Friday Funny – sea level rise is “set to flood UN headquarters as soon as 2100” – another self-immolation by Zoë Schlanger

While we can only hope this is true, and hopefully the flood will finally get the U.N. out of the U.S., the reality is much different.

From this article at QZ back in September, which I missed.

Sea level rise will flood the neighborhood around the UN building with two degrees warming

Leaders are gathering at the United Nations headquarters in New York City this week, where a set of climate change meetings will take place alongside the United Nations General Assembly. While they discuss ways to prevent the worst effects of climate change, the neighborhoods around the UN face a very real threat: Sea level rise is set to flood the immediate area, possibly as soon as 2100.

Right now, of every US city, New York City has the highest population living inside a floodplain. By 2100, seas could rise around around the city by as much as six feet. Extreme rainfall is also predicted to rise, with roughly 1½ times more major precipitation events per year by the 2080s, according to a 2015 report by a group of scientists known as the New York City Panel on Climate Change.

But a two-degree warming scenario, which the world is on track to hit, could lock in dramatic sea level rise—possibly as much as 15 feet. Whether it will take 100 years or longer for the total extent of the sea level rise to play out is unknown, as the rate of ice melt at the poles is harder to predict than the amount of ice that can melt with a specific amount of warming.

This model projection photo is provided with the article:

The article was written by one Zoë Schlanger who in my opinion, isn’t capable of writing about climate honestly – mainly because she willfully ignores facts that are plainly evident to anyone with a a shred of journalistic curiosity.

WUWT readers may recall I wrote this article about her journalistic failures: The journalistic self-immolation of Newsweek’s Zoë Schlanger

So in this QZ article, she willfully ignores the sea level data that is publicly available from NOAA:

The relative sea level trend is 2.85 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence
interval of +/- 0.09 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from
1856 to 2018 which is equivalent to a change of 0.94 feet in 100 years.

Note that the trend is steady, there’s no acceleration seen in the data.

NOAA calculates .94 feet rise in 100 years for the graph. Since we have 80 years left to 2100, we’ll calculate 0.94 feet x 80/100 = 0.752 feet or about 8 inches by 2100.

That’s a far cry from six feet by 2100.

But for people like Zoë who can’t handle graphs, a picture says a thousand words. Spot the sea-level rise over the last 100 years: