Guest “It doesn’t get any dumber than this” by David Middleton
Hat tip to Mrs. Middleton…
Climate Ready: Evidence in NYC shows rapid glacier melt is leading to real-world effects
By Dani Beckstrom WABC
Friday, March 28, 2025NEW YORK CITY (WABC) — It’s not just in the movies; the ice on our planet is melting faster than we ever thought possible.
This melting is not just taking place at the North and South Poles.
“Everything from the relatively small glaciers that we’re use to looking iconically at, to the Alps, the Rockies, Alaska,” Robin Bell, geophysicist and glaciologist, said.
[…]
“There’s a tide gauge down at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal,” said Bell. “And sea levels have just been going up.”
[…]
New York City’s history with glaciers goes much further back.
“About 20,000 years ago, this whole area was under ice,” Steven Jaret, research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, said. “It would have been here about 1,000 to 2,000 feet thick.”
In parts of New York State, more than a mile and a half of ice covered what is now ground level, which is more than four times the height of one World Trade Center.
[…]
The article goes on to describe all of the breathtaking evidence of catastrophic glacier melting in and around New York City: Glacial erratics, glacial striations, more glacial erratics… Oddly enough they failed to mention that Long Island is basically a terminal moraine. They even included a cute video, with clips from the Ice Age cartoons.
Evidence of Late Pleistocene “rapid glacier melt” in modern-day New York City “is leading to real-world effects” about as much as the presence of Ordovician Period marine fossils on Mount Everest leads to evidence of Noah’s Flood.
Regarding sea level rise… When this much ice melted…
Sea level rose at a rapid rate of about 11 mm/yr over a period of about 10,000 years…
(Siddall et al., 2003)
Zooming in on the past 7,000 years (older is toward the left), we can see that the Late Pleistocene rapid sea level rise peaked between 6,000 and 5,000 years ago during the Holocene Climatic Optimum.
About 1,000 years ago as the climate transitioned from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age, sea level fell. by as much as 6 meters, before beginning to slowly rise again in the mid-1800’s.
Here’s a plot of CW11 shifted to the same datum as J14:
About 13 inches of sea level rise over a 150 year period.
This brings us back to New York City…
“There’s a tide gauge down at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal,” said Bell. “And sea levels have just been going up.”
There is? Better let NOAA know about it…
Let’s take a peak at the actual tide gauges:
The relative sea level trend is 2.94 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.09 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from1856 to 2024 which is equivalent to a change of 0.96 feet in 100 years.
The Battery has the longest record length at nearly 170 years…. A steady rate of 2.94 ±0.09 mm/yr, starting 47 years prior to this climatic catastrophe:
Of course, that 2.94 ±0.09 mm/yr is a combination of the water moving up and the land moving down.
NASA-Led Study Pinpoints Areas of New York City Sinking, Rising
Sept. 27, 2023
Scientists using space-based radar found that land in New York City is sinking at varying rates from human and natural factors. A few spots are rising.
Parts of the New York City metropolitan area are sinking and rising at different rates due to factors ranging from land-use practices to long-lost glaciers, scientists have found. While the elevation changes seem small – fractions of inches per year – they can enhance or diminish local flood risk linked to sea level rise.
The new study was published Wednesday in Science Advances by a team of researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and Rutgers University in New Jersey.
[…]
The scientists found that on average the metropolitan area subsided by about 0.06 inches (1.6 millimeters) per year – about the same amount that a toenail grows in a month.
[…]
So, we can knock 1.6 mm/yr off of the 2.94 mm/yr, reducing the actual rise in sea level elevation to 1.34 mm/yr.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Rutgers University” NASA JPL
In the Science Advances paper, the “scientists” claimed that sea level rise at The Battery is accelerating.
During the 20th century, relative sea level at the Battery tide gauge in Manhattan, New York City increased at a rate of about 3.1 mm/year. From 2000 to 2022, that rate has increased to 4.4 mm/year. About 1.5 ± 0.2 mm/year of this rate has been attributed to subsidence driven by glacial isostatic adjustment [GIA; (1–3)].
Even if we accept the acceleration claim, 4.4 – 1.5 still takes us back to 2.9 mm/yr… The same rate it’s been since before the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter.
However, a quick look at NOAA’s “Variations of 50-Year Relative Sea Level Trends” clearly demonstrates that the apparent recent acceleration is simply due to the well-documented, roughly 60-yr cycle (quasi-periodic fluctuation for the math nerds) in the rate of sea level rise.
This cycle is most likely related to the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (Gervais, 2016, NCAR) and not to fossil fuel consumption.
Yes, I know… Correlation does not equal causation. However, without correlation, it’s rather difficult to move on to causation.
Then there’s Bergen Point, with the shortest record length, entirely within the current up-swing of the ~60-yr cycle.
I’m surprised they didn’t cite Bergen Point as evidence of accelerated sea level rise [/Sarc off]
So… Yes, there’s lots of evidence that massive sheets of ice once covered New York City and much of the Northern Hemisphere… But they melted… A long time ago… And that’s a good thing. However, those ice sheets will almost certainly return at some point in the geologically near future. And that will be a very bad thing and far more catastrophic than 3 mm/yr of sea level rise:
As if the Eyewitless News ABC 7 story wasn’t dumb enough…
March 31, 2025
Big Banks Quietly Prepare for Catastrophic Warming
Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and an international banking group have quietly concluded that climate change will likely exceed the Paris Agreement’s 2 degree C goal and are examining how to maintain profits
By Corbin Hiar & E&E News
CLIMATEWIRE | Top Wall Street institutions are preparing for a severe future of global warming that blows past the temperature limits agreed to by more than 190 nations a decade ago, industry documents show.
The big banks’ acknowledgment that the world is likely to fail at preventing warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels is spelled out in obscure reports for clients, investors and trade association members.
Most were published after the reelection of President Donald Trump, who is seeking to repeal federal policies that support clean energy while turbocharging the production of oil, gas and coal — the main sources of global warming.
[…]
(Wood for Trees, MacFarling Meure et al., 2006)
Cue “correlation is not causation”… Allow myself to repeat myself… From 1800 to 1900, per capita energy consumption, primarily from biomass, remained relatively flat; as did the average life expectancy. From 1900 to 1978, per capita energy consumption roughly tripled with the rapid growth in fossil fuel production (coal, oil & gas). This was accompanied by a doubling of average life expectancy. While I can’t say that fossil fuels caused the increase in life expectancy, I can unequivocally state that everything that enabled the increase in life expectancy wouldn’t have existed or happened without fossil fuels, particularly petroleum.
Our modern society would not exist without fossil fuels and it would collapse in a heartbeat if fossil fuels were made unavailable and/or unaffordable. One of the coolest things about being a petroleum geologist, is that I can give thanks for fossil fuels and say “you’re welcome” in the same sentence.
References
Brock, J.C., M. Palaseanu-Lovejoy, C.W. Wright, & A. Nayegandhi. (2008). “Patch-reef morphology as a proxy for Holocene sea-level variability, Northern Florida Keys, USA”. Coral Reefs. 27. 555-568. 10.1007/s00338-008-0370-y.
Buzzanga, Brett et al. ,Localized uplift, widespread subsidence, and implications for sea level rise in the New York City metropolitan area. Sci. Adv. 9, eadi8259(2023).DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adi 8259
Church, J.A., White, N.J., 2011. “Sea-level rise from the late 19th to the early 21st Century”. Surv. Geophys. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10712-011-9119-1.
Gervais, François. Anthropogenic CO2 warming challenged by 60-yearcycle. Earth-Science Reviews. Volume 155, 2016, Pages 129-135, ISSN 0012-8252,
Jevrejeva, S. , J.C. Moore, A. Grinsted, A.P. Matthews, G. Spada. 2014. “Trends and acceleration in global and regional sea levels since 1807”. Global and Planetary Change. %vol 113, 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2013.12.004 https://www.psmsl.org/products/reconstructions/jevrejevaetal2014.php
Lomborg, Bjorn . Welfare in the 21st century: Increasing development, reducing inequality, the impact of climate change, and the cost of climate policies. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. Volume 156, 2020, 119981, ISSN 0040-1625, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2020.119981.
Ljungqvist, F.C. 2010. “A new reconstruction of temperature variability in the extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere during the last two millennia”. Geografiska Annaler: Physical Geography, Vol. 92 A(3), pp. 339-351, September 2010. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-459.2010.00399.x
MacFarling Meure, C., D. Etheridge, C. Trudinger, P. Steele, R. Langenfelds, T. van Ommen, A. Smith, and J. Elkins (2006), Law Dome CO2, CH4 and N2O ice core records extended to 2000 years BP, Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L14810, doi:10.1029/2006GL026152.
Siddall M, Rohling EJ, Almogi-Labin A, Hemleben C, Meischner D, Scmelzer I, Smeed DA (2003). “Sea-level fluctuations during the last glacial cycle”. Nature 423:853–858
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“the ice on our planet is melting faster than we ever thought possible”
It’s melting so fast that in about 1,500 years sea level will reach the peak level of the previous interglacial (warm) period 125,000 years ago, when it was 4 to 6 meters higher. I, for one, am frightened out of my mind by the astonishing(ly slow) pace of glacier melt and sea level rise. 0.0035 meters per year of sea level rise is an existential threat. Someday. Like in thousands of years, but it’s a big deal and we must do something about it. Now!
-Global Mean Sea Level 3.5 ± 0.4 mm/yr, Sea Level Research Group at University of Colorado
–Sea Level Rise, After the Ice Melted and Today (by Vivien Gornitz, NASA GISS)
The funniest thing is:
New York was covered with 1.5 miles of ice.
Then the melt started.
And within the next 6000 years Sea levels went up 80 meters.
During the last 60 years there should have been 0.8 m as average.
But when we take a look at photos of coastlines or watch 60ies beach movies everything looks the same now.
The sea level rise is absolutely irrelevant by any metric and significantly lower as it was 10000 years ago.
Yet they dare to say : “Ice is melting faster than we ever thought”
No!
It melts 90% slower than it did for thousands of years.
And 98 % slower than they themselves predicted :
According to Hansen lower Manhattan drowned in 2018 and so did the Maledives.
If there was any relevant melt many Islands would have been gone by now
and the UN would terrorize us all, and especially school children with a ” drowned island historymonth”,
front beach properties would be sold for pennies on a dollar.
The few remaining beach resorts would be overcrowded.
And what would never ever happen is that China, Emirates etc are building artificial islands in the sea.
Even amateurish man made islands like Santa Cruz del Islote are still there and still one foot above sea level as they’ve always been.
Sea level rise and melting ice are the same non -issue as co2.
So irrelevant that noone would ever talk about it if they wouldn’t be bombarding us permanently with fear propaganda.
They are exactly the same thing as Iraq’s WMD’s.
The only place they exist is inside Colin Powells testtube.
And the testtube was just the replacement for the yellow cake lie
just as global warming is for the ice age – to achieve a specific goal.
4-6m higher was only 5000 years ago, 125,000 years ago it was say 120m+ higher
Impossible to 120m higher than present where did you get that number from ?
It’s a straight physics calculation and if you melt all the ice on Earth 65m is the highest sea level from present. Even the IPCC can get that one right because it isn’t climate science but physics and you can see the breakdown
https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/estimating-glacier-contribution-to-sea-level-rise/
Glaciers who cares, Greenland ice sheet 7m and Antarctica 58m
It’s the spirit that counts… 😉
Eggs zackley! Numbers, schmumbers. . . Science, schmience. . . Who cares about precise measurement anyway, when you can use gruesome imagery as a first choice, and still lure tens of millions of acolytes into your Amen Corner?
So long as you live above 230′ above MSL you will ALWAYS be OK. At 240′ you needn’t be concerned with most storm surges either
Not higher. Lower. Look up “continental shelf”.
I am genuinely baffled as to why you would want people to think you are an idiot.
The “120 metres” is how much lower sea level was at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) around 20,000 years ago.
See Figure 2 in the ATL article.
.
For “dry facts” it is reasonable to start with looking at what Wikipedia has to say about a question, in this case :
“What was the highest sea level during the Eemian interglacial, ~130-115kya ?”
In most cases additional research / follow-up of references will be required … but not in this instance.
URL : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Interglacial#Sea_level
Start of that section :
You managed to take “post in haste, repent at leisure” — which I have frequently been guilty of myself in the past, and will no doubt be guilty of many times in the future as well — to a whole new “level” …
Yep, 6 to 9 meters maximum during the Eemian interglacial would be the guess of the serious sea level folk. That’s before “clarifying” by the IPCC, the media, etc. Even that is a bit hazy as it assumes no tectonic up or down motion of the measurement site(s) in intervening 120,000 years,
Poor TV reporter Dani. Like most, reads a script without knowing what she is talking about.
Glaciers melting, the horror. Sea level rise accelerating, the horror. Except neither is true.
USNPS had signage for many years at the main Glacier National Park visitor center saying all the Park glaciers would be gone by 2020. Winter 2020, while the Park was closed, all that signage disappeared because its glaciers were still there. And still are.
Climate Alarmists appear out of alarms. They now just recycle stuff already multiple times disproven. Or make nonsense assertions like ‘The oceans are boiling.’
“They now just recycle stuff already multiple times disproven.”
Yes, Climate Alarmists are getting really boring. They can’t come up with anything new, and all their old stuff has been debunked.
Big banks like Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan are losing their assets over DEI, ESG, and CAGW. Ditto Vanguard and Blackrock. The days of culture warfare substituting for financial competence are over. Read the memo…
Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and an international banking group have quietly concluded that climate change will likely exceed the Paris Agreement’s 2 degree C goal and are examining how to maintain profits
Easy, just invest in air conditioning.
The area around New York City was profoundly shaped by Pleistocene glaciations — a series of ice advances and retreats over the last ~2.6 million years. Specifically, the most recent major event was the Wisconsin Glaciation, which ended about 12,000 years ago. But geologists have evidence that at least six or seven glacial cycles affected this region.
So, in her ignorance, she’s correct.
Her irrelevancy would be more accurate.
Several years ago, one of my sons was playing in a week-long baseball tournament in Cooperstown, NY, at the south end of Lake Otsego in the finger lakes region of central New York. During some downtime, I drove around the region showing my older son all of the effects of real global warming, like the u-shaped valleys that were no longer filled with glaciers but left the finger lakes behind when they melted, providing nice farmland and beautiful scenery for us knuckledragging skeptics to enjoy. My kids are now out of college and still non-believers.
Phil ==> Cooperstown is at the south end of Lake Otsego, but neither the town or the lake are in the Fingerlakes Region.
Cooperstown is in the Mohawk Valley Region of New York, in Ostego County.
Lovely place, especially if you like Baseball.
Kip, thanks for the clarification. My mother grew up in northern Pennsylvania right on the NY state border and we used to go up there almost every summer for vacation. would go up to Seneca Lake and watkins Glen a lot. Central NY is a beautiful area and I just assumed Otsego was one of the finger lakes without really looking.
Otsego may well be a glacial lake formed at the same time as the larger lakes to its west called “Finger lakes.” It is not called a finger lake because of a decision by a cartographer long ago. It is also much smaller than the lakes we call finger.
Denis, thanks to you and Kip for the geography lesson and corrections. My main point was that NY state (or most of it) was covered by continental glaciers and there are a ton of glacial erosional and depositional features in central NY. While I was up there, I took advantage of it to show my son firsthand that life in general benefits when the glaciers go away.
Roger Maris, Pete Rose and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson should all be in the Hall of Fame!
Big Reds fan from way back. Johnny Bench was my hero in high school. Went to the Hall of Fame when in Cooperstown. Pete Rose is in, sorta. There’s a Pete Rose display in the museum section with his jersey and stuff even though he doesn’t have a plaque in the actual Hall.
I’m a life-long New York Mets fan,,, Rusty Staub has always been my baseball hero. The 1973 NL Championship series between the Reds and Mets is still etched in my memory… As is the subsequent 4-3 loss to the Oakland A’s in the World Series.
La Grand Orange played for Tigers a couple years after Montreal. I think he was hitting coach too.
Le Grand Orange started with the Houston Colt .45’s (before they were the Astrosto the Tigers for Mickey fracking Lolich!. Rusty was an MVP contender for the Tigers in 1976.
Rusty eventually returned to the Mets and became one of the best pinch-hitters in baseball.
I live in SE Virginia where we have the AAA Tidewater Tides. Used to be the farm team for the Mets. They switched parks, switched leagues and are now the farm team of the Orioles, which is fine. My younger son is an O’s fan because of that, but my older son is a Yankee’s fan (and he likes soccer). To this day, I’m trying to figure out where I went wrong.
I used to.have a Tidewater Tides hat… 😎
P.S., Used to have an Estwing rock hammer. Have no idea whatever happened to it.
I have at least three… 🙂
You may have once been a field geologist … if you get the joke above about using an Estwing rock hammer to demonstrate the scale.
If I take a photo, with a person it it…. it was because I needed something bigger than a quarter or a lens cap… 😎
Yes, my still wife complains that the only time she was ever in one of my photos was to be a scale next to some boring rock or another!
Shawshank?
Dave ==> Terrific – saved me the effort — and yes, as far as I could find, no Tide Gauge to sea level gauge a the Staten Island Ferry Terminal.
Yes, relative sea level goes up – at about 9 inches per century with 1-2 inches of that being the land of Manhattan Island moving down.
Journalists don’t seem to be able or willing to check any facts these days.
No blame on the more prompter readers — Dani.
Kip,
I couldn’t bring myself to watch the full video, but I think her glaciology “experts” were an octengenarian (or older) glaciologist and a 12-yr old natural history museum volunteer.
This was a great example of getting the facts sort of right, and taking them as far out of context as possible.
Ref. Figure 1 in the article, we need to annex Canada and level the Laurentian Mts before they can launch another round of catastrophic glaciation!
/s
Now now Frank. The last glaciation pushed a great deal of excellent Canadian dirt over to the US side. Where I come from (Western NYS) there are dozens and in places hundreds of feet of excellent soil. Thank you Canada.
“faster than we ever thought possible.”
Haven’t we sorta been waiting for 40 years?
Fun aside. I still have my old, warn Eastwing rock pick, plus my 5# Eastwind crack hammer, plus its associated chisels, my hand built fine rock screen (used to get magnificent rubies and sapphires out of the NC Cowee Valley alluvial deposits), and my gold pan (used to get old gold at Dahlonegha, Georgia). All in my very used rock hound small backpack. Will be going to my Colorado grandkids soon.
I bought a gold pan in Hill City, SD back in the mid-1970s. washed a few flakes out of some dirt, and that was the limit of my gold mining days. Lost the gold pan and the small vial with the few flakes of gold that I panned.
Is it Eastwing, Eastwind, or Estwing?
Estwing… Ask any mason or geologist… 😎
https://www.estwing.com/
I asked because Rud used three different names.
One time in college… I took my first Estwing rock pick and slammed it into a dangling overhead light fixture in my college dormitory, while I shouted, “Hey look! I’m Thor!” The light fixture exploded in a hail of sparks, the tip of the rock pick melted, and I only survived because it had a rubber grip and I was too drunk to notice being electrocuted… 🍻
Rock folks will get a kick out of Nick Zintner’s missing rock hammer:
Geology Video Blooper – Columnar Basalt
Oh I have had rock hammers. My first was purchased as a Freshman geology student in 1966 but it was not the last. Estwings and various 3 to 5# crack hammers (those for the Precambrian Shield projects). Some lost, some misplaced, some loaned and not returned, some just disappeared. I did donate one to the airport security in Lima Peru because I “forgot” it was in my carry-on backpack. More than a few pocket knives met the same fate.
Aren’t they saying that the melting of the 1 1/2 miles of ice over NY was catastrophic? That if only the ice could have stayed there, NY would not be destroying the planet with emissions?
NB. “emissions” is their name for it. In my language they are CO2 emissions.
There is still widespread refusal to accept that the size of the ocean basins is changing and that this will affect apparent sea level changes seen on tide gauges.
We know that there is sea floor spreading, we have eyewitness accounts of new sea mounts appearing above the ocean surface, we know that many islands are growing higher above the ocean level, we have numerous records of undersea volcanism, etc. Given this, the expectation should be that basin size IS affecting measured sea levels as we speak. Sure, it is not so easy to measure or to devise proxy measurements, but it is simply wrong science to cancel culture it. Geoff S
“Long Island is basically a terminal moraine.”
And Eyewitness News ABC 7 is a bunch of terminal morons.
I recently learned the Welsh for ‘carrot’. It is moron. All those ‘reporters at ABC (and most other outlets) are carrots.
“There’s a tide gauge down at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal,” said Bell. “And sea levels have just been going up.”
About 5ft twice a day … every day (:-))
I have a question about the caption in figure 2.
Does that mean that the number of seals rose or that seals got taller?
(Sorry. Couldn’t resist. 😎
Utter nonsense Get some real scientists involved before making comments like these.
No one EVER can forecast what will be the situation in 1500 years from now.
The Yogi Berra Rule applies: “It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.”
Actually… Anyone can easily forecast 1,500 years into the future… 🙂