The pattern of federal emergency spending reflects a deep-seated fear of ‘Big Government’ in the United States. The principal rationale offered by the sponsors of the Upton-Inhofe bill (apart from the belief that global warming is ‘a hoax’) is that any attempt by a federal agency to mitigate or avert damaging climate change represents a ‘power grab’ by Washington that must at all costs be resisted. The same deep-seated fear also prevailed in seventeenth-century England. Plague epidemics in 1603, 1625 and 1636 had killed tens of thousands of Londoners, and so it was easy to anticipate the probable impact should a new epidemic spread from Holland in 1665. Nevertheless, neither the City nor the national government took appropriate action. Instead, when plague struck, the king and his court, many magistrates and almost all the rich fled the capital. When Charles II convened Parliament to debate appropriate intervention, no legislation passed because the peers demanded an exemption from restrictive measures such as quarantine and insisted that no plague hospitals be erected near their homes. One may wonder why the central government did not act unilaterally to save its capital; but, as a contemporary pamphlet pointed out, ‘their power was limited and they must proceed legally’ – the rule of Oliver Cromwell and his army officers a decade before had left a bitter taste, and as King Charles put it, he was ‘too old to go again on my travels’ and would not risk alienating his subjects with unpopular actions. The consequences of government inaction were therefore measured in the corpses of plague victims dumped daily in mass graves. In all, the Great Plague killed 100,000 Londoners, one-quarter of the total population of the capital, plus 100,000 more people elsewhere in England.28
In the twenty-first century, as in the seventeenth, coping with catastrophes on this scale requires resources that only central governments command. The construction of the Thames Barrier in southeast England offers an instructive example. The river Thames has frequently burst its banks and flooded parts of London. In 1663 Samuel Pepys reported ‘the greatest tide that ever was remembered in England to have been in this river: all White Hall having been drowned’; and proposals to erect a barrier to prevent similar catastrophes began a century later – but the opposition of the London merchants, whose trade would suffer if ships could not sail up the Thames, and disagreements among competing jurisdictions over the cost, thwarted them all. Then in 1953 a tidal surge in the North Sea flooded some 150,000 acres of eastern England and drowned more than 300 people. A government minister assured the British House of Commons that ‘We have had a sharp lesson, and we shall have only ourselves to blame if we fail to profit from it’, and he set up a committee to propose remedies, which recommended the immediate construction in the Thames estuary of a ‘suitable structure, capable of being closed’. The government eventually considered two types of barrier but, once again pressure from shipping interests and cash-strapped local authorities prevented action.29
Then in 1966 a new government asked its Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor Hermann Bondi, to examine the matter afresh. A mathematician by training, Bondi devoted much attention to assessing risks; but he also consulted historical sources and found that the height of storm tides recorded at London Bridge had increased by more than three feet between 1791 (when records began) and 1953, and he predicted that this trend would continue. Bondi compared the risk of another storm tide with other risks, such as a meteorite falling on central London – which would also cause immense damage – but, he noted, the probability was very low and there was no way to take evasive action. By contrast, ‘a major surge flood in London would be a disaster of the singular and immense kind’; given the rising level of the North Sea, it was inevitable; and ‘It would be indeed a knock-out blow to the nerve centre of the country.’ Bondi therefore unequivocally recommended the construction of a Thames barrier, and although shipping interests and fragmented local government once again caused delay, in 1972 Parliament passed the Thames Barrier and Flood Protection Act, which authorized the project and promised to fund it. By 1982, when the barrier was complete, it had cost a stunning £534 million – but the value of the property it protects now exceeds £200 billion, including 40,000 commercial and industrial properties and 500,000 homes with 1¼ million residents. All would be inundated if another flood ‘drowned’ Whitehall, the heart of government now as in the time of Samuel Pepys, containing both Houses of Parliament and the offices where 87,000 members of the central administration work. It would also ‘drown’ the new Docklands economic development, and disable 16 hospitals, 8 power stations and many of the fire stations, police stations, shops and suppliers needed to repair and replace items damaged in the flood, as well as 200 miles of roads, 100 miles of railway, 51 rail stations and 35 Underground stations. Londoners would therefore lose not only their homes and jobs but also the essential means of response and recovery. In short, without the Thames Barrier, London would be like New Orleans in 2005: vulnerable to a natural disaster that, like Katrina, is sooner or later inevitable.30
Completion of the Thames barrier came just in time – it had to be activated 39 times between 1983 and 2000, and 75 times between 2001 and 2010 – and its success, combined with the increased frequency of extreme weather, has encouraged a more proactive attitude towards climate change on the part of the British government. The 2004 Report by its Chief Scientific Officer, summarizing the research of nearly 90 experts on the risks of flooding, expressed the choice with engaging simplicity: ‘We must either invest more in sustainable approaches to flood and coastal management or learn to live with increased flooding’.31 A similar choice exists for other climate-related risks (such as hurricanes), and indeed for other types of risks (such as the spread of diseases, perhaps accentuated by bio-terror or, for that matter, by ‘bio-error’): societies can either ‘pay to prepare’, and commit substantial resources now to avoid far greater costs later, or else ‘learn to live with increased’ risks.
Despite the many differences between the seventeenth and the twenty-first centuries, governments during the Little Ice Age faced the same dilemma – although some needed more reminders than others of the need to choose. In Japan, at one extreme, the famine, rural revolts and urban riots of the Kan'ei era sufficed to convince Tokugawa Iemitsu and his advisers of the need to create more granaries, to upgrade the communications infrastructure, to issue detailed economic legislation, and to avoid foreign wars in order to accumulate sufficient reserves to cope with the possible return of extreme weather. England took somewhat longer. Despite the subsistence crises of the 1590s, 1629–31 and 1647–9, only in the 1690s did property owners accept the central government's argument that, in the long run, it was economically cheaper and more efficient (as well as more humane) to support those who became old, widowed, ill, disabled or unemployed, thus creating the first ‘welfare state’ in the world. Other societies endured even more disasters before they reached the same conclusion that welfare formed an essential and necessary part of collective risk management; but by the nineteenth century the ‘welfare state’ had become a hallmark of all economically advanced states.
Climatic adversity is a great leveller, because the human population in advanced societies shares many of the needs of the human population elsewhere. ‘The hungry time’, the term used by the aboriginal people of western Australian for the season between the end of one annual cycle and the beginning of the next (see chapter 15), sounds relatively simple for groups of hunters in another hemisphere, but climate change can create a ‘hungry time’ for those living in even the most advanced societies. Of course, the total human population in the seventeenth century was far less than the three billion in 1950, let alone the seven billion today; but the geographical distribution of the present population is changing in ways that increase the resemblance between the world today and that of the seventeenth century. Thus in 1950 Europe had three times the population of Africa, but in 2012 the population of Africa is at least 50 per cent larger than that of Europe – a disparity that widens every year as the former grows and the latter decli
nes. This shift increases the percentage of the total population that spends a high proportion of its disposable income on basic needs such as food, energy and housing, often in areas where even central governments lack the effective means of dealing with big disasters, making them more vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Thus Hurricane Katrina in 2005 caused damage equivalent to 1 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product of the United States, but drought in 1999 caused damage equivalent to 16 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product of Kenya.
It is impossible to measure the human suffering caused by natural disasters. We cannot compare the misery of the women who went to the New Orleans Convention Center in 2005, expecting to find food, water, medical care and shelter in the aftermath of Katrina, but were instead raped, robbed and left to die, with the Australian women who starved as they watched their children die of hunger during an unusually long ‘hungry time’; or with the poor women of Shanghai who found in 1642 that ‘the only currency that could buy rice was children’, and that the price of enough rice to feed one person for a week ‘was two children’. Nor can we measure the true human cost of any of these catastrophes via some sort of ‘body count’. Although some contemporaries speculated that ‘a third of the world’ died in the mid-seventeenth century, and although the surviving data confirm that some communities lost up to half of their populations, while others disappeared altogether, it is impossible to calculate a world-wide total. Certainly, the Global Crisis ended prematurely the lives of millions of people, just as a natural catastrophe of similar proportions today would end prematurely the lives of billions of people.
Historians who prophesy rarely receive much attention from their colleagues (or anyone else), and those who prophesy doom (whether or not they are historians) are normally dismissed as ‘whiners’ – Hoggidiani, to use the dismissive phrase in Secondo Lancellotti's book Nowadays. Yet the Hoggidiani are not always wrong. Some natural disasters occur so suddenly that, without advanced preparation, no escape is possible. George Gordon, Lord Byron, discovered this in 1816. He fled England to escape accusations of incest, adultery, wife-beating and sodomy, planning to spend a pleasant summer in a villa near Lake Geneva with a former mistress, his personal physician (and, perhaps, catamite) John Polidori, and a select group of close friends. Instead, the party spent a ‘wet, ungenial summer’ (Switzerland was one of the areas worst affected by global cooling), which forced Byron and his companions to spend almost all their time indoors. Among other recreations, they competed to see who could compose the most frightening story. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley began work on Frankenstein, one of the first horror novels to become a best-seller, while Polidori wrote The Vampyre, the progenitor of the ‘Dracula’ genre of fiction. Byron himself composed a poem which he called ‘Darkness’. All three works reflect the disorientation and desperation that even a few weeks of abrupt climate change can cause. Since the question today is not whether climate change will strike some part of our planet again, but when, we might re-read Byron's poem as we choose whether it is better to invest more resources in preparation today or live with the consequences of inaction tormorrow. After all, unlike our ancestors in 1816, and in the seventeenth century, we possess both the resources and the technology to make that choice.
Darkness by Lord Byron
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless; and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.
Morn came and went – and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires – and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings – the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum'd,
And men were gather'd round their blazing homes…
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again: a meal was bought
With blood, and each sat sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left.
All earth was but one thought – and that was death
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails…
Chronology of the leading events of the Global Crisis, 1618–88
Year Europe Americas Asia & Africa X = El Niño
VEI = Major volcanic eruptions
** = Extreme climatic events Year
1618 Bohemian Revolt; purges in Dutch Republic; deposition of Ottoman Sultan Mustafa Manchu leader Nurhaci declares war on Ming and invades Liaodong X
Three comets; Sunspot minimum 1618
1619 X 1619
1620 Ottoman-Polish war → 1621
War spreads to Germany → 1648 **
X 1620
1621 Spanish–Dutch war resumes (→ 1648); ‘Kipper- und Wipper’ period (→ 1623) X 1621
1622 Ottoman regicide Revolt of Shah Jahan against Jahangir; revolt of Abaza Mehmet Pasha → 1628 V4 1622
1623 Deposition of Ottoman Sultan Mustafa (again) 1623
1624 Danes invade Germany → 1629 Revolt against Viceroy in Mexico; Dutch seize Salvador → 1625 Donglin crisis in China; Ottoman war with Iran → 1639 1624
1625 Act of Revocation (Scotland); Cossack revolt; French Huguenot revolt → 1629 V5; Sunspot maximum 1625
1626 Revolt in Upper Austria 1626
1627 Manchus raid Korea 1627
1628 War of Mantua begins → 1631 Gujarat famine → 1631 ** Year without a summer 1628
1629 Edict of Restitution (Germany) Manchus raid North China 1629
1630 Plague in Italy; Cossack revolt; Swedes invade Germany → 1648/1654 Dutch capture Pernambuco → 1654 X
**
V5, V4 1630
1631 Rioting in Istanbul; Kadizadeli movement gathers strength V5 1631
1632 Russo-Polish war → 1634 1632
1633 1633
1634 Bandit armies invade Jiangnan 1634
1635 France declares war on Spain → 1659 X
** 1635
1636 Croquants revolt (France) Revolt in Lower Austria Hong Taiji proclaims Qing dynasty, raids North China and invades Korea 1636
1637 Cossack revolt → 1638; Scottish Revolution → 1651
Évora & S. Portugal revolt → 1638 Pequot war (New England) Revolt at Shimabara, Japan → 1638 1637
1638 V4
X 1638
1639 Nu-Pieds revolt (Normandy) Chinese (Sangleys) revolt in Manila X 1639
1640 Catalan revolt → 1659
Portugal declares independence: war with Spain → 1668 ‘Beaver Wars’ around Great Lakes **
two V4 & one V5 1640
1641 Irish rebellion → 1653
Conspiracy of Medina Sidonia (Andalusia) ‘Panic in the Indies’ revolt of Portuguese Asia → 1668; Dutch capture Angola X
**
one V4 & one V5 1641
1642 English Civil War → 1646 Qing raid North China; Li Zicheng destroys Kaifeng X 1642
1643 Sweden invades Denmark → 1645 Li Zicheng declares Shun era 1643
1644 Li Zicheng takes and loses Beijing; Qing invade China, capture Beijing and occupy Central Plain Weakest monsoon recorded in East Asia 1644
1645 Turco-Venetian war → 1669 Portuguese colonists in Brazil rebel → 1654 Qing invade South China; ‘Southern Ming’ resistance → 1662 Prolonged sunspot minimum (Maunder Minimum) begins → 1715 1645
1646 Macao revolt V4
X 1646
1647 Naples revolt → 1648
Sicily revolt → 1648
‘Putney debates’ (England) ** 1647
1648 Fronde → 1653
Ukraine revolt → 1668
Híjar conspiracy (Madrid)
Ottoman regicide and revolt
Russian revolts → 1649
Second Civil War in England and Scotland
Succession crisis in Denmark Portuguese retake
Angola **
X 1648
1649 English regicide; the ‘Rump’
English army begins conquest of Ireland 1649
1650 Dutch regime change → 1672
Swedish crisis
England invades and occupies Scotland → 1660 V4, V5
X 1650
1651 Bordeaux Ormée → 1653
Istanbul riots; murder of Valide Sultan Yui conspiracy in Edo X 1651
1652 ‘Green Banner’ revolts in Andalusia Colombo revolt X 1652
1653 Swiss Revolution
Fall of ‘Rump’ in England Goa revolt 1653
1654 Russo-Polish war → 1667
Last Swedish troops leave central Germany 1654
1655 Sweden invades Poland → 1661 V4 1655
1656 Istanbul riots 1656
1657 Revolt of Abaza Hasan Pasha → 1659 1657
1658 Sweden invades Denmark Mughal Civil War → 1662 *** 1658
1659 English Republic restored; Spain and France make peace Cape Colony at war → 1660 X 1659
1660 The ‘Danish Revolution’; ‘Restoration’ in Scotland, Ireland and England V6, Three V4
X 1660
1661 Qing order evacuation of all maritime areas → 1683 X 1661
1662 Moscow rebellion Execution of last Ming claimant to Chinese throne 1662
1663 Ottoman-Habsburg war → 1664 V5 1663
1664 Comet 1664
1665 Portuguese and allies destroy Kongo; Shabbatai Zvi declared Messiah Comet
X 1665
1666 Revolt of Laicacota (Peru) 1666
1667 Russia and Poland make peace; French war against Spain → 1668 V5 1667
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