by Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That:

A recent New York Post (NYP) article, “Scary Map Reveals Major Coastal Cities Rapidly Sinking into Sea”, reports that a study from NASA claims that several major coastal cities are sinking at alarming rates due to a combination of land subsidence and rising sea levels. The NYP specifically mentions sea level problems in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities, suggesting that their problems are due to a combination of subsidence and rising seas, the latter exacerbated by climate change. The latter point is misleading. Land subsidence is a well-documented problem in some cities, largely driven by local human activities such as groundwater extraction, poor urban planning, and natural geological processes. Subsidence is not due to climate change. However, despite NASA’s claim, long-term sea-level rise trend data does not support claims that seas are rising at historically unusual rates. In fact, seas have been rising at a modest and steady rate for over a century, with no significant acceleration linked to human-caused emissions.