Assuming that it can actually get there?
Today on the WUWT Hot Sheet, we reported that there was more fear-mongering imagery from National Geographic, as seen at right.
Steve Wilent said in a tip:
Have you seen the cover of the September 2013 National Geographic Magazine? Cover story: Rising Seas. Image: The statue of Liberty with water up to about Liberty’s waist — more than 200 feet above sea level.
http://press.nationalgeographic.com/2013/08/15/national-geographic-magazine-september-2013/
I wondered if they told readers how long that will take to get to that level, like I did in a previous photo portraying New York underwater here:
According to the Nat Geo article “Rising Seas”, it turns out that they didn’t tell their readers about how long it would take to reach the level depicted on the cover, so I’m going to do the calculation for you. First, specs on the Statue of Liberty. I found this image with measurements:
![funfactsstatue[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/funfactsstatue1.jpg?quality=83)
But neither it or the article http://statueofliberty.org/Fun_Facts.html using it had the details I was seeking to be able to determine the heights above current mean sea level.
The National Park Service stats page says:
| Top of base to torch | 151’1″ | 46.05m |
| Ground to tip of torch | 305’1″ | 92.99m |
| Heel to top of head | 111’1″ | 33.86m |
| Ground to pedestal | 154’0″ | 46.94m |
Source: http://www.nps.gov/stli/historyculture/statue-statistics.htm
Since the measurements are to ground level, I also has to determine the height of the island above MSL. A variety of measurements I discovered give different answers. Google Earth says 7 feet, while this National Park Service document says 15-20 feet were the highest elevations during its natural state before becoming a national monument. Looking at photos, etc, and considering those citations, for the sake of simplicity I’m going to call the height of Liberty Island at 10 feet above MSL. That puts the torch at 315 feet above the sea level.
I also had to estimate where the NatGeo waterline was, and based on folds in the robe, I estmated it to be 1/3 of the entire height of the statue from feet to torch, or about 50 feet above the top of the pedestal. That puts the NatGeo waterline at approximately 214 feet, or 65.2 meters above mean sea level.
So I have added these measurements, along with the estimated water line from the NatGeo cover to this image from WikiPedia:
So now that we have an estimated value for the NatGeo waterline depicted on the cover of the magazine, we can do the calculations to determine how long it will take for sea level rise to reach that height.
We will use the rate value from the tide Gauge at “The Battery”, just 1.7 miles away according to Google Earth.
Source: http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8518750
How long will it take to reach the NatGeo waterline in the cover photo?
The mean sea level trend is 2.77 millimeters per year. At that rate we have:
65.2 meters = 65200 millimeters / 2.77 mm/yr = 23537.9 years
That’s right, 23 thousand 500 years!
A new ice age will likely be well underway then, dropping sea levels. The water would never get there. That’s assuming the statue still exists there at all. Ironically, Liberty Island is a remnant of the last ice age:
Liberty Island is a small 12.7-acre island in New York Harbor. As a remnant of last glacial age, it is composed of sand and small stones deposited as the glaciers retreated.
Even if we believe that sea level will accelerate to 2 or 3 times that rate (as some proponents would have us believe), we are still looking at thousands of years into the future. At a 3x rate, we are looking at 7846 years into the future.
Without explaining this basic fact to their readers, National Geographic is doing nothing but scare-mongering with that cover image. Shame on them.
It is this sort of junk science sensationalism that causes me and many others not to subscribe to National Geographic anymore. Their climate advocacy while abandoning factual geographics such as this is not worthy of a subscription.
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Ric Werme says:
August 20, 2013 at 10:25 pm
davidmhoffer says:
August 20, 2013 at 10:19 pm
> That’s assuming the statue still exists there at all.
Copper thieves.
*
LOL. Thank you, Ric, you’ve made my afternoon. 🙂
Good article, Anthony, this info should be out there for all to see – and it will be, thanks to your blog and others like it. The warmists have nowhere to hide, and no lie escapes detection.
Has anyone seen the new Tom Cruise scifi movie, Oblivion? It shows a post-apocalyptic world, but we can always tell which city we’re in because all of the most iconic buildings remain. Heck, even in D.C. the Washington Monument is completely intact, even though the rest of the city is pretty much rubble. (Surprisingly, it’s not a bad movie at all, other than those kinds of details I enjoyed it).
This kinda looks the same.. a ridiculous benchmark of catastrophe, which of course reminds me of the Original “Planet of the Apes”… Charlton Heston sees part of the Statue of Liberty rising from the sand, it’s thousands of years in the future and the Apes have done all they can to erase human artifacts, but that statue is still essentially intact. “You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!”
I disagree that NatGeo has great photography these days. All that I see (my parents still subscribe, members since the 50s and every issue intact) are staged, grainy, and mediocre images. And I have a business selling commercial photography, so I have some idea what makes a great image.
The whole sea-level rise scare depends upon acceleration of current trends, and that acceleration is simply NOT happening. But that doesn’t stop the alarmists from claiming that it is.
Did not the UN at one time have a post on their website stating there would be 50 million sea level rise by 2012? Since been quietly removed.
Just answered my own question, botched my first search somehow
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/15/the-un-disappears-50-million-climate-refugees-then-botches-the-disappearing-attempt/
NG may have enough ice in their refrigerators to make that much water. They seem capable of pulling anything out of nowhere to get a ‘story.’ What an absolute ludicrous effort. No science involved!
The National Geographic makes a habit of ignoring and re-arranging facts to suit itself. For example, they altered the position of the pyramids of Egypt in order, as they put it, to make “a more pleasing composition” of the photos. You might give them a pass on that if they ever bothered to tell their readers about their manipulations.
If I fictionalized current events into another set of subjects, and posited huge numbers of professionals blandly engaged in grandiose lies about without any apparent sense of shame or anyone but a few isolated skeptics to oppose them, it would be seen as grotesquely implausible.
On the other hand, I’m sure I could make a SyFy Channel movie out of it.
Now, come on. The picture in that cover could happen. Eventually. And there might be talking apes too.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/08/20/NPR-s-Folkenflik-Edits-Out-O-Keefe-Sting-from-History-of-CEO-Scandals The important bit is the last sentence: “[Gary] Knell, whose vision for NPR was profiled just last month in the Wall Street Journal, will take over at the National Geographic Society.”
Actually the picture says it all, although not in the way intended. The alarmists claim that climate change will violate our freedoms, whereas the violation of our freedoms is in the distortion of the science itself.
Inadvertently, scientists say here that it’s all over for the Kakadu wetlands with just 2cm of rise http://pindanpost.com/2013/08/18/kimberley-water-lilies/
Since it hasn’t changed in decades, what are they worried about.
the 65 metres is about what you would get from the complete melting of antarctica. ie a lump of ice a few miles thick and several thousand miles wide.
mind you, humans never cease to amaze me. they panic about the smallest things (is milk good for you or bad for you this week?) and shrug off utter disasters like WW2.
If we had that sea level rise in a year, there would be some effects for sure, but life would just carry on as normal. it would be less far to walk to the beach, some people would have lost some property, some ports would need rebuilding as would some cities – on the upside think of the new land grab in greenland and antarctica
Facinating thing about this is that satellite data supposedly tells us sea levels on average are rising some 3 mm plus per year.
Central east coast USA is one of the faster subsiding places on the planet (some 0.7mm/year I think?).
Yet somehow the Battery Point tide guage only gives us 2.77 mm per year…..
And then we may take into account the 0.7 mm per year of the sea rise we measure we get from pumped aquifer water reaching the sea.
Even the junk scientists from BoM don’t see any rise, or they would have built their new buildings in Broome a lot higher; http://pindanpost.com/2011/05/03/underwater-broome-developers-dont-think-so/
We live in a world where newspaper and magazine sales are tumbling because of the internet.
Sensationalism and scary forecasts still sell, as every climate scientist can attest to.
Nat Geo wants to survive, so in editorial policy the concepts of scary and sensational naturally receive higher priority than facts. Also, like many of our great scientific institutions, the management has probably been hi-jacked by serial lefties, who have an agenda which would make the founders turn in their graves and bear little resemblance to the thinking of their members/readers.
That torch she’s holding doesn’t look very carbon-neutral to me…..
…..a windmill, perhaps?
The rise of sea level is likely not a linear function.
As sea level rises, it’s surface area increases thus requiring more melt to keep the rise linear.
Other National Geographic hoaxes: Piltdown man, Nebraska Man, Peking Man, Java Man and the Archaeoraptor (half bird half dinosaur thing)
This would not happen, as in 23500 years the Statue of Liberty will be knocked over by a thick ice sheet …
and the reason I stopped my Nat Geo subscription years ago was because of their incessant pushing of the green issues. They should learn that it puts a lot of people off.
What kind of warming would create such a sea level rise for National Geographic’s image? During the warmer Eemian interglacial Greenland’s ice sheet showed only a modest response.
(Nature – 2013) “…a modest ice-sheet response to the strong warming in the early Eemian…”
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v493/n7433/full/nature11789.html
You missed the whole point of the cover. In essence climate change will have very limited impact as shown by our ability to maintain the statue of liberty very well over thousands of years. We will cope very well regardless how high the water comes.
Bah, 23,537.9 years! As if. I’ve seen the documentary “Planet of the Apes” and the year was only AD 3978 where the statue was buried in sand up to the waist.
I dunno… If all the National Geographics stored in attics, basements, and medical offices were burned at the same time there might be enough soot created to cover Greenland and the poles and melt them. But then you’d have to factor in the isostatic rebound of the continents after getting rid of all the back issues when doing the sea level rise calculation. Of course I’ll need funding for further study.
The real science question is how many comets will have to deposit water to flood the planet to a 200 foot sea level increase. The number to be looking for is the one that estimates the extra water needed after the Gore “all glaciers melt” and the North and South Poles are ice free, the mountains are not ice capped, etc. Next, estimate how to get all those ice comets in the Oort cloud to Earth.
Then, someone at National Geo will calculate how the mass of the SUV’s and their carbon footprint will attract them. Sort of like a huge celestial ice magnet.