Pirate's Cove

It’s pretty wild

(Salon) While doing research 12 or 13 years ago, I met Jim Hansen, the scientist who in 1988 predicted the greenhouse effect before Congress. I went over to the window with him and looked out on Broadway in New York City and said, “If what you’re saying about the greenhouse effect is true, is anything going to look different down there in 20 years?” He looked for a while and was quiet and didn’t say anything for a couple seconds. Then he said, “Well, there will be more traffic.” I, of course, didn’t think he heard the question right. Then he explained, “The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won’t be there. The trees in the median strip will change.” Then he said, “There will be more police cars.” Why? “Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up.”

Oh, wait, wasn’t NYC’s West Side supposed to be under water already? Well, since that failed, let’s do another one

New York City sea levels could rise a foot in next decade

New York City sea levels could rise more than a foot by the 2030s, according to projections presented by a city climate panel.

The nation’s largest city will see as much as 10 percent more precipitation and temperature increases of 2 degrees to 4.7 degrees, the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC) said at a presentation at the Consortium for Climate Risk in the Urban Northeast. The presentation’s contents were first reported by The City.

Further into the century, “we can’t rule out” precipitation increases as high as 30 percent, said NPCC member Radley Horton, a climate professor at Columbia University, although he added that projecting precise precipitation increases “is not a strength of climate models.”

Already, “coastal New York City is experiencing a slightly higher rate of sea level rise than the global average,” Horton added, and “sea level rise, even if it doesn’t sound like much … matters an enormous amount. If you raise that baseline by a foot … the high water levels that you might see during the occasional storm, if we add a foot of water to that, we suddenly have the events that used to be very rare happening many times more than they used to,” such as high-tide flooding.

Notice that they use the squishy “could.” Will it or won’t it, guys? Let’s look at actual measurements

.95 feet per 100 years. Which is over average for the last 8,000 years (6-8 inches per century), which would encompass cool periods where you have low to negative sea rise. So, actual measurements, which do not show one foot in 100 years, will not happen in the next 10. Kings Point, which is just to the east of NYC at the most western edge of Long Island sound shows .85 feet per 100 years.