A story published in the New York Post (NYP) on March 3rd 2024 by Carl Campanile has the alarming headline: Sea levels around NYC could surge up to 13 inches in 2030s due to climate change: state study. The story and study cited is false, because it relies on an impossible climate model scenario known as RCP8.5, which has been debunked by actual climate scientists as we reported here and here.
Surprisingly, just a day later on March 4th, 2024 the editorial board of the NYP published this headline: NYS DEC’s ‘sky is falling, seas are rising’ lunacy. Both stories are about the same report, an assessment done by the New York state Department of Environmental Conservations (NYDEC), which claimed that sea levels could rise by more than a foot in some areas around New York City in a decade or less.
With dueling headlines a day apart, it’s hard to really know what the position of the NYP is, but of the two, the latter headline is far more measured and realistic.
As mentioned previously, the RCP8.5 climate model used to make these claims is implausible if not impossible, and has come to be accepted in the climate scenarios community as being an unrealistic projection.
To give you an idea of just how unrealistic this model projection is, lets examine one of the oldest records on sea level in the United states, The Battery tide gauge in New York City from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This record shows a constant and mild sea level rise going back over 150 years:
NOAA says this about the data in that chart:
The relative sea level trend is 2.92 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.09 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from 1856 to 2023 which is equivalent to a change of 0.96 feet in 100 years.
In other words, it would take just over 100 years for sea level to rise by an additional one foot in New York City. Yet, there are the claims of 13 inches of rise in about 10 years, according the the NYP article citing NYDEC. For that to occur, sea level would have to start rising at over 10 times the current rate as displayed by the data at The Battery tide gauge shown above. This is extremely unlikely if not impossible, as sea level has never demonstrated such dramatic and immediate increases that would be required in the scenario outlined by NYDEC.
In a takedown of this absurd claim, climate scientist Roger Pielke Jr. Ph.D, had this to say in an essay, Bonkers in Yonkers:
You don’t have to be a climate scientist to see that SSP5-8.5 is far more extreme than the more plausible scenarios consistent with history and the projected near-term future to 2050. Extreme, implausible scenarios have their purposes, but are misused if prioritized as the basis for policy and planning.
…
The real world is not headed for a RCP8.5 future, which means that planning for a RCP8.5 world is not just misguided, but bad science, poor policy, and a waste of taxpayer money.
…
Whatever the understandings and motivations of these experts, the continued misuse of climate scenarios in New York is an example of regulatory capture by a small group of like-minded people who sit largely out-of-sight, protected by their authority and the inscrutable complexity of climate scenarios.
Clearly the claims made by NYDEC are completely out of line with reality. But worse than that, they’re not even looking at all of the data available. For example it has been known for quite some time that New York City is actually sinking due to the weight of its own infrastructure. Last year the NYP published this headline: NYC is sinking under the weight of its buildings, geologists warn. in that article it is stated:
New geological research warns that the weight of New York City’s skyscrapers is actually causing the Big Apple — whose more than 1 million buildings weigh nearly 1.7 trillion pounds — to sink lower into its surrounding bodies of water.
The city is plopping closer to the water at a rate of 1 to 2 millimeters a year, “with some areas subsiding much faster.”
This is from a peer reviewed publication from May 2023 in the American Geophysical Union journal Earth’s Future titled: The Weight of New York City: Possible Contributions to Subsidence From Anthropogenic Sources. In that publication abstract they say:
Geodetic measurements show a mean subsidence rate of 1–2 mm/year across the city that is consistent with regional post-glacial deformation, though we find some areas of significantly greater subsidence rates. Some of this deformation is consistent with internal consolidation of artificial fill and other soft sediment that may be exacerbated by recent building loads, though there are many possible causes.
It seems far more plausible that New York City is suffering under its own weight rather than being inundated by supposedly climate driven sea level rise based on an implausible or nearly impossible climate model such as RCP 8.5.
The media does everyone a disservice when they report on these wildly irrational claims of imminent sea level danger while ignoring the complete story of why at least half of it is actually happening. Further, they are unnecessarily alarming people by not looking at real world timelines of actual sea level rise such as The Battery tide gauge right there at the tip of Manhattan Island.
Such journalism is simply cheap and irresponsible without the entire story being reported.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
The job of newspapers is to sell ads, not publish true facts and stories.
It is the “job” of the readers to insist on evidence and reality or drop the newspaper.
Slowly.
From Microsoft Copilot with GPT-4 …
In 2020, the estimated total U.S. daily newspaper circulation (combining both print and digital) was approximately 20.9 million for both weekdays and Sundays. This represents an 8% decline from the previous year for weekdays and a 10% decline for Sundays1.
It’s important to note that the newspaper industry has faced challenges due to the increasing digital consumption of news. However, newspapers remain a critical part of the American news landscape, even as their financial fortunes and subscriber base have declined since the mid-2000s1.
Replaced by twitter … errrr … X et al.
I have “dropped” (not re-subscribed) to the local newspaper and several well-known magazines. There is no need to pay for the crap when my horses produce pre-digested material of better quality.
Fixed it for you.
It is the “job” of the thinkers
readersto insist on evidence and reality or drop the newspaper.The newspapers need advertising revenue from the many companies wanting to promote their green cred. The papers are unlikely to switch to a realistic editorial policy on the phony climate crisis, as they would lose those advertisers.
Cred or crud?
To paraphrase George Box’s comment on computer models: ” All newspapers are inaccurate, some are useful,” the Post is occasionally useful. That’s more than you can say of many others, but quite faint praise.
To get to 13 inches by 2039 requires 22mm per year of sea level rise. NOAA says sea level rise is 1.7 to 1.8 mm per year. When is this giant increase going to begin to happen?
Well, let’s see, the least ridiculous possibility is that of a steady linear increase starting now, due to an unknown mechanism, which means that to reach an average of 22 mm/yr over the next 15 years, the actual rate in 2039 will have to be around 42 mm/yr, approaching 1 mm/week. Heehee!
I thought the West Side Highway was underwater years ago.
Anyway, the end of snow here in Colorado will have to wait a while. More than 30 inches of powder dropped last night, and it’s still coming, but roads to the mountains are impassible.
Right now radar shows Pueblo getting the brunt.
I’m getting some too. Been out twice working on the driveway and I’m almost half done but it’s still coming down at a fast rate, so no hurry as I’m not going anywhere.
Seems like upslope conditions. Eldora is getting blasted. https://www.eldora.com/the-mountain/webcams/snow-stake-cam
Snowing hard here, with wind at times. Probably about 12″ total, but a lot fell as rain yesterday, at least 1/2″
It’s melted down to about 8-10″ here as the temp is right around freezing. Very dense snow that’s difficult to shovel.
Yeah, bottom inch or two is mostly liquid. Springtime is here.
We had a crazy hail event that drifted off of Pikes Peak last summer. Waterlogged hail is the worst to try to shovel. But yes, the snow this morning literally weighs a ton. Good for the soil moisture, though.
I worked 3 seasons at Eldora back in the mid 70s. I don’t remember getting that much at once in those 3 years! We got cold though … 2 nights in late January 1979 it was -45d natural with max wind chill. You can do the math! Made a ton of snow in no time all over the front mountain! Nice that they have a camera running now. Memories!
Wow, nice to hear about that. I think it was ’96 or ’97, one storm dropped over 80″ in a couple of days.
It’s shaping up to be a nice little resort. The high-speed six seater on the front side let’s one do a lot of skiing in a short amount of time.
I’m looking forward to the gondola to Winter Park (wishful thinking).
I looked at the pictures (at the website) and see that the run shown is, I think, West-ridge. that was just a cleared run with no access to the public back in my day. We (Mountain Crew) used it all the time. Steepest and longest run on the mountain. I see it is open now. There was a lift there, but not used for the public.
Funny you should bring up Winter Park. We used to do a “shovel riding” competition with them (again, mountain crews) … we did a downhill and a jumping competition. Freaking hoot!!. All of us dressed in Foul Weather gear. We were told we looked like giant yellow lemmings playing in the snow.
Just had a look at:
https://www.webcamtaxi.com/en/usa/colorado/denver-16th-street-mall-cam.html.
Looks like it’s coming down well.
Yes the West Side Highway floods fairly regularly, here’s a video from last fall.
The former climate jurk from NASA claimed the parkway past his office would be underwater long ago.
Why does anyone listen to such FAILures?
Story Tip:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/follow-the-science-leads-to-ruin-climate-environment-policy-3f427c05?mod=opinion_lead_pos5
An excellent article by Bjorn Lomborg in the Wall Street Journal.
Some of the highlights: Draconian efforts to meet net-zero CO2 targets would cost $27 trillion per year, and possibly kill 6 Billion people!
The editors at WUWT should highlight this article–it’s a bombshell !
The first (free) paragraph is good.
The leading image by Martin Kozlowski is a treasure.
Bjorn L. frequently has an essay such as this in the WSJ.
Since WSJ is primarily targeting the finance sector, it has managed to remain somewhat close to the middle and often reasonably unbiased and factual.
Too bad it is subscription. Then again, the negates a lot of profit center ad click chasing.
The WSJ editorial page is the best there is.
London bit this bullet back in the 1980s.
The city is acknowledged to be on a geologically sinking basin. The UK government did something about it (their asses do sit on the river, after all).
The Thames barrier is good for at least a century and thus can’t be used for these kind of scares. New York…….?
NYC sits right around the terminal moraine of the Laurentide ice sheet from ~20 kya. The weight of the ice to the north would have pushed land at and just south of the moraine upwards, but now that process is reversing. The same thing is occurring in the southern parts of Great Britain. When you look at it that way, and add in the weight of the structures in modern day New York, then the true sea level rise is closer to nil.
The New York Post is the journal of the activities of the Kardashians, Taylor Swift and various NYC athletic figures. Don’t go there for real information.
The New York Post exposes one radical leftwing scandal/criminal act after another.
That’s where you learned about Hunter’s Laptop from Hell, among other things.
The New York Post is becoming one of the few news organizations that can be trusted to tell the people the truth about the political situation.
The NY Post is a fine newspaper.
Why does the blue line on the graph of sea level at The Battery suddenly rise by about 0.30 meter at the late end of the graph? Is that where the 13 inches comes from?
Regarding the subsidence measurements, maybe New York City will capsize before Guam. (sarc)
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/stationhome.html?id=8518750
Really high tide on January 13.
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/waterlevels.html?id=8518750&units=standard&bdate=20230901&edate=20240314&timezone=GMT&datum=MLLW&interval=h&action=
One day’s tide skewed it that much??
There were several days of high tides around that time but the13th was especially high. I confess that I didn’t look into the length of period for the moving average calculation.
Do other local tide gauges show the same outlier spike around that time ?
Yes, it’s really odd. Looks like an instrument problem but this certainly needs to be checked otherwise the alarmists will go to town with this ‘proof’ of rapid acceleration.
Bergen Point West doesn’t.
Are you sure?
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=8519483
Atlantic city shows similar high levels.
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=8534720
In that first pic on the first link, it looks like the pier it is on is falling apart !!
I wonder what happens when you park a big truck near the inflow pipe ?
Combination of a storm and high tides, the governor declared a state of emergency.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12959787/new-york-city-floods-west-highway-storm-gerri.html
Winds are a factor, on the wet coast of NA tides are higher in Decembe.
Sometimes there are King tides, King tide – Wikipedia.
I don’t know if the Atlantic ocean sloshes like the south Pacific and Indian oceans do (slow shift of sea level across them, wind may be a significant cause.
Doesn’t matter, Gotham-NYC will be uninhabitable by that time.
Not true, but its inhabitants will be descendants of illegal border crossers.
“But worse than that, they’re not even looking at all of the data available.”
+ “Such journalism is simply cheap and irresponsible without the entire story being reported.”
= Lazy.
I’ve long believed laziness is an additional part of the inept and deceitful reporting of and advocacy for the climate crusade.
But what about this? The sinking and rising hybrid alarm.
Where sinking cities are pushing sea level rise into overdrivehttps://www.cnn.com/2024/03/06/climate/sinking-cities-us-sea-level-rise-climate/index.html
CNN —
Dozens of cities along the US coastline are sinking at alarming rates, leaving them far more exposed to devastating flooding from sea level rise than previously thought, scientists reported Wednesday.
As oceans rise and the coasts sink, up to 343,000 acres of land will be exposed to destructive flooding by 2050, from hazards such as hurricanes, coastal storms and shoreline erosion, according to the study published in the journal Nature. In a worst-case scenario, roughly 1 in 50 people in the 32 cities analyzed could be exposed to flood threats.
“The New York state Department of Environmental Conservations (NYDEC) .. claimed that sea levels could rise by more than a foot in some areas around New York City in a decade or less.”
The New York is so progressive. They’ll ban to use your eyes soon.
The article states “an assessment done by the New York state Department of Environmental Conservations (NYDEC), which claimed that sea levels could rise by more than a foot in some areas around New York City in a decade or less.” is the source of the Post’s rants. This government led assessment should be cause for review within the government department and likely those that performed the assessment being fired or at least reprimanded.
The rate of sea level rise is exactly the same as it was when nobody noticed it was rising….
Excellent comment
+20
About half of the measured relative sea level rise at The Battery is due to slow sinking of the land
It may not be a bad thing that main stream journalism is teaching non-journalists every day that they should not take anything the journalists say at face value. And if the stories aren’t about truth then we can all see they are about the agenda of those buying the advertising. To complete the lesson people only need to think carefully about whether advertisers are working for the pubic’s best interest or their own.
“For example it has been known for quite some time that New York City is actually sinking due to the weight of its own infrastructure. “
It’s not just NYC that is sinking Anthony. It is all up and down the East Coast:
“The researchers analyzed satellite data and ground-based GPS sensors to map the vertical and horizontal motion of coastal land from New England to Florida. In a study published in PNAS Nexus, the team reported that more than half of infrastructure in major cities such as New York, Baltimore, and Norfolk is built on land that sank, or subsided, by 1 to 2 millimeters per year between 2007 and 2020. Land in several counties in Delaware, Maryland, South Carolina, and Georgia sank at double or triple that rate. At least 867,000 properties and critical infrastructure including several highways, railways, airports, dams, and levees were all subsiding, the researchers found.”
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/152452/americas-sinking-east-coast
But of course this is never mentioned when the MSM talks about SLR.
Tectonic plates can rise and fall.
You can see relatively small plates tipping, in tide gage data on the mid-wet coast.
(That region has big plates sliding under others (crude explanation, earthquake risk territory.)
As the editor of a newspaper once admitted… ‘It is not the job of the media to tell the truth, but to report liars, accurately’.
” planning for a RCP8.5 world is not just misguided, but bad science, poor policy, and a waste of taxpayer money”
That equals fraud in my dictionary.
” headline: NYC is sinking under the weight of its buildings”
How many Tyrannosaurus rexs is that?
In a college class, about 30 years ago, we each picked a local business and plotted the inputs used. For example, a place making tortillas needs flour. A glass factory needs silica, sodium carbonate and limestone. I wonder if there is a map of the sources of the mass of materials that have been brought on to the five boroughs of NYC?
Story Tip. What’s everybody missing here ? Glacial Subsidence ! A long swath of area from Canada’s Prince Edward Island Island to lands south of New York are subsiding as a result of “Glacial Isostatic Subsidence” In geological time frames the glaciers of the last Ice Age just melted. The monster weight of inland glaciers made the east coastal areas rise during the Glacial era. Like pressing a rubber sheet in the middle and seeing the edges rise up. When all that inland weight melted, the interior lands began rebounding upwards. The process of coastal subsidence began, and continues today. Changes are not just sea level rise alone (if any) but the coastal land around it is sinking. The opposite happened a few years ago when a 3.2 M quake struck under Lake Erie about 40 miles from Detroit … Glacial Rebound.
Warmer water expands and occupies more space than cooler water. Glacial rebound is part of the picture; but so is thermal expansion of warmer ocean water.
None of it caused by humans.
It is not AGW.. it is totally natural.
Just quickly looking at the trends, the past 30 years of sea level change at The Battery shows a higher rate than the full period from 1900 to present (4.7mm/yr vs 3.1):
A similar story is borne out by looking at the 30-year trends back to 1900 for this location (grey dashed line is the trend for the full period):
At current rates, you’d see about 3 inches of additional increase at this location by 2039, a far cry from 13, but if the rate increases even further, you might feasibly get close to the 6-9 inches the article sites as being most probable.
Alan
Two potential factors might be affecting the recent 30 year trend. We are in the warm phase of the AMO, possibly contributing to an accelerated rates. Secondly, the local subsidence might have accelerated due to groundwater abstraction and secondary settlement dynamics from construction decades prior to the 30 years period. The settlement rates are quite heterogeneous and those affecting the tidal gauge, which sits at the southern most point of Manhattan, are just a guess at this point. Until the publication of studies across the globe which show buildings affecting rates of subsidence, it would have been assumed all the subsidence was at geologic speed, thus not part of the faster rates.
Your second graph shows it will soon drop to a much lower slr trend.
Grate cherry-picking, though. ! 😉
The latest measurement shows a spike that is probably influencing your results…I suspect that that latest spike is an artifact but this certainly needs to be checked…see comments above on this.
There is also an underlying oscillation, as AJ has shown.
The part he has cherry-picked just happens to be the upward leg of that underlying oscillation.
Not fooling anyone… except maybe himself.
The data I’ve plotted are annual means – the spike that occurred in the early part of 2024 is not included (because 2024 isn’t over yet).
El Nino is all you have.. isn’t it climate-fool.
Your idiotic graph starts at the bottom of the long term oscillation, well below the long term trend line, and relies on the very large 2023 El Nino to create a larger trend.
It is the ultimate in mathematically illiterate cherry-picking.
Not fooling anyone here.. except yourself. .. Making a FOOL of yourself.
30 year running linear trends at Battery Park…
.. shows that fastest 30 year trend ended around 1954.
Saying that if you choose your starting point carefully, you can find a higher trend, is simply cherry-picking. Of course you can, but you have to ignore the structural uncertainty in the estimated trends. You show that there are about 10 start points that produce a higher trend, and no others. That would suggest that the actual trend is not likely to be higher given the variance of the data. You can estimate the uncertainty via lowess smoothing (not my analysis):
And see that the current trend at this location is outside of the uncertainty range of any previous period.
You poor mathematical illiterate.
I didn’t cherry pick anything.
You chose the 30 year period, I calculated 30 year trends.
The fastest 30 year trend ended in about 1954.
Sorry if you cannot accept basic facts.!
Your pathetic attempt to DENY the fact when put in front of you is totally hilarious.
Fastest 20 year linear trend ended around 1949.
All of those projections are mere speculation; reality does not depend upon any of them. The actual result could also be that human “emissions” are slowing the warming rate that would be dominate without human activity.
Well, “It seems far more plausible that New York City is suffering under its own weight….” not really. The Continental mass itself is moving downward south the the hinge-point which is in a east-west line running from about Boston west through just north of Kingston, NY.
It is not a function of the weight of the buildings. Much more geology than city planning.
One would think with all the hot air generated by politicians, NYC would be floating above ground.
Very nice Anthony.
Roger Pielke is far too kind.
It is past time to bring departments like NYDEC before a committee and rake them over the coals. They need to be forced to justify all of their claims and methods or have all funding removed or better yet have the department disbanded.
Right, a Governmental committee in New York is going to investigate the DEC objectively??
What do you suggest?
Perhaps the the liberal arts BS merchants at the NYP are arithmetically challenged and do not know the difference between 10 and 100 which for them is zero!!!
I recommend every Watts article I find on my daily recommended climate and energy reading list. But I always I wonder why every Watts article is not included at his own website.
Two observations
I believe NOAA stopped publishing their great tide gauge charts a few years ago. Inconvenient charts. It may be possible to build a chart at their website with their data, but I just used an older chart on my blog, as was used in this article
I do not read the Post’s website often but it has been consistently conservative. This one climate scaremongering article is not typical. Maybe a Post editor was drunk after a three martini lunch and forgot the Post was a conservative newspaper?
Writers need good editors
Musicians need good producers
“I do not read the Post’s website often but it has been consistently conservative. This one climate scaremongering article is not typical. Maybe a Post editor was drunk after a three martini lunch and forgot the Post was a conservative newspaper?”
That’s what I was thinking, too.
The New York Post did change their tune the next day in another article, so maybe the drunk editor got sober and realized what he had done and took steps to correct it. 🙂