From Penn State and the “freaking out about sea level is easy when you don’ pay attention to history” department. (well worth a link click)
Sea-level rise, not stronger storm surge, will cause future NYC flooding
Rising sea levels caused by a warming climate threaten greater future storm damage to New York City, but the paths of stronger future storms may shift offshore, changing the coastal risk for the city, according to a team of climate scientists.
“If we cause large sea-level rise, that dominates future risks, but if we could prevent sea-level rise and just have the storm surge to worry about, our projections show little change in coastal risk from today during most years,” said Michael E. Mann, distinguished professor of meteorology and atmospheric science and director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center. “While those storms that strike New York City might be bigger and stronger, there may be fewer of them as changing storm tracks increasingly steer the storms away from NYC and toward other regions.”
Coastal damage increases if the sea level is higher before a storm, and if the extra surge caused by the storm is higher.
The researchers looked at the history and future of both sea level and storm surge, from preindustrial times through 2300, in models that had been run for the full period. The researchers focused on results from simulations with rapid carbon dioxide release, often referred to as “business-as-usual” simulations. They reported their results online today (Oct. 23) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Future changes in sea level and storms would be smaller if actions were taken to slow climate change, such as the Paris Accord’s goal of limiting warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Sea level has been rising, and this is expected to continue as warming causes ocean water to expand and ice on land to melt and release water into the ocean. But, rapid change in the behavior of parts of the Antarctic ice sheet might cause much greater rise than is often included in coastal planning.
The researchers first calibrated their sea-level models to simulate the rates of historic sea-level rise. Then they ran simulations for the future, with and without results of a recent study that projects large future Antarctic ice sheet melt with business-as-usual increases in levels of greenhouse gases. Such large Antarctic melt implies large increases in sea level, globally and at New York City.
If this Antarctic instability occurs, the future risk to New York City is dominated by sea level rise. Then, according to Andra J. Gardner, postdoctoral fellow, Rutgers University, by 2100 the estimated 500-year flood height would be 17 feet, and by 2300 the 500-year flood height would be about 50 feet. A 500-year flood is one that has a 1 in 500 chance of occurring in any given year. Reducing warming enough to preserve the Antarctic ice thus would greatly reduce risk to New York City.
If sea-level rise remains small, then changes in storm surge are the most important concern for future coastal risk to New York City. In agreement with previous work, the models show that warmer future conditions allow stronger storms. But the models also show that the warming causes storm tracks to shift offshore and northward, away from New York City.
“If a shift occurs toward less common but possibly larger storms, it poses special challenges for coastal planners, and highlights the value of additional progress in understanding and projecting the tracks as well as the strength of these storms,” said Mann.
The paper describes the general agreement among the models studied that storms will strengthen and shift offshore with warming, but identifies important differences that could be reduced with further research.
“Sea level is rising and higher sea level increases the damages from coastal storms,” said Richard B. Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences, Penn State. “Human decisions about energy will be important in determining how much the sea rises and thus how much damage we face, and accurate projections of storms will help in minimizing the risks.”
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Sea level is falling where I live, fairly quickly in geological terms. There are local factors.
The models disagree, so who do I believe, the evidence of my own eyes, or the scientists models?
Reminds me of something that happened way back in the wayback when I was a “touring pro” All the crew and bands were relaxing and whatever after the show. One of the guys ( not in my band though it could have been) was very compromisingly wrapped up with a female fan when his wife walked in. What are you gonna believe?” he said. “What you see or what I tell ya?”
Why did the UN recently spend billions renovating their headquarters building? It appears it will soon be underwater. You would think they would have moved to higher ground.
Haha …. They decided to get help from there World Health Organization and appointed Robert Mugabe on the appropriations committee. They found all the money had disappeared and so they had to stay there.
The Eastern Seaboard is sinking. Sea rise has remained the same. The claimed sea rise for the last century was 7″. Old photos show not even that rise. Hmmmm. Even the accepted figure for the post glacial sea rise seem too high.
Good Bye New York…. 🙁
But will you even be missed !
It’s going to be a very tough sell trying to convince people to be concerned about possible storm damage that might occur in 300 years.
The climate plan B selling item is toothpaste. It seems to have 100% approval with 2 votes.
No, 97% with two votes.
CO2 does impossible things.
If If If If – If wishes were horses beggars would ride.
enough already with all this B$.
The Thames barrage was built in 1984 to limit flooding in London. Long before any ‘global warming’ should have taken place.
Well, frankly, Mikey the Mann doesn’t know squat about New York – not at all.
If you look at a south to north photo of the skyline of NYC, you will see tall buildings at the southern (seaward) end and at the northern (inland) end, with a very long group of buildings that are far shorter than those at the ends of Manhattan island. It’s like a big dip in the middle. The reason for this difference, as was explained on a rather good geology program on one of the science channel shows a few years ago, has to do with what those buildings sit on. At the north and south ends of Manhattan, they sit on solid rock. In the middle, they sit on much softer ground which will not bear the weight of immensely tall skyscrapers. So it doesn’t matter what the sea level does. Unless there’s a massive change to a cooler weather pattern, with ice sheets forming and sticking around, not much is going to happen to Manhattan or the surrounding boroughs.
Geology beats Mikey the Mann’s hysterics every time. What a dope!
I’m convinced.
I’m out of here on 31 December 2299.
I am surprised the ‘distinguished’ professor and his troupe didn’t mention Tropical Storm Sandy, although they allude to it in their statement about future stronger storms. Sandy hit at a full moon in fall at King tide, making the storm surge significantly higher just based on sheer luck of the calendar. It got a bit of press at the time, but rarely hear of this later by many. It was this additional few feet of storm surge that did the bulk of the damage in New York City and surrounding area.
The storm surge hit Long Island before it flooded New York City. And frankly, the media showed a “surge” of about one inc of water down near the Battery. The panic attacks over the city being flooded had me giggling, but the damage from the real storm surge out of the Atlantic turned out to be in Long Island’s Breezy Point area. The complete lack of preparation for it and the idiotically poor response to it was just appalling.
The storm surge from Sandy was higher in Long Island, NYC, and northern New Jersey because Sandy’s eye came ashore near Atlantic City, NJ, meaning that the winds were out of the east and southeast, with a long “fetch” of open water. Sandy was forced westward into New Jersey due to unusually COLD high pressure over the North Atlantic.
Most Atlantic hurricanes which do not make landfall between Florida and North Carolina have the eye stay out to sea, with winds out of the northeast along the New Jersey coast. A northeast wind has only a short “fetch” of water between Long Island and New Jersey, so that storm surges are minimal.
The AGW alarmists can’t blame “global warming” for the damage caused by Sandy, because if it had been warmer in the North Atlantic, the eye of Sandy would have tracked off the coast, with a smaller storm surge. It should be remembered that Sandy also caused heavy snow in West Virginia, in October!
Sea level rise during a 300 year period is not a “risk”. Risk in something that happens during someone’s lifetime. Even if this sea level change happened (which is speculative looking at the ifs), it is not a ‘risk’. It is just a scenario and not to worry about.
By the way, the map is missing 500-year-flood limits in 2017.
If manmade climate change causes more uphills, it’s a challenge for city planners elsewhere. What the world needs urgently is a model projecting the average global outside air & water temperature, composition and volume year 2300. /sarc
What the world also needs is time travel so that we can go into the future and warn future citizens about these things.
Or to the past to close the windows in Hansen’s hearing room.
All that this proves is that through lack of knowledge humanity has so far largely built major cities worldwide in poorly chosen locations. To compound the problem, coastal cities like London, Venice and I guess New York have also sucked drinking water out from below, accelerating the subsidence. Iffy speculations by climate scientists whose track record doesn’t withstand close scrutiny shouldn’t convince anyone of anything – simply put we need a more intelligent approach.
So perhaps we need to start building on more intelligent locations and start listening to engineers and geologists who know what they’re talking about and divert the staggering amounts of money stolen from the public purse worldwide by climate scientists and the parasites working off their misrepresentations into socially useful spending.
I suggest the serious risk of losing the water altogether in a few thousand years. Not much Hudson for Sully to land on. Waterfront properties will be hilltop. Gonna need a new harbour. etc.
?dl=0
Coming soon, just a few thousand years now, same as the last three, check them, and this out
?dl=0
Nothing a disaster as it takes lifetimes, longer than it took to create modern New York, by a VERY long way.
Link to paper?
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/10/03/1703568114
Thank you. Sure enough, the storm modeling is three downscaled GCMs with RCP 8.5. Why this is considered a valuable exercise is mystifying, since GCMs aren’t fit for regional modeling of storms, but even more mystifying is that the three models used don’t actually produce a greater average storm surge at NYC (because the projected increase in intensity is offset by a projected change in storm stracks). The increase in “flood height” is a product of projected increases in sea level — and the increases in sea level include an “enhanced” projection resulting from AIS collapse.
As far as I can see, the article is entirely lacking in showing the models used accurately projected the historical change (or compared to these projections, lack of change) that actually has occurred at the Battery during the ~1C warming we’ve experienced since so-called “pre-industrial” late 19th century. It’s very much a “untested models say this could happen” rather than “validated models say this will happen” paper.
Given that the supposed increase in flood is largely driven by increase in sea level, I would think given 283 years to adapt to the increase in sea level the actual impact of the changes are insignificant. New York in 2300 will not be concerned with storm surges *relative to the 19th century sea level*, they will be concerned with storm surges *relative to NYC’s sea level in 2300*.
I also wonder what Mann in particular contributes to this paper, which is far removed from paleoclimate proxies. Though I suppose it could be argued that Mann’s particular genius is not in understanding or creating paleoclimate proxies, but inventing novel statistical ways of combining them.
Slightly OT question.
We are told that higher CO2 is greening the earth. More vegetation produced each year. A lot of the weight of vegetation is water.
Is there enough water taken up by new vegetation to be measurable in sea level numbers? Geoff.
interesting question.
Human emission since industrial revolution are ~400 GtC. about half of it is still in the atmosphere, and not all of what has been absorbed has been turned into new land green things, but let’s suppose it to be the case, and let suppose 1kg C absorbed in a land green thing is soaked in 10kg water; that will give us some upper bound. That would be 2000Gt water less in the ocean (360,000 Gm²), or 2,000,000 kg / 360,000 m² = 5.5 kg/m² = 5.5 mm. In the last 20 years, that’s 0.5 mm per year. And this is upper bound. This is not measurable.
Why didn’t you provide a link to the Penn State news or even the paper itself? The news article is on the web – Google shows it. Do you want people to suspect you of hiding something?
Here it is…pretty much same thing. http://news.psu.edu/story/489711/2017/10/23/research/sea-level-rise-not-stronger-storm-surge-will-cause-future-nyc
Sadly still no link to the paper. I’m madly curious about a model that accurately estimates *local* sea level rise at the Battery for the length of its record, yet projects massive sea level rise in the future. I’m also madly curious about a separate model that accurately emulates past storm record tracks at a low enough granularity to have confidence in its projections relative to NYC, yet projects a significant difference in strength and tracks for future years. With such amazing and impressive models, I can’t help but wonder why we don’t hear about them, and are instead routinely pointed at the suite of AR5 models that overrate temperature anomaly trend and show no signs of skill at *anything* else globally, let alone at a regional level.
Fantasy claims based on fantasy models based on fantasy science. What could go wrong with that?
Mikey da Mann has to justify his position, grant money and salary. I think he’s running scared, or starting to.
Meantime, Accuweather is fiddling around with its article declaring CO2 to be responsible for loss of nutrients in crops. https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/human-nutrition-at-risk-from-rising-carbon-dioxide-levels-in-atmosphere-studies-show/70002961
They also project that by 2100, we’re doomed. I guess that basic bioscience (plants need CO2 to create sugars) escapes them.
This remember me of a 1970 comic book ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_of_Shifting_Waters ) that featured New york under water and mangrove climate in 1986, because of arctic ice melt-down (sic ! scenarists often have very light physics knowledge).
I wrote this nearly 3 years ago about the flooding we had in the UK that washed away the Great Western railway line
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/09/black-swans-dispatches-from-the-front-line-of-climate-change/
There were three things to be learnt from that. The first being is that it has happened before several times in the lines 160 year history. Secondly, that a huge part of sea level change comes from the land movement, up or down.
By far the most important being where a storm is centred and at what time it strikes. In our case it was at the peak of an already high spring tide with the pressure area responsible for the wind anchored in the ‘wrong ‘place offshore. If the storm had struck at low tide or a lesser tide, there would have been some 15 feet of sea level removed and there would have been no problem
This is not to say that sensible flood precautions should not be taken, but that ‘chance’ plays by far the largest role.
tonyb
I find this scare approach more refreshing then most. When you stop to consider that there is currently apparent ongoing volcanism on and around Antarctica, there is a pretty decent chance that a large piece of glacial ice may well break off and help to fulfill this “Manniacal” prophecy. He has chosen a good source for his scaremongering since they will never relate any loss of ice on Antarctica to volcanism. Got to give it to “the Mann” for going this route. I can hear him now “See? I warned you global warming would cause these changes in Antarctica,” and the snowflakes – or is that green corn flakes?” – will eat it up.
(Snipped)
(Off topic and posted in several threads,that are not in topic with. Stop doing it!) MOD
..LOL….I think you Eco-Snowflakes have reached your “Tipping Point”, not the Earth…
@ivankinsman: First off, the GAO is a branch of govt that has nothing to do with science.
http://www.gao.gov/about/index.html.
“….Our Mission is to support the Congress in meeting its constitutional responsibilities and to help improve the performance and ensure the accountability of the federal government for the benefit of the American people. We provide Congress with timely information that is objective, fact-based, nonpartisan, nonideological, fair, and balanced……”.
Don’t see the word “science” there in the GAO mission statement (so it probably should not be dabbling in climate matters) and climate alarmism is NEITHER nonpartisan nor non-ideological. GAO’s position on the subject violates its mission statement.
Second, CNN, like most news organizations today has become more of a political and ideological indoctrination outlet rather than a middle-of-the-road news outlet. The honchos in charge of CNN and the rest of the mainstream media use their positions in the MSM for political agendas that are well outside of their duty to simply inform.
I would listen to and believe everything the media tells me today only if I was interested in being brainwashed.
Yep. I watch ZERO tv news. None. Zip. Zilch, Nada. I read my news and realize each and every news services bias’s then formulate my own decisions on whether to believe them or not after researching other sources. . And I fully understand that most of them are heavily biased.
From the link,is this howler:
“The researchers looked at the history and future of both sea level and storm surge, from preindustrial times through 2300, in models that had been run for the full period. The researchers focused on results from simulations with rapid carbon dioxide release, often referred to as “business-as-usual” simulations. They reported their results online today (Oct. 23) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”
Now their Crystal modeling ball can work deeper into its future with startling accuracy!
Give me a break!
They allow this highly speculative,unverified crap to be published,but fight Pat Franks far better science paper from being published.
Pathetic.
This kind of studies always catches the CBC green agitprop department’s eye…
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/nyc-flooding-1.4200788
They rarely miss an alarmist garbage.
Meanwhile in the Pacific ocean, Mörner brings the facts showing sea level rise alarms are unfounded.
Published this month is an update on sea levels at Fiji, and thankfully the threat level can be dialed way down. The Research Article: Our Oceans-Our Future: New Evidence-based Sea Level Records from the Fiji Islands for the Last 500 years Indicating Rotational Eustasy and Absence of a Present Rise in Sea Level by Nils-Axel Mörner, Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics, Stockholm, Sweden.
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2017/10/24/fear-not-for-fiji/