100 Scientifically Proven Reasons You Should Never Move To New York City

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Want to move to New York City? Pursue your dreams? Meet that oh so chic man or woman to have genius babies with while you get paid 200k a year to write about your relationship? Well, don’t bother. It’s Pennsylvania for you.

A new study by researchers at NASA and the University of California, Irvine, finds a rapidly melting section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appears to be in an irreversible state of decline, with nothing to stop the glaciers in this area from melting into the sea.

All told, a completely melted Western Antarctic Ice Sheet would add between 16 to 20 feet to sea levels, a level not seen for 125,000 years. And while that won’t be happening soon we can still expect circa 3 to 5 feet of sea level reason over the next 100 to 200 years. “Oh, that’s a while from now,” you say. Well no, it’s really not when you consider that it won’t be happening all at once.

Here’s what NYC will look like with a 5 foot rise. Jersey City is uuuuunhappy and Long Island will be freaking out.

Not devastating, right? No, it is, because the expense of retrofitting all the endangered areas will be astronomical. Some places will get more attention than others and so people will start to move, especially people on Long Island and in Jersey City. What’s more, by the time this occurs, sometime during your child and grandchild’s lifetime, it will be demonstrably clear that it is only going to continue to get worse. Expenditures by the city will only continue to grow, taxes will go up while the population and tax base go down. They’ll be living in a corpse. But believe it or not they’ll have it good. Here’s a list of cities that will be completely gone after 100-200 years.

1. New Orleans

At an 88% flood level you’ll be able to see the ocean from Interstate 12. We are all Lake Pontchartain now.

2. Atlantic City

With over half half of the city flooded (62%), casino owners will have long since abandoned the city due to crushing taxes and constant flood emergencies. America’s favorite playground will have been almost completely abandoned except for those who can’t afford to leave.

3. Miami Beach

Completely gone, 94% flooded. Miami won’t be doing much better. With 20% of the city flooded most Floridians will long since have moved into a then tightly packed center line in the middle of the state.

Those three are the big ones and they’re near term. You may well live to see much of this happen and your children (my children) will grow up in a vastly different world and in the next several hundred years almost every coastal city would be gone. South Florida will be an ocean and NYC will be completely underwater.

But hey, this is all just fan fiction so we don’t need to worry. After all, Wyoming has rejected science standards that teach anything about man-made global warming and so that won’t get taught to children living there. But that’s a good decision because it’s supported by both coal industry there and the opinion of Marco Rubio, Senator from Florida (soon to be known as the Great Southern Sea). It’s also supported by 70% of Tea Party members (Rubio’s constituency) who say that global warming isn’t really happening like scientists say it is at all. No, I mean they don’t even believe that thermometers are capable of measuring heat or that people are capable or writing that measurement down somewhere.

Neat. Yeah, so about Pennsylvania…

image – Justin Brown