I lived in New York for a few months back in 1992, at a time when the city still had grit in its teeth and didn’t smell like an overripe influencer. My apartment was near the Hudson, and I developed a habit of walking along the waterfront in the evenings, letting the city’s pulse seep into my bones. The walkway runs more or less level with West Street, and—according to James Hansen and his apocalyptic choir—that stretch should have been under water for almost two decades by now. Not two years. Not five. A full twenty.
And yet, if you stroll down there today, the water is exactly where it was three decades ago: obediently below the walkway, stubbornly refusing to follow the script. No Atlantean skyline, no gondolas down Wall Street. It seems the Big Apple has negotiated some kind of exclusive non-submersion clause with Poseidon.
Between 2008 and 2013, I spent quite a bit of time in Houston and along the southern Texas coast—a landscape so flat that if you spit in the Gulf, the water politely returns the favor. Down there, even the tiniest shifts in sea level are noticed immediately. And guess what? The old-timers, the ones who’ve watched the tides longer than climate models have existed, all said the same thing: no discernible change.The models, it turns out, are about as reliable as a doomsday cult calendar. Dump them. All of them.