From Watts Up With That?
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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