From the “more proof Walmart is evil” department, comes this bit of serendipity. While looking for a marine deep cycle battery to serve as storage for a solar powered remote weather station and webcam I’m designing, this turned up in the Walmart product search:

Intrigued by the photo, since I had never seen it before, and because it showed a clear view of the sea at Battery Park from the early years of aviation, I set about trying to find the source of it. Usually, photos that are for sale tend to be well protected so that hi-res versions don’t make it onto the net. To my complete surprise, not only did I find the source, but also a high-res version. To my even bigger surprise, it turned out to be in NOAA’s public domain photo collection.

The source:

A flying boat cruising by Battery Park at the south end of Manhattan Island. In: “Flug Und Wolken”, Manfred Curry, Verlag F. Bruckmann, Munchen, 1932.

Image ID: line0987, NOAA’s America’s Coastlines Collection

Location: New York City

Photo Date: 1930 Circa

Credit: Fairchild Aerial Surveys Inc.

Category: Coastline/Mid-Atlantic New York/Historical/

And here is the hi-res version:

Click to enlarge (BTW, since this is public domain, save and print it yourself if you like it. COSTCO offers print services, as Dr. Mike Mann found out) – Anthony_

Available at: http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/htmls/line0987.htm

(Update: Michael Ozanne writes in comments:

That’s the Dornier Do-X , the biggest plane in the world of its day and one of the worst aeronautical engineering exploits in history. Famous for its mishap ridden marketing flight from Friedrichshafen to New York which ended up taking 9 months. Longer than it would probably take to swim it….. more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dornier_Do_X )

Note in the background, you can see what looks to be the Empire State Building (or possibly the Chrysler building) nearing completion. Empire state officially opened on May 1st, 1931. The Chrysler building May 20, 1930. That puts the photo above around 1930 to early 1931. (any readers that can help identify for sure, leave a comment please).

Now compare that photo to this one taken 80 years later in 2010 from Wikipedia with a nearly identical vantage point:

While there have been a lot of changes, most notably the mature trees now in Battery Park, one thing is clear – the city has not been inundated by sea level rise even though the NOAA Battery Park tide gauge indicates a rise of about 0.22 meter ( 8 3/4 inches):

Granted, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference in sea level from 1930 to 2010 just by looking at the two photos, but that’s the point, especially when we see idiotic stories like this one in National Geographic:

Story at: National Geographic’s Junk Science: How long will it take for sea level rise to reach midway up the Statue of Liberty?

Or this one of La Guardia airport by Climate Central’s Andrew Freedman, which is the all-time dumbest in my opinion, since I’m pretty sure sea level rise can’t catch airplanes:

What La Guardia Airport could look like with 5 feet of sea level rise, an amount that could occur by 2100, according to some estimates. Click on the image to enlarge. Credit: Nickolay Lamm/StorageFront , for Climate Central, using Climate Central data.

Story at: Quite possibly the dumbest example of ‘Tabloid Climatology’ ever from Climate Central’s Andrew Freedman

As always, I remind our readers:

Freaking out about NYC sea level rise is easy to do when you don’t pay attention to history

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