Crawling from the Wreckage

by Gwynne Dyer

  29.

  DISASTER POLITICS

  Over the last forty or fifty years there has been a rapid accumulation of threats to life on Earth as we know it—or rather, there has been a rapid growth in our knowledge of such threats. They were always there; we just didn’t know about them.

  For most of human history, the world seemed to be a safe stage upon which to play out our human dramas, but it turns out that we can be ambushed at any time by many different natural disasters that would affect much or all of the world: asteroid strikes, mega-tsunamis, global plagues and massive bursts of gamma radiation from collapsing stars, to mention only the leading candidates.

  April 15, 2005

  THINGS WE KNOW NOW

  Things we know now that we didn’t know twenty years ago:

  We know that most stars have planets: in the past decade astronomers have identified around two hundred planets circling nearby stars. They are all gas giants like our own Jupiter and Saturn—only massive planets like these can be detected by our present techniques—but most stars are probably also surrounded by smaller, rocky planets like Earth that we cannot yet detect. How likely is it that our own solar system, which contains four gas giants and five smaller, rocky planets, is unique in a universe of gas giants?

  We know that there are abundant quantities of organic molecules, the chemical building blocks of life, in interstellar space, and the hypothesis that life on Earth was seeded from space, first advanced by astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, gains ground by the day. But if that is how life emerged on Earth, then why not on many of those trillions of other planets in this enormous universe?

  We also know that relatively local events like asteroids or comets crashing into planets can devastate the entire biosphere: there have already been five known “extinction events” in the history of life on Earth. And now we know that distant cosmic phenomena like collapsing stars can have just as great an impact. Dr. Adrian Melott of Kansas University and his colleagues have just made a convincing case that the first of those events on Earth, the Ordovician extinction of 440 million years ago, was caused by a ten-second burst of gamma rays emitted by a dying star several thousand light years from here.

  Unlike the two mass extinctions known to have been caused by asteroid strikes, 251 million years ago at the end of the Permian period and 62 million years ago when the dinosaurs disappeared, the Ordovician one happened at a time when most life on this planet was still in the seas and nothing had even developed a backbone yet. About 60 percent of the marine species then in existence suddenly vanished from the geological record, but there is no asteroid collision associated with this upheaval.

  Until recently, the only explanation we had for the Ordovician extinction was the sudden onset of an ice age, but that didn’t really make a lot of sense. Even severe environmental stress and loss of habitat caused by falling sea levels shouldn’t have killed off 60 percent of existing species—and besides, why did the planet suddenly tumble into an ice age after a long period of stable, warm climate? So along come astronomer Adrian Melott, his colleague, palaeontologist Bruce Lieberman, and other colleagues at Kansas University with a much more plausible—and worrisome—explanation.

  Stars above a certain size have a life cycle that ends with collapse into a black hole—and, as they collapse, they emit a pulse of energy, mostly made up of gamma rays, that is so intense that it carries all the way across the universe. It is a highly directional pulse, however, and it can only be detected if your home planet happens to lie within the cone of radiation from the particular star in question.

  Down here on the Earth’s surface, astronomers only detect about one gamma-ray pulse a month: the thick blanket of atmosphere muffles most of the weaker, more distant ones. But these stellar collapses are happening all the time here and there in the universe, and satellites simultaneously scanning all parts of the sky for these brief bursts of radiation would see about a dozen a week.

  We are caught in the cone of gamma radiation from one dying star or another about a dozen times a week. Most of them are safely millions of light years distant—but it has been calculated that if such an implosion occurs within six thousand light years of us, and happens to emit its beam of gamma radiation in our direction, it would strip the protective ozone layer off our planet and leave all life on the surface exposed to deadly ultraviolet radiation for up to five years. It would also fill the upper atmosphere with nitrogen oxides that absorb the sun’s heat and could easily push the Earth into an ice age.

  Dr. Melott and his friends believe that this double-whammy is what caused the Ordovician extinction 440 million years ago. What actually happened—first a rapid die-off of many species that were presumably killed by UVB radiation, then an ice age to finish the job—fits the profile of a gamma-ray event very closely. They also calculate that such an event is only likely to hit the Earth two or three times per billion years, so it won’t have an immediate impact on real-estate prices. But the larger pattern that emerges from all this is not pretty.

  We inhabit a universe in which there are probably trillions of planets that broadly resemble the Earth and many, if not most of them, may be home to life of one sort or another. Nobody has a clue how many might harbour consciousness or intelligence, now or in the future, or how many have done so in the past, but even that number could easily be in the billions. And we have reason to suspect that each year hundreds or thousands of these planets are hit by close-range bursts of gamma rays from collapsing giant stars.

  We know a lot more about the universe than we used to, and the knowledge is not very comforting.

  Of course, as the science improves some of the conclusions have to be changed. The asteroid strike at the end of the Cretaceous era that killed off the dinosaurs sixty-two million years ago has been confirmed by a dozen different kinds of evidence—they have even found the crater it left, on the coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula—but it turns out that the even bigger end-Permian extinction (“the Great Dying”) probably was not due to an asteroid. In the article above, I said that it was, but my information was a year or so out of date.

  Scientists have been looking for the same telltale signature of a big asteroid strike in the geological record at the times of the other mass extinctions, and they have not found them. Now the leading suspect for the end-Permian event, and for the three other biggest mass extinctions in the geological record, is runaway global warming caused by massive volcanic eruptions that lasted thousands of years. The hypothesis is that the warming produced stratified, largely oxygen-free oceans that were taken over by sulphur bacteria that emitted vast amounts of hydrogen sulphide gas, destroying the ozone layer and poisoning most land-dwelling life directly. Does that make you feel better?

  Asteroids, at least, are relatively straightforward. You might be able to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with the Earth if you had spent the money and acquired the relevant technological capabilities in space beforehand. Otherwise, you just tuck your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye. There’s not much you can do about massive volcanic eruptions, either. But many of the potential disasters we face pose acute political dilemmas. Like Cumbre Vieja, for example.

  November 3, 2004

  UNSTOPPABLE GEE-GEES

  The western flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands is going to slide into the Atlantic one of these days: a diagonal fracture has already separated it from the main body of the volcano, and only friction still keeps it attached. “When it goes, it will likely collapse in about 90 seconds,” said Professor Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Grieg Hazard Research Centre at University College London. And when it goes, probably during an eruption, the splash will create a mega-tsunami that races across the Atlantic and drowns the facing coastlines.

  Fortunately, the nearest coast to the Canary Islands, where the waves will be around one hundred metres high when they hit, is lightly settled Western Sahara. Few people living in the densely popul
ated coastal plains of Morocco, southwestern Spain and Portugal will survive either, but the waves will drop in height as they travel. The coasts of southern Ireland and southwestern England will also take a beating, but by then the wave height will be down to about ten metres.

  The real carnage will be on the western side of the Atlantic, from Newfoundland all the way down the east coast of Canada and the United States to Cuba, Hispaniola, the Lesser Antilles and northeastern Brazil. With a clear run across the Atlantic the wall of water will still be between twenty and fifty metres high when it hits the eastern seaboard of North America, and it will keep coming for ten to fifteen minutes.

  Worst hit will be harbours and estuaries that funnel the waves inland: goodbye Halifax, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C.; Miami and Havana go under almost entirely, as will low-lying islands like the Bahamas and Barbados. Likely death toll, if there is no mass evacuation beforehand? A hundred million people, give or take fifty million.

  The last time the volcano erupted, in 1949, its whole western side slid four metres down towards the sea, and even now it is still slipping very slowly downwards. Given the scale of the catastrophe if the next eruption sends this mountain crashing into the water, Dr. McGuire is angry that there is so little monitoring equipment on La Palma to give advance warning: “The U.S. government must be aware of the La Palma threat. They should certainly be worried, and so should the island states in the Caribbean that will really bear the brunt of a collapse.”

  “They’re not taking it seriously,” McGuire concluded. “Governments change every four or five years and generally they’re not interested in these things.” It was a classic scene, revisited in every natural disaster movie: crusading scientist calls feckless governments to account, squalid politicos ignore the call. The science journalists couldn’t wait to get their pieces into print.

  But hold on a minute. Haven’t we heard about this threat before? What’s new this time? Nothing, except that there hasn’t been a stampede to cover La Palma with seismometers. Now, why do you think that is?

  Suppose that the governments whose coastlines are at risk, from Morocco to the U.S., did get a warning that Cumbre Vieja was waking up again. What would they do with the warning? Evacuate one or two hundred million people from the low-lying lands indefinitely?

  They don’t know if there is really going to be an eruption (seismology is not that precise), or how big it might be, or whether this will be the one that finally shakes the side of the mountain loose. It could happen in the next eruption, but it might not happen for a thousand years.

  No national leader wants to evacuate the entire coast for an indefinite period of time, causing an economic and refugee crisis on the scale of a world war, for what might be a false alarm. But nobody wants to ignore a warning, and perhaps be responsible for tens of millions of deaths. From a political standpoint, it’s better not to have the warning at all.

  Natural disasters that can affect the whole planet are known to scientists as “global geophysical events”—gee-gees, for short—and they come in two kinds: ones you might be able to do something useful about, and ones you can’t. When governments are faced with the first kind they can respond quite sensibly.

  Since we first realized two decades ago that asteroids and comets smashing into the Earth have caused mass extinctions, a U.S. government project has identified and started to track three thousand “near-Earth objects” whose orbits make them potentially dangerous. In another generation, we may even be able to divert ones that are on a collision course—and if there’s one gee-gee that you would want to prevent above all others, that’s the one. But there’s no similar remedy on the horizon for volcanoes or earthquakes, or the tsunamis they might cause. About these, we just have to keep our fingers crossed.

  We had a very close call with an asteroid strike less than a million years ago: not a near miss, but an actual collision with a monster the size of the end-Cretaceous asteroid that miraculously did not cause a mass extinction. At the International Geophysical Congress in Glasgow on August 18, 2004, Dr. Frans van der Hoeven of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands revealed that a similar asteroid hit Antarctica only 780,000 years ago, a mere blink of an eye in geological time. We are still here for three reasons, all of them flukes.

  First, the asteroid broke up just before hitting the Earth, creating five smaller impact craters over an area measuring 2,100 by 3,800 kilometres rather than a single huge impact crater. Second, most of the pieces melted in the deep eastern Antarctic ice cap before cratering the underlying bedrock, which limited the amount of dust released into the atmosphere. And finally, there was already permanent winter over most of the planet, so it was much less of a shock to the biosphere than it would be if it happened today.

  “The extraordinary thing about this meteor strike is that it appeared to do so little damage,” said Professor van der Hoeven. “Unlike the dinosaur strike there is no telltale layer of dust [in the geological record] that demonstrates the history of the event. It may have damaged things and wiped out species but there is no sign of it.” Apart from the craters, the only indication that something big happened 780,000 years ago is that the Earth’s magnetic field reversed at just that time. I could build a whole religion around a piece of luck that big, but I shall refrain.

  30.

  JAPAN

  Something very important happened in Japan over the past five years: it stopped being a one-party state. It always had genuinely free elections, of course, but for fifty years (with the exception of a single year) the Liberal Democratic Party always stayed in power. Then it lost the plot, and soon afterwards it lost power.

  The right wing of the LDP was always home for most Japanese nationalists (except the really crazy ones), but they were always kept on a short leash. Then, in 2006, one of their own, Shinzō Abe, became prime minister.

  September 23, 2006

  SHINZŌ ABE AND A “NORMAL” JAPAN

  “We just ignore them!” said the man at the think tank in Beijing, a senior adviser to the Chinese foreign ministry, and burst out laughing. He laughed because it is a long and daunting list of people to ignore: the American journalists and academics who predict an eventual war with China; the U.S. armed forces, which are transferring more and more hardware to the western Pacific; and the Bush administration officials whose search for allies in Asia to help them “contain China” culminated in a quasi-alliance with India last year. He also has to ignore the counterparts of those people in the Chinese military-industrial complex, who try to use all that foreign activity as evidence that China must pour many more resources into defence. He is a busy man.

  The reason he (and most of the Chinese foreign-policy establishment) deliberately ignore them all is because taking the “American threat” seriously and trying to match it would just play into the hands of the hawks on both sides. There is no objective reason that makes a U.S.-Chinese clash inevitable but preparing for it, or even talking too much about it, actually makes it more possible.

  It’s an admirably sane attitude, founded on the obvious fact that China would be far worse off in any confrontation with the United States today than it would be in ten or twenty years’ time, when rapid Chinese economic growth will have narrowed the gap between them. So, even if you believe a clash is inevitable sooner or later (which most Chinese analysts don’t), then it’s a good idea to have it much later, not today.

  I heard the same argument from half a dozen other influential foreign-policy analysts in Beijing two weeks ago, and this should have been reassuring, if not for the fact that every one of these experts, having patiently explained that there were no threats on the horizon that could deflect China’s “peaceful rise” to great-power status, then added: “except Japan.” That is quite an exception, as Japan has the world’s second-biggest economy and is right on China’s doorstep.

  Which brings us to Shinzō Abe, the new prime minister of Japan. Elected as the leader of the ruling Liber
al Democratic Party on September 20 and formally installed as prime minister on September 26, he is the youngest man (fifty-two) to occupy the office since the Second World War. Indeed, he only entered parliament thirteen years ago and got his first cabinet-level job just last year.

  But Abe didn’t really need to serve a long apprenticeship; he sort of inherited the job. Twenty years ago, his father was foreign minister, and widely tipped as a future prime minister until he was sidetracked by a corruption scandal and then died relatively young. His grandfather, Nobosuke Kishi, was prime minister in the late 1950s, despite having been identified (but not tried) as a war criminal by the American occupation authorities. And this is not just a political lineage; it’s a clearly defined ideological group within the Japanese ruling elite.

  The people around Abe are uncompromising nationalists who insist that Japan must become a “normal” country. By this, they mean that it should stop apologizing for the Second World War; start rewriting school textbooks omitting all the material about war guilt and Japanese atrocities; and start rewriting the “peace” constitution so that Japan’s euphemistically titled “Self-Defence Forces” can legally become ordinary armed forces, able to be deployed overseas.

  Prime Minster Abe has even said that it is “not necessarily unconstitutional” for Japan to develop a nuclear deterrent. He advocates even closer military ties with the United States, and worries aloud about the intentions of a stronger China. Abe not only irritates the Chinese, whose relations with Japan are at the lowest point in decades after five years of his predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi; he actually frightens them.

  No sane Japanese wants to turn the country’s giant neighbour and biggest trading partner into an active enemy, and Abe isn’t mad. But it wouldn’t be the first time that a government has talked itself into a needless military confrontation.