National Geographic article sea level rise midway up Statue of Liberty (Review by Anthony Watts)

Link to original article: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/20/national-geographicsjunk-science-how-long-will-it-take-for-sea-level-rise-to-reach-midway-up-the-statueof-liberty/

National Geographic’s Junk Science: How long will it take for sea level rise to reach midway up the Statue of Liberty?

Anthony Watts / August 20, 2013

Today on the WUWT Hot Sheet, we reported that there was more fear-mongering imagery from National Geographic, as seen above. http://press.nationalgeographic.com/2013/08/15/national-geographic-magazineseptember-2013/

I wondered if they told readers how long that will take to get to that level, like I did in a previous photo portraying New York underwater here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/28/freaking-out-about-nyc-sea-level-rise-iseasy-to-do-when-you-dont-pay-attention-to-history/ According to the Nat Geo article “Rising Seas”, it turns out that they didn’t tell their readers about how long it would take to reach the level depicted on the cover, so I’m going to do the calculation for you. First, specs on the Statue of Liberty. I found this image with measurements:

But neither it or the article http://statueofliberty.org/Fun_Facts.html using it had the details I was seeking to be able to determine the heights above current mean sea level.

The National Park Service stats page says: Top of base to torch

151’1″

46.05m

Ground to tip of torch

305’1″

92.99m

Heel to top of head

111’1″

33.86m

Ground to pedestal

154’0″

46.94m

Source: http://www.nps.gov/stli/historyculture/statue-statistics.htm Since the measurements are to ground level, I also has to determine the height of the island above MSL. A variety of measurements I discovered give different answers.

Google Earth says 7 feet, while this National Park Service document says 15-20 feet were the highest elevations during its natural state before becoming a national monument.

Looking at photos, etc, and considering those citations, for the sake of simplicity I’m going to call the height of Liberty Island at 10 feet above MSL. That puts the torch at 315 feet above the sea level.

I also had to estimate where the NatGeo waterline was, and based on folds in the robe, I estimated it to be 1/3 of the entire height of the statue from feet to torch, or about 50 feet above the top of the pedestal. That puts the NatGeo waterline at approximately 214 feet, or 65.2 meters above mean sea level.

So I have added these measurements, along with the estimated water line from the NatGeo cover to this image from WikiPedia:

So now that we have an estimated value for the NatGeo waterline depicted on the cover of the magazine, we can do the calculations to determine how long it will take for sea level rise to reach that height.

We will use the rate value from the tide Gauge at “The Battery�, just 1.7 miles away according to Google Earth.

Source: http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=85 18750 How long will it take to reach the NatGeo waterline in the cover photo?

The mean sea level trend is 2.77 millimeters per year. At that rate we have:

65.2 meters = 65200 millimeters / 2.77 mm/yr = 23537.9 years That’s right, 23,500 years!

A new ice age will likely be well underway then, dropping sea levels. The water would never get there. That’s assuming the statue still exists there at all. Ironically, Liberty Island is a remnant of the last ice age: Liberty Island is a small 12.7-acre island in New York Harbor. As a remnant of last glacial age, it is composed of sand and small stones deposited as the glaciers retreated.

Even if we believe that sea level will accelerate to 2 or 3 times that rate (as some proponents would have us believe), we are still looking at thousands of years into the future. At a 3x rate, we are looking at 7846 years into the future.

Without explaining this basic fact to their readers, National Geographic is doing nothing but scare-mongering with that cover image. Shame on them.

It is this sort of junk science sensationalism that causes me and many others not to subscribe to National Geographic anymore. Their climate advocacy while abandoning factual geographics such as this is not worthy of a subscription.