The Guardian claims in “‘Point of no return’: New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level, study finds” that New Orleans has effectively entered a “terminal condition” and must begin an organized population retreat because sea-level rise will surround the city within decades. This is false. The article relies on speculative climate modeling, paleoclimate analogies, and worst-case sea-level projections that are nowhere near what actual tide gauge measurements of sea level show today.
The story warns that southern Louisiana faces “3–7 meters of sea-level rise” and shoreline retreat of up to 100 kilometers inland. That claim is extrapolated from comparisons to a warm period 125,000 years ago when ice sheets were in a very different configuration, not based on observed current data trends. The result of computer model simulations of ancient paleoclimate conditions has no bearing on the present, nor is it in-line with actual sea-level trends.
Measured sea-level rise along the Gulf Coast is well documented by long-running tide gauges operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The observed rate in the region is on the order of millimeters per year, not meters per decade as seen in the sea level trend graphic from the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (NOAA) below.
The New Canal Louisiana tide gauge is the station closest to New Orleans. Note that based on actual data, NOAA predicts about two feet of rise in 100 years. Even accounting for local subsidence, the data show gradual rise, not an exponential surge toward three to seven meters (9.8 to 23 feet) this century. There is no empirical evidence supporting the notion that New Orleans will be “surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century.”
The Guardian also asserts that “strengthening hurricanes” are compounding the threat. Yet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) reports no increase in the number or severity of major hurricanes. Observational records for U.S. landfalling hurricanes show no significant upward trend over the past 50 years, as seen in the graphic below.
The most destructive hurricane to strike Louisiana, the 1900 Galveston storm and later the 1915 and 1965 storms, occurred long before modern carbon dioxide emissions were elevated. Hurricane activity in the Gulf of America has always fluctuated due to natural cycles such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. Wind shear, sea-surface temperatures, and atmospheric dynamics drive storm intensity. There is no consistent data demonstrating a climate-driven escalation in Gulf Coast hurricane strength.
To the extent that “sea level rise” is greater on average in New Orleans and some other Gulf Coast areas than for the nation or world as a whole is due to a factor that the Guardian largely ignores, land subsidence. Southern Louisiana is sinking due to sediment compaction, groundwater withdrawal, oil and gas extraction, and the historical channelization of the Mississippi River. Much of the relative sea-level rise in the region is local land sinking, not accelerating global ocean expansion. Conflating subsidence with climate change induced sea level rise is grossly and dangerously misleading.
Even the study at the center of the article is an opinion piece, not a research paper, in a scientific journal projecting improbable future scenarios. It does not present new measurements showing imminent sinking or rapid sea level rise.
The map shown in the article depicts Louisiana under three meters of sea-level rise. That graphic is a model scenario based on SSP5-8.5, a high-emissions climate scenario combining fossil-fuel-intensive development with high level climate forcing by 2100. This worst-case scenario has no bearing in reality and is so bad that the IPCC recently removed it from all scientific consideration.
The rhetoric reads more like the trailer for a big-budget disaster film rather than an objective journalistic endeavor. “Terminal condition.” “Point of no return.” “Timebomb.” These alarming trigger words and phrases don’t reflect the reality on the ground in New Orleans, nor trends recorded by scientific instruments.
New Orleans has already invested billions of dollars in levees, pumps, and floodgates since Hurricane Katrina. Engineering solutions exist. The Dutch have defended land below sea level for centuries. To suggest that “there’s no amount of money” that can maintain protective infrastructure ignores modern coastal engineering reality.
Sea level is rising gradually. Wetlands are eroding due to river management and sediment starvation. Subsidence is measurable. These are real challenges. But they are not proof that relocation “must start now.”
Policy should be driven by measurements, not metaphors.
New Orleans faces engineering and land management challenges. It does not face a guaranteed watery extinction within decades based on current observed sea-level rise or hurricane trends. The Guardian’s doomsday story is not sober risk assessment, rather it is junk journalism at its worst.
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.
Originally posted at ClimateREALISM
Laughable stuff from the 6th form student politic common room. Is this RCP8.5 inspired?
I was reminded of the consensus that once existed regarding a flat Earth…
Today I found a message floating
In the sea from you to me
You wrote that when you could see it
You cried with fear, the Point was near
The flat Earth consensus still exists. Proof? All of those idiotic energy imbalance graphics that average the incoming sunlight over the surface of a perfect sphere.
“In a world of spherical cows every steak is round.”
The Earth bulges at the equator by 0.3% from perfectly spherical. That’s pretty spherical. Billiard balls have a tolerance of about 0.2% and you’d call them spherical wouldn’t you ?
Also using the heat transfer correlations between two flat plates the area of the Earth…and 2 spheres, one the radius of the Earth and one the radius of the top of Troposphere is also accurate within about 0.2%….which is much more accurate than the calcs to start with…so your oft made statement about flat/spherical is nonsense.
Well, Anthony, you know the old saying in journalism: “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story”
I always miss the ” good story” part in this scheme.
The saying is more : Never let the fact get in the way of the agenda”
The Gran sure likes to lie ….
This appears to be the main ‘basis’ of the article.
Törnqvist, T. E., B. Castro, J. Keenan, J. M. Mehta, & Z. Shen. 2026. Climate-driven depopulation and adaptation realities in America’s coastal ground zero. Nature Sustainability. Published online.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-026-01820-z
“Climate-driven human migration modelling is at an early stage of development that is unable to internalize such a drastic shift in coastal geography. Therefore, we take an inverse approach to utilize both archaeological evidence of the migration of Indigenous people and geological palaeo-shoreline reconstruction to examine the spatial dimension of the possible future of human settlement in this region.”
The senior author has published other papers on the delta, including one in 1996 ( “A revised chronology for Mississippi River Subdeltas”). The geology is very complicated along with controversy about causes of subsidence, wetland loss, etc., which range from blaming the petroleum industry to faults and other more ‘natural’ causes. The major delta has historically shifted from the Mississippi border to the Atchafalaya area, the latter a delta in the making. This is another example of ‘experts’ operating both in science and management which has been creeping for decades into what is a serious problem. The “Indigenous people” moved around quite a bit before us ‘foreigners ’ moved in. Our management of the Mississippi River has been operating for many decades, mostly seriously after the 1927 flood. Hurricanes are a bigger, more immediate, problem.
The nature study is paywalled, – though it may be the study the Guardian article posted above is based on.
The nature study is paywalled, – though it may be the study the Guardian article posted above is based on.
“The major delta has historically shifted from the Mississippi border to the Atchafalaya area, the latter a delta in the making.”
Using maps and photos, a good read is found on Wikipedia: Old_River_Control_Structure
Excellent post, John. The Corps of Engineers take depth measurements there daily, and barring a catastrophic structure collapse the soundings act as ‘the canary in coal mine mine’ for the inevitable future redirection of the Mississippi River through the Atchafalaya basin. Fascinating to have read about this way back after Katrina hit NOLA.
Your link appears mostly correct, although there is a lot more to the problem. Simplistically it is whether to keep New Orleans and the unusual ‘toothpick’ type delta or allow a ‘natural’ succession of deltas which is a horribly complicated decision. I dealt with the fisheries question which is confounded by the more national ‘arguments’ with some clearly showing their lack of understanding, therefore applicability. The ‘natural’ river always had tributaries and crevasses through the river formed levees. The upstream examples, Bayous Plaquemine and Lafourche, were artificially shut in 1868 and 1904. A recent interesting paper argued that it historically was more dendritic. (Condrey, R. E., D. E. Evers, and P. E. Hoffman. 2014. The last natural active delta complex of the Mississippi River (LNDM): Discovery and implications. pp. 33-50.In, J. W. Day, G. P. Kemp, A. M. Freeman and D. P. Muth. (eds.), Perspectives on the Restoration of the Mississippi Delta, Estuaries of the World. Springer, Dordrecht.)
I studied and sampled Atchafalaya Bay and bays to the west in 1970 when it was a low salinity brackish bay which became in the 1973 flood start of the current subdelta. I also studied there the flood years of 1974-75, bay was full of freshwater fish, even some in the Gulf, now it’s mostly a freshwater swamp. (Hoese, H. D. 1981. Some effects of fresh water on the Atchafalaya Bay system. Proc. Nat. Symp. Fresh-water flow. Est. Biol. Serv. Prog. U. S. Fish Wildl. Serv. FWS /OBS-81-04 (2):110-124. Castellanos, D. L. and L. P. Rozas. 2001. Nekton use of submerged aquatic vegetation, marsh, and shallow unvegetated bottom in the Atchafalaya River delta, a Louisiana tidal freshwater ecosystem. Estuaries. 24(2):184-197.)
We lived on a hill formation north of Lafayette where the 1927 flood reached the base. They did almost lose the river in 1973 and you have to give credit to the competence of the Corps of Engineers and the scientists they trusted, especially their Waterways Experiment Station. Politics was part of the problem, but in Louisiana they were closer to reality and they always had to deal with ‘carpetbaggers’ who thought that they ‘knew better.’ (Loftin, L. B., H. D. Hoese, and M. A. Konikoff. 2011. Will overfishing and proposed Mississippi River diversions imperil Louisiana oyster fisheries: Commentary and review. Gulf of Mexico Science. 29(1):1-12. https://doi.org/10.18785/goms.2901.01)
The Groan has reached the point of no return.
New Orleans faces engineering and land management challenges.
The Dutch are very good at this sort of thing. England has a history of using their water management expertise right up to the present day.
Somerset Levels receive giant Dutch pumps to funnel flood water to sea
Teams of Dutch engineers have been working alongside the EA to install eight powerful pumps and huge pipes at Dunball, in Bridgwater, and another five further inland at Beer Wall, near the badly hit village of Burrowbridge.
The idea is to ease pressure on the rivers Parrett and Tone on the Levels by increasing flow along two other courses – Guardian
The same levels where the river Parrett went from managed to rewilded – and half as wide.
1960s
2014 (and flooding)
The Dutch visited New Orleans and studied the installed Wood Screw Pumps extensively to learn how it was done.
This type of article only works if there is great confidence in the readers not knowing anything.
if there is great confidence in the readers not knowing anything.
That’s what education (since the 90s) is for…
Oh, but the kids know what they were taught. Too bad they are not taught to think.
This is an example of the BS coming from the cultists
Paraphrasing Star Trek – “Science – the final frontier”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/04/new-orleans-sea-levels-relocation-climate-crisis
“Where no man (human) has gone before.”
Applies to the Guardian.
There are some scientists and engineers and others that have gone there before.
Leave now when there are decades (no specific number) to measure, assess, and mitigate?
Abandon an entire city on pure hyperbolic speculation?
I guess they had to publish something to get ad clicks.
I know a person that believes everything he reads in The Guardian (& the NYT). I find it best to leave the room when he starts the nauseous pontificating on the latest news from these sources.
References to the “most destructive” 1900 Galveston storm should come with a footnote to the configuration of the town and the 10,000-foot-long wooden causeway that helped destroy the town as the storm surge carried it into the buildings. With current technology, early warnings and evacuation would have saved most of the 8,000 that died.
New Orleans’ problem is not “climate change” so much (not at all, really) but instead that about half the city is below sea level by as much as 8 feet, the city is sinking/subsiding, it’s in an area subject to hurricanes making landfall, and last but certainly not least the decades-long corruption that keeps protective levees, dams, and dikes from being built properly, with the public monies allocated to them siphoned off into the pockets of crooked politicians and their cronies. But “climate change” makes a great excuse to ignore the real problems and to keep the money spigot flowing…
I blame the French. Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville was the guy who thought a tidal mudflat was an ideal place to build a city.
It’s not that simple, although New Orleans did spread there where Katrina did a lot more damage. We ‘sailed’ down the river in 1985 from New Orleans on a friend’s sailboat, but required mostly motoring as winds seldom cooperated. Imagine the upstream problem. When only sails and oars were propulsion the French first explored and more or less settled east of the river until St. John’s Bayou, now Industrial Canal and part of the Intracoastal Waterway, from Lake Pontchartrain offered adequate access to the river through west Mississippi Sound and Lake Borne. Louisiana was clearly more productive and the river was the necessary prize. New Orleans was the ‘high land.’ See my comments above.
Netherlands?
Also: ‘No return’ kinda implies ‘never’. Have they decided Earth will never have another ice age?
Well, the dikes failed in 1953 due to a lack of maintenance during the war. In some places, the water rose by more than five meters. There were deaths, of course. The government’s response was immediate: a gigantic plan to renovate the dikes and close off the estuaries. This proves two things: life is dangerous (how could it not be?), and human beings are perfectly capable of adapting to that danger and prospering… provided they have a sound economy and intelligent leaders with a sense of priorities.
The fact that they have lived below sea level for centuries did not prevent the Dutch from having, for a long time, a very powerful military fleet, nor from flourishing artistically. I would love to see The Night Watch once in my life, but it’s like Mona Lisa in Paris, you practically need a telephoto lens to catch a glimpse of it behind a wall of tourists. And then, all things considered, I think I prefer Hieronymus Bosch to Rembrandt
The first time I read about something like this was in 1975 when I was living in Houma and working as a Roughneck on an offshore oil rig.
By the turn of the century, all of Louisiana South of of I10/12 was supposed to be washed away. 50 years later the same story with the same reasons and the same number of years into the future resurfaces.
Yes, the Southern part of the state is subsiding. But that is more because the silt flowing down the Mississippi is funneled to the birds foot at the end of the river in the Gulf rather than being allowed to spread over the land and build the land.
If The Netherlands can do it so can others. The only reason it hasn’t been done is because of the historical government corruption in New Orleans and Louisiana
Well then, this inevitable flooding gives me the opportunity to share a nice little song with you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vchUUT0NYQ8
When the sea riiiiiiises…
The Guardian seems to have a crew lying in wait for any slight variation from the norm in global or local temperatures, precipitation, storm tracks, sea levels, droughts and anything climate-related so that it can run one or more scare stories about the events. And naturally it has the solution: reduces fossil fuel use, tax citizens more, mandate green product purchases—anything that causes higher living expenses and adds greater restrictions on the population. All this because there’s only one planet, or did I overlook something new?
It’s a business, not a truth and reconciliation court. The hidden layer of information is who is paying for this tripe and how much.
What could be done is changing the drainage canals the are used to pump water north out of New Orleans. Open them up all the way south through the city. Open channel, tunnel, cut and cover as needed depending on what’s in the way. Let water flow freely through the city to carry sediment out to rebuild the land south of the end of the Mississippi River that has been too constrained. Other channels could be put in to the west of New Orleans.
It’s essentially the same created problem as the canal that was built through the Florida Everglades. Dug as a straight through channel, it did its job too well. Too much water flows out, resulting in an influx of salt water. The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) is plugging canals, converting straight canals to winding ones, digging channels under roads, and removing a lot of old roads to bring balance to the in and out flow of fresh water through the Everglades.
Similar projects should be done to rebuild the Mississippi River delta, and save New Orleans from sinking. Low parts of the city could have the buildings raised and the land filled up. It’s been done in some other cities. ‘Course today the cost in our inflated dollars would be higher.
This brings to mind the Twilight Zone episode where a used car salesman was forced to tell the truth to his customers on the used car lot. That was science fiction of course. In the real world of media its all about fleecing them with con games everyday.
The New Orleans Climate Bogeyman is just a distraction for the city’s real problems, which are crime, drugs and gangs. Typical of any Progressive American city, but amplified by the original history and beauty of the area. It is a true melting pot on a scale one can enjoy. The summer heat can be brutal, best to visit in late spring and catch the Jazz Festival.
Check WWOZ.org on the web for music and current events.