Yet it’s not as if the more modest rise is without consequence. A sea-level rise of no more than a metre would displace up to a hundred million people in Bangladesh, Nigeria, China and Egypt alone and inundate much productive agricultural land.4 Interestingly, Florida and the Netherlands, with large populations living at or below sea level already, tend to be omitted from such round-ups, presumably because it is taken as read that they will be defended, for yes, prosperity protects even against the rising sea.
Sea-level rises are clearly felt most at the highest tides. It was a combination of high tides with unfavourable winds and atmospheric pressure that led to the disastrous coastal flooding in the Netherlands and East Anglia in 1953 and in Venice in 1966. This is a great help to the media, as news editors need equip themselves with nothing more than a tide table to work out when to run the story. The headlines can be used over and over. ‘Highest tides in 20 years threaten coast towns this weekend’ appeared in September 2006 in The Times, accompanied by a photograph of a man keeping ‘an eye on sea levels’ with the aid of a pair of binoculars.
Sea-level rise attributable to global warming is exacerbated in some populous parts of the world by the fact that the land is moving independently. Along the eastern seaboard of the United States and in south-east England, for example, the land is sinking at rates similar to those at which the sea is rising as land further north, once depressed by the weight of ice-age glaciers, seesaws upwards.
In such places bulldozers have been used to bank up protective shingle barriers. But these may be of little use. Astonishingly, each millimetre rise in sea level may push these barriers back by as much as a metre due to the complex workings of the processes of erosion.5 On exposed coasts, this means that the shoreline can be expected to retreat by a pictorially gratifying 3 or 4 metres a year. Add to this the prospect of higher waves and stormier storms as the side effects of global warming, and a few millimetres more of a calm sea has been transformed into a vindictive assault on our coasts.
It was King Canute’s subjects who demanded that he command the sea to stop rising. The king politely turned up on the beach and, having already said there was nothing he could do, proceeded to demonstrate his powerlessness before the tide. Today, people in coastal communities appeal not to monarchs but to governments. Having for decades adopted the position that existing coastlines are to be defended, however, governments are increasingly shifting towards a policy of strategic retreat or, more euphemistically, ‘managed realignment’. Major settlements will continue to be protected, but in some places, such as Wallasea Island in Essex, the sea is being admitted deliberately by breaching long-standing barriers. The aim is to sacrifice a coastal band of agricultural land to create a wide barrier of marsh which will offer a degree of natural flood protection. In some cases, the policy is defended not on economic grounds but because continuing to maintain the sea defence would cause wildlife habitat to be lost – cold comfort to the humans whose own habitat may be sacrificed in the process.
But for most of us, rising sea levels are the least of our worries among the effects of climate change. They affect relatively few people and are happening almost invisibly slowly, certainly far more slowly than the communities concerned are able to react. ‘Sea level rise is such a slow process that once started it’s almost impossible to reverse,’ warns Mark Lynas in High Tide.6 But his absurd nonsequitur gives the game away: there is nothing intrinsically unstoppable about something slow, indeed there is more time to stop it. Nevertheless, inexorability is an essential journalistic makeshift when things aren’t happening with catastrophic speed. In March 2006, the Baltimore Sun – sea levels are rising comparatively fast at just over 3 millimetres a year in Baltimore as along the rest of the US eastern seaboard – attempted to alarm its readers by reporting the words of a local professor in environmental science: ‘The seas are expected to rise slowly and steadily, but no one knows how soon or by how much.’
Indeed, scientific uncertainty is very high. The IPCC’s 2001 report anticipated that sea levels would rise by 49 centimetres by 2100, but this is the midpoint of a range between 9 and 88 centimetres, an order-of-magnitude variation in estimates. This reflects the simple lack of knowledge of all that happens in complex natural systems. It’s not clear yet, for example, whether the accelerating melting observed in the Arctic will be replicated in the Antarctic (which contains 90 per cent of the world’s ice). At the moment it is generally thought that the Antarctic is in fact helping to mitigate rising sea levels by receiving larger net snowfalls each year than it loses due to melting. Nor is it clear how surface and groundwater around the world fit into the picture. These uncertainties are why the IPCC’s 2001 predicted rise of 49 centimetres was in fact a reduction on the prediction of 54 centimetres in the IPCC’s previous report of 1996. The estimate was cut again, to 43 centimetres, in the IPCC’s most recent report in 2007, although some reputable studies published since the cut-off date for this report favour a significantly increased estimate of around 80 centimetres.7
We may not have taken the 20-centimetre rise during the twentieth century quite in our stride. It took the deaths of some 1,835 people in the Netherlands and 307 in Britain to prompt the launch of the Dutch Delta Works scheme of national flood defence and the construction of the Thames Barrier. But at least these so far adequate defensive measures were taken; the Venetians have yet to act to protect the Serenissima. This work will surely continue where it is feasible.
Meanwhile, populations that face more serious disruption are showing a good sense that evades the newspapers. The Tuvaluans have brokered a deal with New Zealand to resettle the country’s entire population. Other, safer, South Pacific islands have also offered refuge. Are the islanders scrambling to escape? Hardly. New Zealand offered a quota of 300 immigrants a year, which would see the entire population of 11,000 resettled in little more than a generation. The Tuvaluans have suggested a lower rate of seventy-five people per year so that essential social services may be maintained on the islands. The Tuvaluans are in effect hedging their bets, which seems only wise given the high uncertainties in calculating future sea levels.
The Maldives are even lower than Tuvalu and home to more than 300,000 souls. Here the strategy is to concentrate areas of population into defensible enclaves. ‘In Bangladesh the future has arrived,’ according to the country’s High Commissioner, Sabihuddin Ahmed.8 ‘Climate change will eventually threaten thirty to forty million lives [a quarter of the population] in Bangladesh. When these people’s homes and crops are flooded forever, where will they go?’ Where they go is indeed a serious issue, but there is time to plan. The timeframe over which sea levels are predicted to rise dangerously – in the Thames Gateway, the Netherlands polders, the Florida coast, and even in Bangladesh – is far greater than the duration of the typical housing policy or even the lifetime of some modern dwellings. The Netherlands needs no new technology to guard against sea-level rise. Scientists have estimated that spending $12 billion on raised earthworks and greater pumping over the century would be enough to deal with a 1-metre rise – that’s about £10 a year for each Dutch citizen. If Bangladeshis grow wealthier at the predicted global rate, they too will be able to afford to safeguard many homes, greatly reducing the numbers of those who will need to migrate by the time that the forecasts become a reality.
Go with the Flow
‘Risk of quakes adds spice to life’ San Francisco Chronicle
Around the world, hundreds of millions of people live with the daily risk of extermination by the Earth’s geophysical might – 500 million of them from volcanic eruption, 130 million as the result of earthquake, according to separate estimates (another – clearly incompatible – estimate puts 75 million Americans in thirty-nine states at significant risk from earthquake).1 Many millions more are within realistic striking distance of the tsunami that would follow a massive geological upheaval under the sea. These numbers are growing faster than the rate of increase in global population. Every year, u
p to 80 million people are added to the numbers at risk from some kind of natural disaster, according to the United Nations’ International Strategy for Disaster Reduction. It seems that we are choosing to live dangerously.
Even in these modern times, our violent planet has us in its thrall. Earthquake and especially volcano, with its visual sublimity, are two of the staple scenarios of the disaster movie. No hard sell is needed in order to inspire terror beyond the bare words – Earthquake came out in 1974, and Volcano in 1997. Tsunami followed in 2006.
For some, though, the cinema isn’t close enough. Volcano tourism is a growing business. Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii competes with Vanuatu, with holiday brochures advertising the world’s safest volcano. The volcanoes of Italy – Vesuvio, Etna, Stromboli – became essential stops for artists and writers on the Grand Tour. Today, thousands of tourists climb Etna’s slopes each year. Injuries and deaths are a regular occurrence. Nine people were killed in 1979, and another two in 1987, when they wandered too close to active vents, adding markedly to the rather modest total of fifty-five recorded lives lost due to Etna’s volcanic activity in all the preceding 3,500 years.
But these are mere teasers for the main event. Geological surveys indicate that there are about 500 known active volcanoes on land. Between them they are responsible for about sixty eruptions a year. Both the most violent and the most famous eruptions happened in the nineteenth century in Indonesia. The Tambora eruption of 1815 was the most powerful ever recorded, sending ash and gases into the atmosphere such that 1816 became known on the other side of the world as the year without a summer. Krakatoa famously destroyed an entire island in 1883. To these 500 may be added volcanoes under the sea about which much less is known, and the knowledge that volcanoes officially listed as dormant can explode back into life. The greatest likelihood of a human disaster today may come from a volcano that everybody considers to be harmless. Vesuvio was just such a volcano until its eruption in CE 79 took the lives of more than 3,000 inhabitants of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
The volcano has scarcely slept since. Worse still, according to The Times, ‘Vesuvius has been saving biggest bang for the future’. The report was based on archaeologists’ discoveries concerning not the eruption of CE 79 documented so colourfully by Pliny the Younger, but an even more powerful eruption known as the Avellino catastrophe which happened 2,000 years earlier. This eruption destroyed the Bronze Age settlement of Avellino but killed relatively few people. Paths found in the ash suggest that most managed to walk to safety.
Today, some 3 million people inhabit the area devastated by this eruption, which includes Naples, Pompeii, Ercolano and more than a dozen other towns. A fifth of them live in the ‘red zone’ on the lower slopes of the volcano, many in illegally built homes in the Vesuvio National Park. There might be enough warning of an eruption to allow for an orderly evacuation, but a sudden explosion would leave no time for all these people to escape, especially if, as was the case in 1983 at nearby Pozzuoli when residents feared that a small earthquake presaged a major eruption, they try to get away by car and get stuck in the traffic.
Mauna Loa on Hawaii, the world’s largest volcano, erupts on average every ten years or so, but has not done so since 1984, leading to speculation that a big eruption is overdue, especially when seismic activity increased in 2002 and 2004. The major town of Hilo, the tourist coast and new housing on the volcano’s slopes are all within four hours, and in some places just minutes, of being overwhelmed by lava. There is only one road out of the danger area, and, if that were cut off, there would be no means of evacuation other than by helicopter, which would be dangerous and slow. Nevertheless, land is cheap and building is legal, although discouraged by measures such as the withholding by the state government of utility services. The United States Geological Survey estimates that there has been more than $2 billion worth of construction since the eruption in 1984.
The mentality is the same in earthquake zones. ‘Risk of quakes adds spice to life’, headlined the San Francisco Chronicle, writing on the centenary of the earthquake and fire that claimed 3,000 lives in the city in 1906. Given a relatively gentle reminder of the ever-present danger in 1989 ($10 billion of damage, sixty-three killed), San Francisco has invested heavily in its infrastructure, but there remains a severe risk especially to housing from even a moderate quake. Less than one person in seven has earthquake insurance, according to the Financial Times. ‘Most owners are simply trying to ignore the danger.’ As at Mauna Loa, government interference – banning building or making insurance mandatory – would be seen as an infringement of liberty.
Reading this in New York or Paris or Berlin, you might puzzle at these people’s fatalism while quietly congratulating yourself on living somewhere sensible. But you don’t have to live along a major fault line for the press to give you the quivers. ‘London could face quake of LA scale, say geologists’, the Sunday Times reported in 1996. ‘Britain “due a big earthquake” ’, the Financial Times echoed a few years later. But ‘big’ turns out to be relative – in the geological backwater of the British Isles it means a quake like the one in 1580 in which, it was said, ‘two people were killed by falling masonry’.
Londoners do not much fear an earthquake as they go about their daily business, but then nor do San Franciscans or Angelenos. Why not? For many, the lifestyle benefits outweigh the risk. For others, economic necessity forces the gamble with nature. Plots of building land on the barren slopes of Mauna Loa have been advertised on the internet for as little as $400. Between major events, people believe that earthquakes and volcanoes are less of a danger than they are in fact, and a bargain is hard to resist.
What changes when the big one strikes? Does a rational reappraisal of the danger take the place of ignorance and denial? Is fatalism banished – or strengthened?
In 1995, the first known eruption of the Soufrière Hills volcano on the Caribbean island of Montserrat destroyed half the island, including its capital, Plymouth, and killed nineteen people. A decade later, more than £200 million has been spent redeveloping the island, but few of the 8,000 who left after the eruption – two-thirds of the population – have returned. A survey for the British Department for International Development found that, although most of the Montserratians who came to Britain ‘might return home, hardly any are making active plans to do so’.2 It is less the risk of another volcanic eruption that puts them off than the uncertainty of finding a home and a job.
The 1995 earthquake in Kobe claimed more than 6,000 lives and did $250 billion worth of damage, but it also awakened the Japanese generally to the truth that their buildings were not as earthquake-proof as they had been led to believe. How to prevent a recurrence was made obvious by studying the pattern of the damage. As is generally true in earthquakes, most of those who died were crushed by collapsing buildings. It was duly found that nearly all of these buildings had been put up before 1981, when building regulations were toughened. Rebuilt according to the new codes, Kobe at least should be far better equipped to withstand another earthquake of the same intensity.
But what of the capital, Tokyo, which, according to the Financial Times, ‘is overdue a potentially enormous earthquake’? Since Kobe, the Japanese have greatly increased the number of seismic monitors to provide better warnings. But, according to Bill McGuire, the professor of geophysical hazards at University College London, ‘nobody has ever accurately predicted an earthquake there’.3 Although new buildings conform to the latest standards, older ones do not. McGuire estimates the cost of a quake may be more than $3 trillion to rebuild and 60,000 dead – grim, but less than half the toll of the last major Tokyo quake in 1923. Tokyo city authorities have also improved procedures for managing a disaster, but there is nevertheless a recognition, reinforced by experience at Kobe, where it was not rescue teams but simply people at the scene who saved most lives, that people ‘ultimately have to be responsible for themselves’.4
Planning for catastrophic events that might hap
pen at any time is not straightforward. A general warning may have no effect, while a specific warning can only be given on the strength of a firm prediction, which is often impossible to make. The massive eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 was predicted and an evacuation successfully accomplished, saving thousands of lives. It is not insignificant that there was an American air force base in the affected zone.
When the Colombian Nevado del Ruiz erupted in 1985, by contrast, 25,000 died because the local agencies failed to act despite informed predictions in the month preceding the event. Those living near by had not associated the volcano with any danger partly because it is hidden from view behind other mountains. No evacuation was organized perhaps for fear of a backlash if no eruption came. The Ecuadorian volcano Tungurahua is one of the world’s most active at the time of writing. An eruption in August 2006 destroyed villages and left one person dead and sixty missing. In this case, the area had been evacuated the previous month, but people had returned to their homes.
The Naples area authorities are trying to persuade red-zone residents to move out with inducements of €30,000 per household, rather than depend on an evacuation plan that would struggle to cope with a mass exodus. But if the experience at Pozzuoli is anything to go by, people might calculate that it is better to stay put and then demand the government build them a new town after the disaster. The regional president, Antonio Bassolino, wants the residents to go, but at the same time he would like tourists to come. It is even planned to convert some of the evacuated homes into hotels. ‘Tourists obviously will leave at the volcano’s first cough,’ he says.5 But volcanologists say he is reckoning without the likely influx of volcano rubberneckers. Neapolitan lives may be saved, but if the hotels fill up perhaps not many lives overall!
Panicology Page 23
