New York Response to Part 490 Sea-Level Rise Amendment Comments – Watts Up With That?

Roger Caiazza

This is an update to some articles that were published early in 2024 about the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) proposed Amendments to Part 490, Projected Sea Level Rise (Amendment).  Kip Hansen wrote a post entitled New York State Sea Level Rise:  Fantasy as Law.   A few days later Anthony Watts responded to a New York Post article by Carl Campanile with the headline: Sea levels around NYC could surge up to 13 inches in 2030s due to climate change: state study. I prepared comments which I summarized in a post.  In September 2024 DEC adopted the Amendment.  Surprising no one, their Assessment of Public Comments blew off all the concerns expressed.  

Part 490 Projected Sea-Level Rise

DEC’s Climate Change Regulatory Revisions webpage describes the Amendment to the regulation:

On September 22, 2014, the Community Risk and Resiliency Act was signed into law — Chapter 355 of the Laws of 2014 (CRRA). CRRA is intended to ensure that decisions regarding certain State permits and expenditures consider climate risk, including sea-level rise. Among other things, CRRA requires the Department of Environmental Conservation (Department) to adopt regulations establishing science-based State sea-level rise projections. Therefore, the Department proposed a new 6 NYCRR Part 490, Projected Sea-Level Rise (Part 490). Part 490 establishes projections of sea-level rise in three specified geographic regions over various time intervals, but does not impose any requirements on any entity. An amended Part 490 was adopted in September 2024 with no revisions to the draft released for public comment in January 2024.

Kip Hansen summarized New York sea level rise history and the DEC projections in detail in his post.  What you need to know here is that New York City’s sea level has been increasing 3 mm per year over 167 years.  Enough of that observed increase is caused by local subsidence so that the remainder is “very close to the standardly cited Global Sea Level Rise figure for the 20th Century of 1.7 or 1.8 mm/yr.  (opinions vary – see NOAA here.)”   Kip explains that the projected increases included in the Amendment” have not been seen in the decade since the 2014 update report and, based on the historical record, are extremely unlikely to be seen in the near future.” He points out that “all the projections, in the Amendment, in the NYSERDA 2014 report and in the NYS Climate Assessment require doubling and tripling of long-term sea-level rise rates in New York City.”

RCP8.5 Comments

Kip, Anthony, and I agree that the projections are flawed because the methodology estimates an unrealistically high projected sea-level dependent upon an impossible climate model scenario.  Depending upon which version of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report being used the modeling scenarios are known either as a Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) or Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSP).  The RCP-8.5 scenario has been debunked by many as Anthony reported here and here.  My comments focused on the misuse of RCP-8.5 using some of those references and adding others. 

The Amendment revises the projections of future sea-level rise required by New York regulations. 

I raised the RCP-8.5 concerns in the pre-proposal draft of the amendment.  The Regulatory Impact Statement (RIS) uses the label SSP5-8.5 for this scenario and admits that those emission scenarios are implausible:

The Department acknowledges that current GHG emissions policies would result in actual emissions lower than projected by SSP5-8.5. Thus, the inclusion of higher projections of sea level rise, especially those based on SSP5-8.5, could lead to consideration of conditions that are unlikely to occur, at least in the more immediate future.

So how did DEC justify the continued use of SSP5-8.5?  The RIS goes to considerable lengths to justify its use with statements like the following: “Unfortunately, current literature does not provide a basis for assessment of the emissions levels at which ice shelf and marine ice cliff instability, important factors in sea level rise in high emissions scenarios, such as SSP5-8.5, become significant.” 

Response to RCP8.5 Comments

DEC is required to respond to submitted comments.  The Assessment of Public Comments document addressed my arguments in their response to Comment 6.  They summarized my concerns saying that “SSP5-8.5 is not plausible, and model outputs based on this SSP, including the rapid ice melt scenario, should not be included in the projections.”   The reply stated:

Response to Comment 6: DEC has described its rationale for including SSP5-8.5 model outputs in its projections, including the rapid ice melt scenario, in the RIS. To summarize here, the emission-reduction gap noted above, uncertainties in the causal chain to sea level heights, including ice cliff and ice shelf stability, and reports of accelerating Antarctic and Greenland ice loss reduce confidence that SLR will be limited to the levels projected by SSP2-4.5 models.  The CIA methodology report (p. 21) provides additional rationale for including projections based on SSP5-8.5:

• Continuity with previous New York State projections, which were based on representative concentration pathways with the same end-of-century radiative forcing.

• Stakeholder interest in these projections, based on CIA Needs Assessment.

• Value of identifying a broad range of plausible outcomes.

• Current climate impact models’ underestimation of plausible outcomes when driven by only moderate GHG forcing.

DEC maintains that inclusion of high, albeit unlikely, projections to enable consideration of the consequences of low-probability but high-consequence events to be the more prudent alternative to limiting projections to those based on SSP2-4.5.

The crux of my disagreement is the value of incorporating what is essentially an impossible scenario.  All the reasons cited attempt to justify what is essentially an executive decision to perpetuate the narrative that there is an existential threat of climate change exemplified, in this case, by extraordinary sea-level rise projections. 

It is telling that the response claims that the extreme projections are included because of “Stakeholder interest in these projections, based on CIA Needs Assessment.”  New York State agencies love to claim that they have a robust stakeholder process.  However, the stakeholder process operates with a loaded deck.  The New York Research & Development Authority (NYSEDA) CIA Needs Assessment Steering Committee is a relevant example.  The report states “The assessment has been guided by a Steering Committee of climate scientists, assessment experts, and representatives from nonprofit organizations and state and municipal government agencies.”  I am very critical of the review process because I know that there is immense pressure to adhere to the narrative within NYSERDA and I am sure no one skeptical of the extreme impact narrative was allowed anywhere near the Steering Committee. In addition, technical analyses performed for NYSERDA will not be funded in the future if the answers do not support the narrative.

Another reason given for using the impossible scenario is the “value of identifying broad outcomes”.  In this instance I think the value is primarily for the “scare the bejesus out of the populace” narrative needed to perpetuate the story that New York politicians are here to save the planet even in the face of increasingly obvious enormous costs, threats to reliability, and inevitable reduction in personal choice.  This will only stop when there is a change in the political balance of New York.

Conclusion

Surprising no one, their Assessment of Public Comments blew off our concerns.  There is no reasonable defense for using RCP-8.5.  As long as New York State continues to claim they follow the science but ignore it when it is inconvenient, the more likely the rush to the bottom will become a death spiral. 

Roger Caiazza blogs on New York energy and environmental issues at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York.  This represents his opinion and not the opinion of any of his previous employers or any other organization with which he has been associated.