President Obama warned of a submerged Manhattan without efforts to combat climate change during a fundraiser in New York City Wednesday night.
“[T]he majority of people believe in things like science — and scientists,” an official transcript of his remarks reads. “And so when scientists tell us that the planet is getting warmer and we need to do something about it, the majority of people think that’s a good idea, let’s do something about that, because we don’t want Manhattan to be underwater.”
Multiple organizations have sounded the alarm in recent years that rising sea levels will affect coastal cities worldwide. Based on U.S. Geological Survey and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data, The New York Times estimated that a five-foot increase, listed as “probable” in 100 to 300 years, would cause 7 percent of New York City to be flooded. The East River “starts to eat away at La Guardia Airport” at that point, the Times’s map predicts.
But Manhattan Institute senior fellow Jim Manzi, a critic of global warming unbelievers, has argued that data from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change implies that the real threat of global warming is “not one of averting a global disaster in which Manhattan becomes an underwater theme park.”
“Rather, climate change is likely to involve a modest risk that will have to be managed and a series of tradeoffs to be hotly debated,” he wrote last year.
