Sea Level Rise Could Turn New York Into Venice, Experts Warn
Wednesday, February 09, 2011
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Malcolm Bowman Oceanography professor of Stony Brook University in Long Island (Jim O'Grady/WNYC)
- Join the Discussion [16]
Malcolm Bowman, an oceanography professor from Stony Brook University in Long Island, recently stood at the snow-covered edge of the Williamsburg waterfront and pointed toward the Midtown skyline. "Looking at the city, with the setting sun behind the Williamsburg Bridge, it's a sea of tranquility," he said. "It's hard to imagine the dangers lying ahead."
But that's his job.
He said that as climate change brings higher temperatures and more violent storms, flooding in parts of the city could become as routine as the heavy snows of this winter. We could even have "flood days," the way we now have snow days, he said. Bowman and other experts say the only way to avoid that fate and keep the city dry is to follow the lead of cities like Amsterdam and Saint Petersburg and build moveable modern dykes. Either that or retreat from the shoreline.
Higher sea levels will give severe storms much more water to funnel toward the city. Bowman pointed first north, then south, to depict surges of water coming from two directions: through Long Island Sound and down the East River and up through the Verrazano Narrows toward Lower Manhattan. The effect could be worse than anything seen before.
Neighborhoods vulnerable to storm surge (Courtesy of NYSEMO GIS)
“Straight across the river, we could expect the FDR Drive to be underwater. We would expect the water lapping around Wall Street," he said. "We could see vital infrastructure, hospitals, sewage treatment plants, communication conduits all paralyzed by flooding with seawater, which is very corrosive.” (SEE IMAGE BELOW RIGHT)
The city got a glimpse of such destructiveness with the December Nor'easter of 1992, when massive flooding shut down the PATH train and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. Again, in the summer of 2007, a flash storm dumped so much rain so quickly that most subways stopped running. Afterward, the MTA removed 16,000 pounds of debris from its tracks and spent weeks repairing electrical equipment.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Panel on Climate Change said an increase in the number of such devastating storms is “extremely likely.”
John Nolon, a Pace University law professor with an expertise in sustainability law, said city officials have done a good job of at least describing the problem. “A lot of New York City is less than 16 feet above mean sea level," he said. "Lower Manhattan, some points are five feet above sea level. These areas are vulnerable and New York City knows it. Compared to other cities, which are only now beginning to wake up to this issue, I think New York City is much further ahead.”
But what to do?
David Bragdon, Director of the Mayor's Office of Long-Term Planning & Sustainability, is charged with preparing for the dangers of climate change. He said the city is taking precautions like raising the pumps at a wastewater treatment plant in the Rockaways and building the Willets Point development in Queens on six feet of landfill. The goal is to manage the risk from 100-year storms – one of the most severe. The mayor’s report says by the end of this century, 100-year storms could start arriving every 15 to 35 years.
Klaus Jacob, a Columbia University research scientist who specializes in disaster risk management, said that estimate may be too conservative. “What is now the impact of a 100-year storm will be, by the end of this century, roughly a 10-year storm,” he warned.
Back on the waterfront, Bowman offered what he said is a suitably outsized solution to this existential threat: storm surge barriers.
They would rise from the waters at Throgs Neck, where Long Island Sound and the East River meet, and at the opening to the lower harbor between the Rockaways and Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Like the barriers on the Thames River that protect London, they would stay open most of the time to let ships pass but close to protect the city during hurricanes and severe storms. (SEE IMAGE BELOW)
The structures at their highest points would be 30 feet above the harbor surface. Preliminary engineering studies put the cost at around $11 billion.
Jacob suggested a different but equally drastic approach. He said sea level rise may force New Yorkers to pull back from vulnerable neighborhoods. “We will have to densify the high-lying areas and use the low-lying areas as parks and buffer zones,” he said.
In this scenario, New York in 200 years looks like Venice. Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have melted ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica and raised our local sea level by six to eight feet. Inundating storms at certain times of year swell the harbor until it spills into the streets. Dozens of skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan have been sealed at the base and entrances added to higher floors. The streets of the financial district have become canals.
“You may have to build bridges or get Venice gondolas or your little speed boats ferrying yourself up to those buildings,” Jacob said.
David Bragdon is not comfortable with such scenarios. He’d rather talk about the concrete steps he’s taking now, like updating the city’s flood evacuation plan to show more neighborhoods at risk. That would help the people living in them be better prepared to evacuate.
He said it's too soon to contemplate the "extreme" step of moving "two, three, four hundred thousand people out of areas they’ve occupied for generations," and disinvesting "literally billions of dollars of infrastructure in those areas." On the other hand: "Another extreme would be to hide our heads in the sand and say, ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’”
Bragdon said he doesn't think New Yorkers of the future will have to retreat very far from shore, if at all, but he’s not sure. And he would neither commit to storm surge barriers nor eliminate them as an option. He said what’s needed is more study—and that he’ll have further details in April, when the city updates PlaNYC.
Jacob warned that in preparing for disaster, no matter how far off, there's a gulf between study and action. "There’s a good intent," he said of New York's climate change planning to date. "But, you know, mother nature doesn’t care about intent. Mother nature wants to see resiliency. And that is questionable, whether we have that.”
Comments [16]
Excellent work, excellent article. Let me write a couple of words on social & legal context
So if an island nation is submerged beneath the ocean, does it maintain its membership in the United Nations? Who is responsible for the citizens? Do they travel on its passport? Who claims and enforces offshore mineral and fishing rights in waters around a submerged nation? International law currently has no answers to such questions.
United Nations Ambassador Phillip Muller of the Marshall Islands said there is no sense of urgency to find not only those answers, but also to address the causes of climate change, which many believe to be responsible for rising ocean levels.
“Even if we reach a legal agreement sometime soon, which I don’t think we will, the major players are not in the process,” Muller said.
Those players, the participants said, include industrial nations such as the United States and China that emit the most carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases. Many climate scientists say those gases are responsible for global warming. Mary-Elena Carr of Columbia University’s Earth Institute said what is now an annual sea level rise of a few millimeters will increase dramatically by the year 2100. “The biggest challenge is to preserve their nationality without a territory,” said Bogumil Terminski from Geneva. International legal experts are discovering climate change law, and the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu is a case in point: The Polynesian archipelago is doomed to disappear beneath the ocean. Now lawyers are asking what sort of rights citizens have when their homeland no longer exists.
t present, however, there appear to be at least three possibilities that could advance the international debate about ‘climate refugee’ protections and fill existing gaps in international law.
The first option is to revise the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees to include climate (or environmental) refugees and to offer legal protections similar to those for refugees fleeing political persecution. A second, more ambitious option is to negotiate a completely new convention, one that would try to guarantee specific rights and protections to climate or environmental ‘refugees`.
The NOAA sea level record from the Battery shows the rate of increase relatively flat at 0.91 feet per century.
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8518750%20The%20Battery,%20NY
Thank you for publishing this article. It is an important topic and deserves to be taken seriously whether one 'believes' in sea level rise or not. As someone who is not an oceanographer and not a climatologist I look carefully at the credentials of the individuals and institutions responsible for the various reports and make a decision as to whether to trust them or not. I pay more attention to these sorts of credentials than I do to the engineers who make the car I drive or the Airplane I use.
So, as a layperson, I have to take this information on trust. Which leads us to the situation of having to decide what is prudent, what the risk is of being either right or wrong. On the evidence, it would seem prudent and good risk management to think of what has to be done to reduce damage to lives and property on the coastline - and to act on it.
A good reason for thnking of this now rather than later is that it will probably take 20 or 30 years to get the infrastructure in place, whatever the particular physical solution may be. That has been the experience of Britain and the Netherlands who took that long to respond to the floods of 1953; and it is the experience of most large infrastructure projects in the US to take that long from conception to completion.
BTW, sea-level rise is also highly affected by coastal geography and the underlying geometry of the ocean floor. It's effect can be strongly locally enhanced, so it is already a problem in some nearby locations:
http://www.easthamptonstar.com/dnn/Archive/Home20110127/News/TheTidesofChangeinMontauk/tabid/14157/Default.aspx
Anthony Watts is a college-dropout radio weatherman who has never published anything in climate, and who advertises himself as an 'AMS Seal Member'....except that his 'seal' is from a certification the AMS stopped doing more than a decade ago. He has no current AMS certifications.
Posting anything from him as 'evidence' is like posting Dinosaur Murals from the Creationist Museum as evidence against evolution.
What,Gondolas in NYC? certainly more objective scientific details needed to conclude the likely rise to such level.
Of the many scientific sources one could cite about sea level and climate change, this is from page 9 of a report by the New York City Panel on Climate Change:
SEA LEVEL RISE
Prior to the industrial revolution, sea level had been
rising along the East Cost of the United States at
rates of 0.34 to 0.43 inches per decade, primarily
because of regional subsidence as the Earth’s crust
still slowly re-adjusts to the melting of the ice sheets
since the end of the last ice age. Within the past 100
to 150 years however, as global temperatures have
increased, regional sea level has been rising more
rapidly than over the last thousand years (Gehrels,
et al., 2005; Donnelly et al., 2004; Holgate and
Woodworth, 2004).
Currently, rates of sea level rise in New York City
range between 0.86 and 1.5 inches per decade, with
a long-term rate since 1900 averaging 1.2 inches/
decade, as seen in Figure 2. The sea level rise rates
shown in Figure 2, measured by tide gauges, include
both the effects of recent global warming and the
residual crustal adjustments to the removal of the
ice sheets.
Most of the observed current climate-related rise
in sea level over the past century can be attributed
to expansion of the oceans as they warm, although
melting of land-based ice may become the dominant
contributor to sea level rise during the 21st century.
For a PDF of the full report:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/om/pdf/2009 /NPCC_CRI.pdf
Christian Soderberg, nature does not make its own rules. Nature obeys the laws of physics, they are literally universal.
The science is not science fiction and the solutions are not expensive. Far less expensive than not doing anything.
Natural forces, like earthquakes, hurricanes, etc. cannot really be anticipated with expertise. Nature makes its own rules because there are infinite and minute causes many of which we are not aware exist. Preparation is good but too expensive for our eceonomy which is just 'getting by' with current costs. I predict that we will do very little to prepare for possible future catastrophes. We will talk, waste a little money in planning, and then really just wait to see what happens. We will contain each catastrophic problem as it arises. People will die, real estate values will decline, and stop-gap methods will be quickly called upon. Then after we have really seen what is needed we may spend the big money and confront the problem. In the meantime, just live as if these scientific forecasts are nothing more than science fiction.
'Insanity' the ARGO floats (from which your graph cherry picks data) show sea levels that include changes due to salinity, not just thermal expansion and ice melt from land based ice.
Hence on their own the ARGO floats will give a false impression of sea levels.
If you check the ARGO site, it will tell you how to obtain true sea level data (steric sea levels+ocean mass).
So in future as well as avoiding cherry picking data, I suggest you leave the science to scientists and stick to the day job (assuming you have one!).
'Insanity' the ARGO floats (from which your graph cherry picks data) show sea levels that include changes due to salinity, not just thermal expansion and ice melt from land based ice.
Hence on their own the ARGO floats will give a false impression of sea levels.
If you check the ARGO site, it will tell you how to obtain true sea level data (steric sea levels+ocean mass).
So in future as well as avoiding cherry picking data, I suggest you leave the science to scientists and stick to the day job (assuming you have one!).
Erm, CO2 insanity.
I think you need to make up your mind.
In one post you reference Anthony Watts who AFAIK isn't suggesting sea levels will be going down any time soon.
Then you post a dodgy link to a graph on a dead blog that has limited data and shows levels going down over a very short period.
If you are trying to prove something, the only thing you are proving is your lack of knowledge and that you have no consistent ideas. That implies you are only interested in misleading and confusing people, rather than understanding what is going on.
Please prove your unprovable global warming theory first, before scaring people and asking people to stop exhaling.
Nice try but here's your sea-level rise. Oh my! Seems it's going the wrong direction - down!
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_nOY5jaKJXHM/S3xTTpWSGjI/AAAAAAAAAyk/lWAqvOnb72Q/s1600-h/Fullscreen+capture+2172010+122234+PM.jpg
Well, the problem with the WattsUp article is that he assumes a linear rise in sea levels.
That is incorrect because of the feedback mechanisms would accelerate the rate.
This article specifies 200 years, which seems like a reasonable time period given the accelerated rates caused by feedback mechanisms.
He also is joking about buildings remaining standing. Maybe he would prefer just ruins underwater instead??
That would be more realistic.
Everyone who reads this should go to this link for a rebuttal.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/28/freaking-out-about-nyc-sea-level-rise-is-easy-to-do-when-you-dont-pay-attention-to-history/
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