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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“It is this sort of junk science sensationalism that causes me and many others not to subscribe to National Geographic anymore.”
Welcome to the party that’s been going on for at least 6 years, when I dropped my 20+ year sub.
I was fortunate to have grown up when National Geographic was devoted to the wonders of the world and telling of the wonders of science.
Now I wonder when National Geographic was taken over by shallow hucksters and fear mongers and became a glossy tabloid.
Nat Geo is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Time to revoke their tax exempt status.
omnologos is on to something. National Geographic is in the Climate Pornography business.
Of course there is no surprise in this. Climate Porn is a very lucrative industry. Most politicians and others of easily misled judgement are addicted to Climate Porn. Climate Porn addicts are supporting it with billions of dollars a year. Climate Porn conferences are held in expensive locations annually. The UN has even set up a large organization to push Climate Porn and publishes a review of International Climate Porn every few years, which is highly anticipated in the tabloid press.
I dropped my subscription years ago, alarmist idiots!
I have done the calculations for volume in the past:
Conclusion: There is an extra 0.112 cubic kilometres of extra ocean volume room available on an expanded earth for every 1 metre increase at its present radius.
======
My original comment and calculations :
I thought I’d share some geometry math I did of volumes and expanding spheres.
A 1 metre increase of earths radius holds 510 thousand cubic kilometres of extra volume.
Here’s the math (I leave it as OneNote printed it):
((4/3)*pi *((6370.001)^3))-((4/3)*pi *((6370)^3))=509904.4439697265
Reduce by 30% to eliminate land area:
.7*509904.4439697265=356933.1107788087
So that’s 360 thousand cubic kilometres of ocean volume per metre radius increase.
An interesting side experiment I did was to calculate how much extra volume there is in an expanded earth radius due to the larger surface area/volume of an expanding sphere, like how a balloon expands when it gets larger. Here is some math:
Increase radius by an extra 1 metre from the previous calculation:
((4/3)*pi *((6370.002)^3))-((4/3)*pi *((6370.001)^3))=509904.6040039062
The difference between the smaller radius calculations and the 1 metre larger radius calculations:
509904.6040039062-509904.4439697265=0.1600341796
Conclusion: There is an extra (.7*.16)=0.112 cubic kilometres of extra ocean volume room available on an expanded earth, per metre increase at its present radius.
I did not add the extra volume that would result from the sea expanding into new land territory.
Most of us (on this blog) possess highly ordered mental processes that prefer to deal in supportable facts, thus the calculations disproving Nat Geo’s assertions of sea level rise. Nat Geo knows that most of the populace is willing to believe the most outrageous, catastrophic scenarios that can be imagined about global warming and climate change without any proof. In today’s world there is no penalty for false propaganda; our government continues to use the “97% consensus” lie as a bludgeon to beat back opposition to its climate change agenda.
The war on climate change is designed to 1) Empower government and 2) micromanage the behavior and activities of the population. Only economic vitality, liberty and freedom will be destroyed by this war.
At what point do the owners of NG wake up and realise they are going broke because they have left the path of science for faith? I subscribed for 32 years, but did not renew last December (about 5-years later than I should have). I wrote telling them why and citing several objectionable articles that had caused me to stop subscribing.
Zero response. Let them die out as something new and evolutionary will arise that meets my need for the scientific truth, even if sometimes unpalatable.
I have also stopped The Scientific American, Nature and two others. I might fly somewhere on the savings
After Peter Gleick committed forgery and identity theft to smear Heartland Institute, National Geographic rewarded Gleick with a high profile blog. IMO, that makes National Geographic accomplices after the fact.
Cancelled my subscription to this Alarmist rag many years ago!
The owners of NG, since they are in the privileged world of tax free status, don’t give a fig for actually making something that increases readership, much less a profit. They are classic modern elites: extremely wealthy, and much more interested in their politics than actually doing something productive. The explosion of so-called non-profits that are all too often simply fronts for extreme wealth to hide money and assets and dole out favors, is damaging the real world where people work and pay taxes.
BTW, I wrote a little paper on that Battery Park tide gauge, and the lack of acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise. It’s paywalled, but here’s the preprint:
http://tinyurl.com/nhazburt1
It might be interesting (too lazy to do it myself though) to see what the slope is
since 2000 as it looks 2-3 times steeper. That would fit in with your 3X calculation of ~7,000 years. Then to look at even Hansen’s alarmist projections and see how long it would take even by his claims. Anyone have an idea?
a much easier hike to the crown.
Venice is sinking faster than sea levels are rising. Figuring that in with the worst possible sea level rise, we’ve still got a couple millennia to move the thing to our new capital in Detroit. ( They never show D.C. under water because that would be a good thing?)
As for why NG sucks, now, it’s all here from a couple of days ago.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323608504579022902445145192.html
“The chief executive of National Public Radio, Gary E. Knell, has resigned after less than two years at the broadcaster to join National Geographic Society as its new CEO.”
It wasn’t that long ago the story would have started out…
Jim Studdly’s lifetime of wresting tigers in the Africa Bush is about to come to an end as he parks the Land Rover for the last time and becomes the National Geographic Society’s new CEO.
Hard to believe NG has lost half their readers since their peak, isn’t it.
I agree that liberty are sinking fast!
I was able to use that issue of NatGeo as a teaching moment for the kids – don’t trust everything you read.
Interesting. Has anyone managed to calculate the rate of land level rise in the same 1856 – 2006 interval due to land fill? If you superimpose the two trends, don’t you get a net increase in usable (dry) land? Take that net trend out 23,500 years and won’t people have to climb dozens more steps than they do today to visit the monument?
I stop my subscription to NatGeo back in the early 2000’s because of the obvious global warming tilt the society was taking. Looking at the board members, I realized there was no hope for a balanced view from the organization.
Galileonardo, excellent letter!
I’d recommend that as a separate post, if possible.
I noticed one small set of typos: “As is of cue you added this:” I’m sure you meant “As if on cue…”
You might also add, where you refute their mention of increases in extreme weather, that the data solidly refutes that meme.
We are all Doomed, NG sold that from
The movie “Planet of the Apes”
Far more likely in 23,500 years it will look more like this.http://sciencefictionruminations.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/statue_planet.jpeg?w=480
I think that a straight-line projection of the sea-level rise is inappropriate, since the earth is a near-sphere and over a geologically-significant time interval, the surface elevation would increase as the cube root of the volume of ‘new’ water in the ocean. Meaning that 23,000 years is wildly underestimated.
REPLY: Excellent point – Anthony