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Where are America’s Drowned Cities?
Global warming lengthens the growing season, and increases net rainfall worldwide. The enrichment of atmospheric carbon dioxide accelerates the rate of plant growth. These are all very positive developments, both for humanity and for wild nature. As a result of climate change, the Earth is becoming a more fertile planet. Nevertheless, representatives of the green movement call for the imposition of economically destructive — and highly regressive — carbon taxes, lest global warming result in catastrophic floods of coastal areas.
This assertion is problematic because global warming has been going on for four hundred years. We can know this with certainty, not from the doubtful claims of researchers who assert that they can measure average global temperatures to within a tenth of a degree, but from readily available historical accounts. Civil War buffs are familiar with the massive snowball fights engaged in by Confederate armies stationed as far south as Georgia, and everyone who has read Dickens encounters tales describing much more severe winter weather in mid-19th century London than anything we see today. If we read back further in time, we hear of a world that is much colder still, with the Thames freezing regularly, sometimes for months on end, during the 1600s.
The profound global warming of the past four centuries cannot be plausibly ascribed to anthropogenic causes, but it certainly has happened, and the greens cannot deny it. That being the case, the catastrophic effects predicted for global warming should now be apparent. In particular, many proud cities and towns that were thriving in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries should now be sleeping beneath the waves. It is time that the reality, or lack thereof, of such losses be assessed.
So let’s have a look. Several major American cities were founded during the 1600s. One of the first was Boston. As the seas have grown over the past four centuries, how much of the Puritans’ fabled “City on a Hill” has been lost to the rising tides?
The map above compares Boston’s coastline in 1630 with that of modern times and shows the inconvenient truth: None of colonial Boston has been lost. Far from it; the city’s coastline has expanded considerably.
The greens might argue that Boston is an anomaly, so let’s consider another city of colonial vintage which is very much in the news these days: New York. We have maps of Manhattan going back to Dutch times; do they report a different result?
No, they do not. Rather, what a series of maps starting with the Castello map of 1660 show is that, for the past four centuries, the Big Apple has been growing, not shrinking.
It is also apparent to the casual observer that other celebrated colonial cities, including Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston, are not underwater either.
But these are only the cities that we know about today. Maybe there were others, now lost to human memory — their records of existence having been erased by global warming deniers — whose ruins might still be found sunk in the gloomy darkness of the ocean’s bottom, far out from the ever retreating shore. This is, after all, what allegedly happened to the lost civilizations of Atlantis and Mu. Perhaps the greens might wish to make the case this happened to colonial America as well.
Personally, I’m skeptical. But this is a question of science. Either the drowned cities exist, or they don’t. If they do, then clearly everyone will have to take the warnings of those sounding the climate alarm seriously. But if they are not found, the green’s flood story will need to be rejected as a myth.
This being so, it is apparent that there can be no more important area of environmental research than the hunt for America’s vanished subsea civilization. Unless evidence for its prior existence can be produced, the central case for global warming catastrophe will lack proof. All environmentalist organizations need to stop whatever else they are doing, and refocus all their efforts and resources on the search.
Show us the lost cities, dear greens. Find the colonial American Atlantis. Don’t wait for summer. Start diving today. The fate of the planet could be at stake.
Published in Science & Technology
This argument has never made much sense to me. Throughout time, coastlines have always changed and people have adjusted. Given that, why wouldn’t we expect people to continue doing so? Why is the idea of things eventually looking/being different so scary?
Um, hold on a second. Boston’s coastline expansion was due to an enormous landfill project.
Ref:
And that was because low tide left a lot of unusable swampland with potential value.
Similar with San Francisco, and many other major cities.
The push to stem global warming is just a lefty conspiracy to deny inner city brown people beachfront property.
According to the NOAA, the sea level in Boston is rising at a rate of 11 inches per century:
Also, according to the NOAA the sea level of the Hudson Bay, a bit north, is dropping by over 3 feet per century:
So if these measurements are indicative of anything, and they may or may not be, a more accurate conclusion would be that stuff is moving around a bit.
The NOAA sea level charts are fascinating.
You want lost cities go to the coal fields of Appalachia . Thanks Barry.
So down in the north, up in the south. I can’t help but thinking there’s something gravitational about it.
Well stated, Mr. Zubrin, a unique expose on the apocalyptic “warmers”. Not that any rationality matters to them. The only thing they really want is more intrusive centralized control. Except, of course, for their scientists. They are far too busy drooling over the grant money to waste time with philosophy.
Does NOAA know about tides? Thought I should ask.
What these charts seem to be saying is that Boston is sinking and Hudson Bay is rising.
I suspect the increase in size of both Boston and New York City has more to do with landfill than with global climate changes. Anyone interested in the phenomena can do worse than reading The Ship that Held Up Wall Street.
I also suspect a little thing called the Little Ice Age – something taught when I attended school in the 1960s and 1970s, but since consigned to the memory hole because it does not fit the narrative – might have more to do with recent global warming than anything humans have done. Coming out of an ice age things, by definition, get warmer.
Seawriter
What all the data is saying is that, after 400 years of global warming,
There are No Drowned Cities.
Not Boston. Not New York. Not Venice. Not Constantinople.
Alas, for the True Believers, they are all still above water.
The carbon-benefit deniers can offer all the excuses they want for this reality, but their theory is counter-factual.
There is No Flood.
I was down in Norfolk the past weekend and my friend and guide remarked to me the church we were passing well inland used to be on the waterfront. It was through land filling and dredging that the shoreline expanded and was maintained. However, the areas would flood time to time with heavy rains.
The point is historical evidence shows a long trend of warming, some objective data like NOAA confirms rising water levels, and all the while human engineering and ingenuity have adapted to our ever changing world. So it is sea levels are rising and we still have more urban waterfront property. It does not seem so calamitous to me.
Those do not count. Coastal property is owned by RICH people so it must be protected, saved, enhanced. Poor people property, well who cares?
Oh don’t worry, they realized a while back that there’s no global warming, not on the apocalyptic scale they were shouting about. That’s why we’re now only supposed to say “Climate Change,” which covers everything. I remember in about 1990, Ted Danson (that well known scientist) said we have ten years! Ten years to DO SOMETHING before the planet turns into Atlantis. Hahahaha
And by the way, Al Gore’s magnum opus “An Inconvenient Truth” used a computer-generated scene of an iceberg shelf dramatically falling into the sea, supposedly as a result of Global Warming. The scene was actually from a sci-fi disaster movie called “The Day After Tomorrow,” which I have seen. I also saw an interview with the person who created the footage on a computer and who confirmed it was used in “An Inconvenient Truth.” Think a conservative film who’d done that would have won an Oscar? For “Documentary”? I don’t.
Has you considered that the mantle of the earth is still recoiling from the end of the glaciation of the last ice age?
But Algore is super serial!
Sure!
Boston tides look like this:
So we see that, while the ocean level rise is 11 inches per century, or less than 1/8 inch per year, the daily tidal changes often hit 10 feet.
I’m sure there are measurement issues.
Of course there are measurement issues. If the entire Boston Bay area is sinking say 11 inches per century, what do you use as a reference? Until you have a “universal” reference outside of the area such as GPS, any measurement of sea level would be relative to the measurement station(s) in Boston.
The standard alarmist attack is, “Maybe not for wealthy countries. But what about the flooding in Bangladesh?”
And the response to that is, “Bangladesh is the worlds largest river delta. The place is built on continuously moving silt. There has and always will always be flooding.”
Many times flooding is caused by man made interference. For example, the Mississippi river floods in the Midwest can be the result of channeling too much water in the levee system.
Every time it rains we are issued flood warnings in low lying areas, in other words the flood plain of rivers and streams. When will folks wake up and realize that those areas have always and will always flood after a hard rain? And when will they quit building in those flood plains? When the Federal taxpayers quit subsidizing their flood insurance.
When the opportunity for graft by not subsidizing flood insurance outweighs the opportunity for graft by subsidizing flood insurance.
Seawriter
You don’t help expose climate change for the utter fraud that it is by offering flawed evidence for such.
Much of Manhattan and Boston are built on landfill. On the other hand, this is almost beside the point since (1) climate change is supposed to accelerate sea level rise beyond its historical norm (the NOAA stats mentioned)–but hasn’t; (2) carbon reductions won’t reverse that rate.
Climate change is, and remains an unproven theory with much evidence to suggest it’s not happening and will never happen.
Subsidence on the Gulf Coast was cited as the main driver behind inundation down there, and suddenly we no longer care about saltwater infusion of wetlands, because we can’t use that to stick it to whitey.
Die, wetlands, die. You’re of more use dead to the WWF than alive.
The point is not that there are some parts of New York and Boston that are expanding. Some of that is indeed explainable by landfill activity. The point is that, after 400 years, there is no evidence for flooding of any parts of these, or many other, famous cities. It is simply untrue that all of our coastlines are being defended by land filling . Simply put, There is No Flood.
That then leaves us with the other effects of global warming, which include longer growing seasons, higher net global rainfall, and accelerated rates of plant growth.
The doomies had a much better case in the 1970s, when they were warning that continued industrial growth would lead to global cooling. While a false prediction, at least the consequence that they were warning about – global cooling- would have been bad. In contrast, global warming is good, a fact which makes the idea of putting chains on humanity in order to prevent it particularly absurd. Effectively, they want to condemn humanity for making the Earth a more pleasant and fertile planet.
But, as the Chinese saying goes: “Where there is a will to convict, evidence is never lacking.”
It is worth pointing out, but it will not change the debate. The Gaia cultists will simply insist that rising coastlines are Proof of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Or Anthropogenic Global Cooling. Or Anthropogenic Climate Change. Or Anthropogenic Whatever. (Make sure you pronounce the capital letters.)
Regardless it’s All Our Fault. Confess your sins against Mother Gaia and pay your indulgence or risk the Eternal Wrath of Gaia.
They are not interested in facts, anyway.
Seawriter
Once or twice a year for the past decade, NPR has aired feature stories from some coastal places, in which they talk a lot about “the rising seas.” Bangladesh, Mekong River Delta in South Vietnam, Burma, Nigeria, Brazil, China, etc., all have been featured, some more than once. The rising seas are causing problems for poor people in delta areas globally, and the NPR reporters repeatedly point to “the rising seas.”
What is actually happening is that these places are sinking. River deltas are formed by silts that started out as soil erosion many hundreds of miles upstream, and got deposited in the area where the river meets the ocean. Poor people build on islands in these areas in order to live off the fishing that is generally good in these areas.
As the green revolution continues, soil erosion is reduced. Less soil erosion means less silt carried downstream in the rivers. The delta islands do not get replenished by river floods as much as they formerly did. Without the new silts, the islands subside. These soils compact under their own weight, and the result is that they sink slowly into the sea.
This is a good news story if you understand what is going on, but NPR repeatedly reports it as poor people suffering from climate change forces that have been unleashed by greedy westerners living wasteful western lifestyles.
Shameful.
Easier.