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.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
National Geographic makes the same deliberate error often made by climate alarmists by inappropriately comparing NOAA tide gauge sea level data with University of Colorado satellite sea level data and then claiming that the difference in these measurements demonstrates that sea level rise is accelerating. This conclusion is scientifically invalid because these measurements address completely different aspects of sea level rise. NOAA tide gauge sea level data is the only measurement available which applies to coastal regions which cannot be measured by satellite. Tide gauge sea level data is the most accurate coastal sea level measurement data available. Satellite sea level data represent ocean volume measurements. The two results cannot be compared but are independent measurement approaches which have no common terrestrial reference framework. Those who make this scientifically invalid comparison due so in any event to push climate alarmism with the usual attributes of deception, concealment and conjecture that always drives alarmist propaganda.
Don’t tell these guys that they’re wrong! I’ve been selling future beachfront property in Cut And Shoot, TX (north of Houston, Elevation 190′) and you’re gonna ruin my business!
Is what the The statue of Liberty represents not already completely under water.
http://www.workbook.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/jasonseiler1.jpg
galileonardo says:
August 20, 2013 at 11:35 pm
“And finally another from the poster:
The East Antarctic ice sheet is so large—it contains four-fifths of all the ice on Earth—that it might seem unmeltable. It survived earlier warm periods intact. Lately it seems to be thickening slightly—because of global warming. ”
They must be laughing all the way to the bank when they write that kind of stuff.
galileonardo says:
August 20, 2013 at 11:42 pm
All right. So here’s the letter I sent to National Geographic a while ago…………………………etc.
That is an excellent letter. But I doubt that NG will care, or print it.
Many of us are glad you sent it to them.
I, as well, cancelled my nat. geo. subscription once I realized they have morphed into an advocacy magazine. They should be worried when scientists like me cancel, but they don’t care.
At this point Nat Geo is kinda like Playboy…you look at the pictures and skip the articles.
The Nat Geo “Rising Seas” article opens with a two-page photo of the swamped roller coaster at Seaside Heights, NJ. Subhead: “As the planet warms, the sea rises. Coastlines flood. What will we protect? What will we abandon. How will we face the danger of…. RISING SEAS.”
The roller coaster is (was?) swamped, the caption says, because “Superstorm Sandy narrowed New Jersey’s beaches by more than 30 feet. At Seaside Heights it swept away the pier under the roller coaster.”
Not “Rising Seas,” but a hurricane (or what has almost a hurricane.
nickshaw1 says:
August 20, 2013 at 10:57 pm
@milodonharlani
I just don’t see it. I read an article recently about a sunken forest off Mobile that they determined to be on dry land during the last great Ice Age. It’s about 70 feet underwater.
If the melting of the sheets covering a goodly portion of the northern hemisphere (incredibly thick sheets at that!) only resulted in a rise of 70 feet (about 22 meters or so), how the heck could just Antarctica and Greenland total about 60 meters?
Or am I really missing something?
—————————————
Water content of Greenland & Antarctic ice sheets is about 66 meters of sea level rise.
During glacial phases, as during the last big “ice age” which ended about 11,400 years ago, so much more water is locked up in continental ice sheets, as over North America, Europe & Asia, that sea level can be lowered by as much as 140 meters. Of course the weight of all the ice also depresses the continents, so the effective lowering is greater.
Thus it wasn’t the melting of Greenland & Antarctica that caused the forest to be submerged, but the disappearance of massive ice sheets on the northern continents & more extensive montane glaciers in the SH. These sheets will form again when the present interglacial ends & the next glacial begins.
Grainy pictures are meant to be that way. Hides the photoshop lines better.
In another issue of National Geographic they depicted NY with no humans left on earth and the conditions for nature to reclaim it over time. If humans caused almost all the warming, then the wild animal inheritors of NY will be the only ones to observe no significant sea level rise until the end of the interglacial period. Regardless, they will just move along and adapt as usual and perhaps graze in front of the monuments to policy fraud.
PS: Here’s an estimate of how low sea level got at the Last Glacial Maximum off Australia, where continental crust rebound isn’t an issue:
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~geodyn/tutorials/Physik_der_ErdeII/pdf/Yokoyama-etal2000_nature.pdf
My 140 meter estimate might be a tad too low, or high, depending upon how you look at it. I based that on the North Atlantic world, with which I’m familiar, but the waters of which are muddied by isostatic rebound.
But in any case, there was obviously a lot more ice locked up on land then than now. The Greenland & Antarctic sheets were of course also larger then. So the 70-foot deep forest was far from the limit of submerged land elsewhere, if it dates from the LGM.
Thanks for this post, Anthony. We get copies of NG as my wife is on some list for professional office freebies (even though we closed our office two years ago), and this issue is sitting on the kitchen counter, where every time I pass I start calculating, “Let’s see, at 3 mm per year. . .” You saved me the trouble of actually looking up the dimensions of Liberty.
Blatant scare-mongering and irresponsible promulgation of falsehoods. The current editorial staff do a great disservice to a once-noble marque.
/Mr Lynn
I Insufficiently Sensitive says:
August 21, 2013 at 8:31 amthink 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
No – not really a good point. That’s only true if we start making a brand new sphere out of all the meltwater. In the earth’s case, sea level rise = volume of meltwater / surface area. Since the surface area increases infinitesimally for the new meltwater, we can say that the sea level rise is effectively proportional to the volume melted.
TimTheToolMan on August 21, 2013 at 2:37 am
The baseline scenario is different and far more likely to happen – global nuclear war (it was close in 1962 …). The specific mutation that happened to the apes is not impossible, as this has already happened once …
Ric Werme says: August 20, 2013 at 10:25 pm
Copper thieves.
_____________________________
Do you have Romanians in the USA too?
.
@Galileoleonardo –
Excellent letter, as well said as anything.
It never ceases to amaze me how these people who claim to be “helping the poor” are the ones who will do them the worst harm There is clearly a lack not only of scientific understanding and method, but also of conscience, humanity and morality, in them. I don’t believe for a minute that they don’t know what their agenda will do, and I think they intend to do the most harm possible, out of some perverse notion that “gaea” or some other anti-deity wills it. I also believe this is tied up with both their disregard of evidence contrary to their meme and their utter unconcern over the suffering they will inflict.
These people are evil, and should be given no quarter. Whatever costs attend upon repairing the damage they do should come out of their hides, and they should pay ultimate penalties for their crimes.
If the earth radius increases, then the rotational velocity decreases.
According to NOAA’s latest sea level budget report, sea level is increasing at ~1-2mm/year…4″ per century. And that’s with the usual caveats: 3mm uncertainty, .9mm ISA added in.
http://ibis.grdl.noaa.gov/SAT/SeaLevelRise/documents/NOAA_NESDIS_Sea_Level_Rise_Budget_Report_2012.pdf
michael hart says: August 21, 2013 at 1:31 am
That torch Liberty is holding doesn’t look very carbon-neutral to me…
_______________________________________
Liberty has held many things in her lifetime, including the standard cornucopia.
Here is the original Liberty (Libertas) on a coin of Emperor Gallienus of the 3rd century. Here she is holding the pileus – the Phrygian Cap or Liberty Cap, which is a bit like the US’s Liberty Bell.
http://www.dirtyoldcoins.com/roman/id/galienus/galli201.jpg
But I think this one is much more appropriate for America – this is Liberty (Libertas) on a coin of Emperor Gordian III, also of the 3rd century. Here she is holding an abacus (!!):
http://www.dirtyoldcoins.com/roman/id/gordian3/gord3115.jpg
Err, do you think that they could change the New York Liberty, so that she holds a cash register??
.
It is that kind hysterical hyperbole that created an economy in the UK that is deadly to elderly on fixed incomes. It should be a capital offense to publish rot like this. Within the time frame of the Holocene epoch, a blink in time, Ellis Island was once part of the coastal mainland and not an island at all. Where’s the picture of that?
Pretty pictures but don’t read the stories. Now that sounds like some other pretty picture magazines out there—-with foldouts.
Climate propagandists have become so brazen they even write academic papers on how to select the most scary and effective images. And yes, baby polar bears rate highly. I took a close look at one of the “good” images they selected, of a power plant belching dark smoke, and wondered why only the chimneys in the foreground emitted dark smoke but those in the background emitted less scary white (water vapourish) smoke. Apparently photoshopping would be difficult. The power plant is unnamed but south-west of Dusseldorf (although motherearthnews brazenly implied it was in the US). It would be interesting if anyone could discover the original photo to see the extent of any fakery in the image used here.
“In a recently-released paper looking at how people visualise climate change, Saffron O’Neill at University of Exeter joined other researchers in the UK, US and Australia, to see how people engaged with climate change images drawn from mass media sources in those countries.
They investigated responses to images ranging from icons of nature, such as coral reefs, snowstorms, bushfires, cracked ground and ice sheets to human made phenomena, such as wind farms, traffic jams, low reservoirs, smoke-stacks, and fuel pumps and then images of political leaders.
For each image they wanted to measure:
1) “salience” – whether it raised the importance of climate change 2) empowerment or “self-efficacy” – the sense of being able to take any action on climate change.
Images of climate impacts were the most salient: in order of impact – flood aerial view, ice sheet, deforestation, polar bear, cracked ground, coral reef. Of the human generated images, smokestacks, traffic jams and temperature graphs led the way in terms of distress.”
http://theconversation.com/four-hiroshima-bombs-a-second-how-we-imagine-climate-change-16387#comment_202906
The NOAA 2012 report in the phodges link states the global sea level from 2005 to 2012 changed by 1.1 mm/yr with an error of about 1mm/yr. That report includes all available data, but includes a calculated global isostatic adjustment.
The real global sea level is not changing. This is based on historical photo evidence of landmarks such as the statue of liberty and others. There is archeological evidence that the docks used for shipping 2000 years ago show sea level is the same after local “silting in” is considered.
The heavy pilings supporting large bridges, the Arizonal memorial and other known landmarks also show zero evidence of sea level changes.
I canceled my subscription to National Geographic a few months ago, after 30 years of being a subscriber.