IN AUTUMN 2000, AFTER WEEKS OF HEAVY RAIN, THE SWOLLEN River Thames flowed into Myles Allen’s house in Oxford. Myles was an Oxford University physicist and junior lecturer who worked with numerical climate models that are used for weather forecasting as well as for predicting future climate. He lived with his wife and young children in a Victorian brick terrace row house, off the Botley Road. To whom, he contemplated, should he send the bill for his sodden carpets and damaged plaster? Maybe to the owners of all the coal-burning power stations, as well as to all the petrolheads (himself included) whose carbon dioxide emissions had contributed to his ruined sofa? Or perhaps this was simply a random act of fate? How could he identify the cause?
Global temperatures had been rising strongly through the 1990s. Two global reinsurers, Munich Re and Swiss Re, had been tracking the economic costs of worldwide catastrophes going back to the 1970s. Even after adjusting for inflation, the losses seemed to be rising exponentially. In 2001 the graph of accelerating catastrophe costs was displayed in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Third Assessment Report’s technical summary. “Many of the observed trends in weather-related losses,” the summary stated, “are consistent with what would be expected under climate change.” After a run of fierce Atlantic windstorms in 1993, even the conservative Financial Times had blamed them on “Global Warming.”1
Yet if Europeans saw the signature of climate change in every flood and storm, this was not how it seemed in North America. Since 1995, there had been more intense hurricanes in the Atlantic, but the storms had shied away from the US coastline. By March 2004, the proportion of Americans who believed that global warming was an exaggerated threat had risen five points, to 38 percent.
If the real catastrophes were not always forthcoming to make the case, there was always Hollywood. In German film director Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow, abrupt climate change leads to hypercanes, a surprise tsunami, and an even more unexpected (but fortunately short-lived) flash-freeze ice age. Following the film’s New York premiere on May 27, 2004, Al Gore gave the climate change slide lecture he had already presented in hundreds of town hall meetings. The film producer Laurie David, who was in the audience, was so inspired by Gore’s message and delivery that she set out to turn the slide show into a movie documentary. The timing was perfect. The weather gods were about to unleash a prolonged campaign of rip-roaring wild hurricane weather.
By August 2004, hurricanes had rediscovered how to reach the US coastline. (The trick is to reposition the North Atlantic anticyclonal high southwest from the Azores to Bermuda.) Nine hurricanes formed that season, six of them intense storms. Charley made landfall on the west coast of Florida on August 13, and Frances on the east coast on September 5. Hurricane Ivan devastated Grenada before intensifying to Category 5 and sending most of Grand Cayman underwater on September 11.
With a headline-grabbing maximum-intensity hurricane careering through the Caribbean, it was a good time for climate change political initiatives. In a speech on September 14, Tony Blair, the British prime minister, announced an international scientific meeting the following February during the British presidency of the G8 to answer the question: “what level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is self-evidently too much?”2 (I was there, in Exeter, when the German climate scientist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber’s proposal of a “guardrail” rise in global temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius [3.6 degrees Fahrenheit] was declared to be the definition of “dangerous” climate change.3) On September 16, Hurricane Ivan made landfall in Alabama at Category 4, pushing a large and destructive storm surge. The total cost of Caribbean and US hurricane damages for the year approached $50 billion.
Through the spring of 2005, all the forecasts suggested that this would be another active hurricane season. However, no one had any idea what was in store.
The season began early. On July 5, Hurricane Dennis developed in the eastern Caribbean; intensifying to Category 4, it became the strongest July storm ever. A few days later, Hurricane Emily broke the record set by Dennis and reached Category 5.
On July 19, Gordon Brown, the UK chancellor of the exchequer, announced that he had asked the economist Sir Nicholas Stern to lead a major review of the economics of climate change.
On July 31, Professor Kerry Emanuel of MIT, a leading hurricane scientist, published a paper in Nature magazine, accompanied by a press release, announcing that “hurricanes have grown significantly more powerful and destructive over the last three decades, due in part to global warming.”4
There had been eleven storms by the end of August. On August 12, the “K” storm emerged over the Bahamas. K was for Katrina, a storm that caused more than $80 billion of damage and the highest loss of American life in a hurricane catastrophe since 1928.
On September 16, 2005, Science magazine published a research paper conveying an even stronger message: “The number of storms reaching categories 4 and 5 grew from about 11 per year in the 1970s to 18 per year since 1990.”5 The “new analysis [is] sure to stir debate over whether global warming is worsening these deadly storms.”
Two days after the paper was published, a new disturbance developed over the Turks and Caicos Islands. On September 21, Rita became the third-most-intense hurricane ever known in the Atlantic, prompting a mass evacuation of Houston, though it weakened down to Category 3 when it made landfall on the border between Texas and Louisiana.
A month later, on October 17, Hurricane Wilma developed southwest of Jamaica and soon became the strongest-ever Atlantic hurricane, with a central pressure of 882 millibars and 185-mile-per-hour (300-kilometer-per-hour) winds. After removing the beach and blowing out windows in Cancun hotels on the Yucatán Peninsula, the storm headed northeast, reaching southern Florida as a Category 3 storm on the 24th and crossing Miami to cause another $20 billion of damage. The season was still not over, even as the National Hurricane Center ran out of letters and switched over to the Greek alphabet—the storm Zeta arrived on December 30.
The hurricanes of 2005 caused $160 billion of damage and took more than 2,000 lives. The Atlantic season broke many records: the highest number of Category 5 storms ever, the largest number of tropical storms, and the largest number of hurricanes. Summer 2005, with its cocktail of catastrophe science and hurricane disasters, seemed proof that climate change was going to be truly apocalyptic. Early in 2006, along the coast of Dauphin Island, Alabama, I watched million-dollar beachfront houses being lifted onto giant trailers and moved inland on barges.
The Al Gore movie An Inconvenient Truth opened on May 26, 2006. Images from the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons and the mere mention of Katrina highlighted the power of these catastrophes to influence the debate.
On October 30, the 700-page Stern Review, prepared by a team of economists at HM Treasury, was published.6 It carried the unequivocal message that, “if we don’t act” (to reduce greenhouse gas emissions), “the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least 5% of global GDP each year, now and forever.”7
The IPCC completed its fourth assessment report in 2006 and published it in early 2007. The Nobel Peace Prize of 2007 was awarded to Al Gore and to the IPCC.
Catastrophes had become enlisted to make the argument for climate change action. But what if the hurricane “publicity machine” was discontinued?
From the start of 2006, it was as if the hurricane gods had changed sides. After being pummeled with seven intense (Category 3–5) hurricanes in fifteen months, no intense hurricanes hit the US coastline for the next ten years. In the spring of 2007, a second wave of scientific publications appeared on the subject of hurricanes and climate change. Rising temperatures in all the equatorial oceans, it now seemed, would lead to stronger upper-level winds that would shear hurricanes apart before they could form. A new consensus was emerging: hurricanes were likely to be more intense, but there could also be fewer of them.8
The story of the rising costs of catastrophes in an era of global warming was also wilting under further scrutiny. Replacement costs increase as people build bigger houses and fill them with more possessions. Adjust the costs for the increased wealth in the path of the storms and the trend in losses disappears.9 That is, unless we can assume that increased wealth is also invested in making properties stronger, and then a trend is back (at least up to the “high tide” of activity in 2005). However it would be difficult to argue that anyone in Louisiana was taking action to improve flood defenses or harden buildings in the years before Hurricane Katrina.10
We are challenged to understand that all climates contain a spectrum of extremes: heat waves and bitter freezes, monsoons and droughts, gales and doldrums. It can be a very broad spectrum. The extremes of the extremes of storms and floods have shown, so far, no simple trends. The worst-ever hurricane year for casualties was 1780.11 The most destructive windstorm across western Europe blew through in 1703, pursued by Daniel Defoe.12 The biggest-ever flood in central Europe occurred after eight solid days of rain in July 1342.13 In the winter of 1861–1862, a month of persistent heavy rain, fed by an “atmospheric river” meander in the jet stream, turned the Central Valley into an inland sea 300 miles (480 kilometers) long14 and washed away one-quarter of California’s taxable real estate, sending the state bankrupt.
But there are also recent records. In October 1998, (formerly Category 5) Hurricane Mitch drifted over Honduras and for four days rained 1 to 2 feet (30 to 60 centimeters) each day.15 Twenty-five villages on the northern slopes of the mountains simply disappeared, along with roads, electricity supplies, and water pipes. In Honduras the death toll was eventually set at 6,500, but 11,000 were missing and 1.5 million people were homeless—around 20 percent of the population. Honduras has never recovered. Some proportion of this rainfall was probably generated by warmer seas—but how much?
What would transform the argument was an idea from Myles Allen, back in Oxford, who was contemplating where to send the bill for his ruined floorboards. He decided to run global climate models with and without the increase in greenhouse gas emissions since 1950—that is, to perform climate “counterfactuals” for a parallel world that had experienced no increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. In both the actual and counterfactual worlds, he would need to run thousands of simulated years of the climate to explore whether a particular weather extreme had become more or less likely in the model output. To match the resolution of the global climate model he needed something large and long-lasting—like a month of extreme temperatures and drought, or weeks of intense rainfall. This would take a lot of computing power, which he did not have. So he enlisted a network of tens of thousands of volunteers around the world to distribute the modeling over their idling PCs.
The first results, generated by Allen’s research student Pardeep Pall, showed that the chance of the autumn 2000 floods that had flooded his Oxford house had doubled in the world of higher greenhouse gases.16 Allen could attribute 50 percent of the cost of the floods to climate change. Within a decade, climate scientists were pursuing “attribution studies” following every climate catastrophe.17
In November 2013, the city of Tacloban on the Philippine island of Leyte was destroyed by Supertyphoon Haiyan, which brought the strongest cyclone wind speeds ever observed and took almost 10,000 lives, most from the storm surge.18 A few days later, at the start of the UN climate talks in Warsaw, the Philippine delegate, Yeb Sano, gave an impassioned speech unequivocally linking the storm to climate change and the failure to agree on actions to take on greenhouse gas emissions: “To anyone who continues to deny the reality that this is climate change, I dare you to get off your ivory tower.”19
In the developing world, it can seem that every climate extreme now gets labeled “climate change.”20 While the attribution analysis provides a tougher test of causation, it may still take months before it delivers results. Tacloban lies in a funnel-shaped bay that amplifies storm surges for intense typhoons tracking south of the town. Tacloban was devastated by typhoons in 1897 and 1912, each of which took thousands of lives.21 So was Yeb Sano correct in his diagnosis that Haiyan’s intensity was a consequence of climate change?
It seems he was. A Japanese attribution study, using a high-resolution regional climate model, found strong evidence that the maximum intensity of storms in this region has increased with preexisting warming.22
Environmental lawyers are following the attribution studies with great interest. If you can show that an event has doubled in probability, it may be possible to find some greenhouse gas emitters on whom to pin liability. But would the evidence withstand courtroom cross-examination and questions such as: Who exactly built this climate model? How do you know it is reliable?23
When a man leaves his home in Senegal, driven out by an intense Sahel drought, is he a “climate migrant” meriting compensation, perhaps even a new home, from the principal greenhouse gas emitters? Attribution studies show that the drought has doubled in probability. Does that make him one half a climate migrant? Attribution studies found that the 2007–2010 drought in Syria had been made “two to three times more likely” as a result of climate change.24 As unemployed farmers moved to the cities, the drought was a factor in the terrible civil war that followed. This is the future in which war becomes a “threat multiplier,” creating far more refugees than the drought alone.25
Attribution studies do not answer the question of whether a whole class of catastrophe is overall becoming more likely or more damaging. Winter 1947 in England was the coldest of the last century, with arctic conditions and a thick snowpack. In early March, a succession of Atlantic storms caused a rapid thaw, leading to the most disastrous national flooding of the past 200 years. It seems likely that such a “continental” deep-freeze winter and associated thaw floods are now less likely in a warmer world.26 Has the disappearance of one class of severe flood been offset by an increase in the likelihood of other classes, such as prolonged episodes of autumn rain or intense summer cloudbursts? In a 2014 global review of all the evidence for worldwide changes in river flood frequency, leading IPCC authors acknowledged that, so far, there is no consistent pattern of change.27
Most likely Superstorm Sandy or Supertyphoon Haiyan would have formed independent of a warmer world. The extra heat in the oceans over which they traveled supplemented their landfall intensity and made them even more destructive.28 Yet just because these storms caused more damage does not prove that overall cyclones are more damaging. Maybe one or more hurricanes have already sheared apart through stronger winds in our warmer world? Or maybe Atlantic hurricanes are recurving further offshore and failing to make landfall?
And for no disaster (so far) can we say scientifically that it could not have occurred without climate change.29 To distinguish whether a climate extreme reflects climate change we need those attribution studies.
THE LARGER THREAT OF CLIMATE CHANGE LOOKING FORWARD IS not simply from stronger hurricanes or bigger floods, but from classes of irreversible tipping point catastrophes: a shutdown in the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation, a permanent dieback in the Amazon rain forest, the death of the principal coral reefs, the runaway escape of methane hydrates trapped in the permafrost, a failure of the Indian monsoon, or an acceleration in the melting of the Greenland ice cap.30 These are not catastrophes for which we can find current examples. Look out for small headlines tucked away on obscure news websites. “Gigantic Gas Discharge Vents Discovered in the Ob Delta of Northern Siberia,” “Persistent Drought in Peruvian Amazon Followed by Great Fires,” or “Recent Bleaching Event on Great Barrier Reef Much Worse Than Initial Estimates.”
SO WHAT ARE THE PRINCIPAL CLASSES OF CLIMATE EXTREMES THAT are going to be intensifying in a warmer world?
The air is scorching. It’s so hot you turn to see if you are standing in the draft of a massive truck or jet engine. It is a dry itching heat, but you are sweating profusely. You’re too hot to undertake any job, or even to sit outside. It’s hot during the day, but most potently hot through the night, with no breeze. Without air conditioning, sleep is impossible.
Known in Latin as dies caniculares (the “days of the little dog”), these are the days in the calendar when the “Dog Star,” Sirius, the brightest in the night sky, in the “Big Dog” constellation Canis Major, rises with the sun between July 24 and August 24 (in the Roman calendar).31 These are the days when dogs lie panting in the shade.
We are going to see a lot of heat waves in the century ahead. We should make ourselves familiar with what to expect and learn to take precautions. The term “heat wave” does not properly capture a phenomenon that spans hundreds of miles (the size of an anticyclone), can be accompanied by a choking chemical smog, lasts for days to weeks, and brings drought, desiccation, and death to people and ecosystems over a wide area.32 In the middle latitudes in the summer, with few hours of darkness, heat can build day by day. High temperatures lead to soil evaporation, while dry soils bake in the sun, increasing surface temperatures.
The summer 2003 European “canicule” heat wave followed the prescribed dates, from July 20 to August 20, peaking between August 10 and 12. France experienced its hottest and most persistent temperatures ever, with seven days of temperatures that were above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in Auxerre, to the southeast of Paris, while high temperatures spread to all the neighboring countries. The heat shock was greatest in the north, where the heat wave brought temperatures almost 12 degrees Celsius (21 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than the normal maximum summer temperatures.33 As a result, no one was prepared, and no one had air conditioning.
By the middle of August, the equivalent of four nuclear power plants in France (4,000 megawatts) had to close down because the river waters were too warm for effective cooling. The French wheat harvest was down by one-fifth.
In August, Paris is closed, families gone to the beach. The roofs of the city amplify the heat. Left behind are the aged relatives, who often sleep in the hottest garret rooms under the eaves. Death rates rise with age: that summer, those under thirty-five were almost unaffected, but at the peak of the crisis, on August 12, three times as many people over age seventy-five were dying than average. At the epicenter of the impacts in the Ile de France (the greater Paris region), the death rate across all age groups peaked at nine times the average.
While “heatstroke” was the identified cause on only 3,306 French death certificates, total “excess deaths” in France were officially estimated at 14,800, and across Europe at 35,000.34
These deaths of the elderly and the sick had been brought forward in time, or “harvested.” On average, how many months of life were lost? More than four months, or the statistics would not have shown that an additional 18,100 people died in France in 2003 than had died on average in the previous three years.35 But less than sixteen months, because in the following year the number of deaths was 24,000 lower than the previous average. So the excess in 2003 was smaller than the deficit in 2004. By all accounts, the French were so shamed by what happened in the heat wave that they started looking after the elderly and the sick better than before. The heat wave changed behaviors. By the end of 2004, the French were living longer than if the canicule had not occurred. How do we account for that in our statistics on climate change mortalities?
For most mid-latitude towns and cities, the average number of extra “cold deaths” of the old and the sick in the winter exceeds the number of “heat deaths” in the summer, with the majority of deaths happening in annual cold spells. Across the northern United States, even by the end of the twenty-first century, that is likely to remain the case.36
The summer 2010 Russian heat wave lasted for six weeks through July and the first half of August. Temperatures exceeded 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) across southern Russia and the Ukraine—more than 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than normal.37 Fires set to clear vegetation spread out of control and destroyed 800 square miles (2,000 square kilometers) of countryside. Hundreds of fires moved into the underlying peat soil, consuming whole villages and creating a toxic smog even in the largest cities, where everyone was advised to wear face masks.38 Nine million hectares of crops dried up and died, and the wheat harvest was down by one-third, with nothing left for export. At the height of the heat wave, death rates doubled in Moscow. An extra 5,000 died in July. Crazed by the heat and the smog, drunken Russians dived into pools and rivers and 2,000 drowned. An official estimate set the total “excess deaths” at 56,000. On July 30, President Dmitry Medvedev linked the crisis to climate change and demanded international action.39
For centuries there had never been a heat wave like the summer of 2003 in Europe or the summer of 2010 in Russia.
In December 2004, working with scientists at the UK Hadley Centre, Myles Allen showed that the chance of the 2003 heat wave across Europe had at least doubled as a result of human influence on the atmosphere.40 Attribution studies revealed that the 2010 Russian heat wave had been made three times more likely by climate change.41
It is more difficult to set records for heat waves in the United States. In the 1930s, drought, combined with poor farming practices and lack of irrigation, created the 1930s Dust Bowl.42 The barren soil turned up the temperature on scorching heat waves across the Midwest. In 1936 records were set, some of which have still to be broken, although many were finally exceeded during the 2012 heat wave.43
Australia, with few areas of climate-tempering forest, has always been prone to violent heat waves. Yet it is getting even hotter. In the “Angry Summer” of December 2012 to January 2013, for the first time average high temperatures across the whole country exceeded 39 degrees Celsius (102 degrees Fahrenheit).44 In southeast Australia, the most extreme heat wave was in January 2009. On February 7, a strong northwesterly wind drew baking air out of the continent’s interior and fires took off across Victoria.45 Fallen power cables sparked one fire whose embers, blown by 60-mile-per-hour (100-kilometer-per-hour) winds, flashed from one woodland to another, overwhelming several small towns so fast that 173 died before they could escape.46
Heat will amplify and extend fire seasons. In October 1991, a small grass fire in the hills above Oakland, California, was whipped by strong northeasterly winds into the tree-lined hillside streets. Jumping an eight-lane freeway, the fire consumed more than 3,000 houses, while twenty-five people died.47 There was no possibility to halt the fire until the winds had calmed. The wooden cities of Oakland and Berkeley remain at risk from a windblown firestorm emerging out of the Berkeley hills.48
In May 2011 in Slave Lake, Alberta, a forest fire, fanned by gale force winds, destroyed 374 properties—one-third of the town.49 The great Chicago fire of October 8–10, 1871, also consumed one-third of the wooden city. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the fire was sparked by embers blown on strong southwesterly winds from the thousands of fires lit by settlers to clear the land. At the end of a long summer drought, it is beyond coincidence that there were four giant fires around the shores of Lake Michigan on the same day. One fire 250 miles north, at Peshtigo, burned hundreds of square miles of forest, destroyed the lumber town, and killed more than 1,500 people trapped between the fire and the lake.50
One thing is for sure about future warming: the heat waves will be hotter, even more frequent, and more like those in Australia. They will come not just every thirty years, but every decade, even every year.
EACH YEAR HIGH TIDE REACHES, ON AVERAGE, ONE-EIGHTH OF AN inch (3 millimeters) higher than the previous year. This rise is going to accelerate as the Greenland ice sheet melts and all the heat passing into the oceans expands their volume. At the last interglacial warm period, 125,000 years ago, the oceans were 16 feet (5 meters) higher. Sea level rise will be an inevitable legacy of our times.
The greatest concentration of people in a river delta is in Bangladesh, where there are already tens of thousands of climate migrants; displaced by the chronic loss of land to erosion, waves of humanity are propelled inland in the aftermath of each storm surge flood.51 As the people come down from their raised concrete flood shelters to discover that their houses have been washed away, their only option is to catch a boat upriver, most likely to Dhaka, to find employment so as to avoid living on the street. The waves of migration that follow each storm surge will become larger and push deeper into Bangladesh and the border with Assam.52
Some coastal cities are already living with rapid sea level rise from land subsidence caused by groundwater extraction. Close to the shoreline, parts of Jakarta will have sunk almost 13 feet (4 meters) by 2025.53 In towns along the northern coast of Java, just as in Venice, people have either abandoned the ground floor of their houses or visit these rooms only at low tide.54 In Grand Bahama, after houses in the canal estate community of Queen’s Cove were flooded three times in a decade, insurance was withdrawn, mortgages became unavailable, and houses were abandoned.55
ALREADY MORE THAN HALF THE WORLD’S POPULATION LIVE IN CITIES. By 2030, it will be 60 percent. We are in the era of “Catastropolis”: disaster entangled with urbanization.
Cities in the rich world acquire better flood defenses and storm drains than rural areas, and the largest buildings have been designed by structural engineers. Tall buildings are anyway mostly out of reach of floods.56 Yet even in the rich world, cities can foment risk, especially port cities that are open to the sea. When the flood defenses break, as in New Orleans in 2005 or in Nagoya, Japan, in 2000, the consequences are worse, because people in cities live as if there is no threat. Water fills the subway tunnels, the underground shopping malls, and the hospital basements where the heaviest and most expensive diagnostic scanners are situated. At the waterfront, the high price of land lures developers to reclaim the swamps, priming the land for future soil liquefaction and flooding.57 The faster the city grows the more of the development happens outside planning controls, with informal settlements crowding over the land considered too steep or too flood-ridden for official occupation.
When Superstorm Sandy made landfall in New York and New Jersey in the early morning on October 29, 2012, it left more than 8 million customers without power, 3 million of them in New York City’s five boroughs. The most surprised and least prepared were the urbanites in Lower Manhattan, where electricity cables had been laid underground to protect them from wind damage. Substations designed to survive 12.5-foot (3.8-meter) water levels blew up when the surge tide reached 14 feet (4.3 meters). The New York Stock Exchange closed for two days, the theater district was closed for three, and 6,300 patients had to be evacuated from thirty-seven New York health-care facilities.58 Power was not fully restored to Manhattan for five days. Fortunately, power outages at the end of October are far more bearable in New York than in January or August, but the elderly and disabled were still left in dark apartments without any working elevators. Gasoline rationing continued in New York for fifteen days, while 10 billion gallons of raw and partially treated sewage spilled into the sea.
WORLDWIDE THE COASTLINE WITH THE GREATEST EXPERIENCE OF accelerated sea level rise is the “southern wild” of Louisiana, which extends as far inland as the northern shores of Lake Pontchartrain, including the city of New Orleans.59 In areas unprotected by the levees, the Cajuns who live here watch from year to year as their orchards and cemeteries become overwhelmed by the sea and their woods die as the saltwater infiltrates tree roots. The sea level rises two-fifths to three-fifths of an inch (10 to 15 millimeters) each year, up to 6 inches (150 millimeters) every decade: 80 percent of this change reflects the land sinking rather than the sea rising. Every year another 16 square miles (40 square kilometers) of land disappears.60
The sinking is not new. One hundred and thirty years ago, a journalist wrote of Last Island, southeast of New Orleans: “Many and many a mile of ground has yielded to the tireless charging of Ocean’s cavalry: . . . porpoises at play where of old the sugar-cane shook out its million bannerets; . . . those wan battle-grounds where the woods made their last brave stand against the irresistible invasion.”61
Why is this region sinking so fast? The delta turns out to be a gigantic landslide, with more than 100 surface faults.62 It is slipping inexorably into the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.63
Without massive interventions at the Old River Control Structure far to the west, in 1927 the whole Mississippi River would have diverted south along the steeper Atchafalaya channel to the sea.64 The river at New Orleans would then have become a clogged swamp, and Morgan City would today be the “new” New Orleans. Ever-increasing amounts of money will have to be injected into both the river and the city to sustain them, but eventually most of the land will have to be let go, being too expensive and difficult to protect.65
TEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO, HUMANS LIVING ON THE FOOD-RICH shoreline experienced the sea rising inexorably by as much as a woman’s height in her own lifetime, the water rolling miles inland on the great deltas. The sea had been rising for generations. Every decade or so, the beach camp would need to be relocated inland. We may become just as inured to the idea that the sea is inexorably rising. In the decades ahead, there will be constant renewal at the coast. The “winners” from climate change will be civil engineers and construction companies. Many airports have already been built on coastal salt marshes, like New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. The departure board will increasingly read: DELAYED BY HIGH TIDE. Will the airport grow walls around the runways, or try to find somewhere inland to relocate? Watching their property values depreciate as people start to move to higher ground, those who live on the coast will argue for compensation for their relocation. A city like Miami cannot be protected with a wall because the reef rock on which it is built is completely porous.66
Insurers will emphasize “insurability,” refusing to cover those properties now deemed too high-risk for wind or flood damage, while politicians talk up the “obligations” of insurance. Florida had a test drive for the climate change future after the 2004–2005 hurricane season, when “contract-terminating,” “rate-hiking” insurers were identified by the press as the enemy. Insurers will need to step up to a societal role, as in agreeing to ensure that insurance remains available for the lifetime (fifty years?) of any new property that has been officially sanctioned for its location and construction quality.
A former period of climate change in Europe, the Little Ice Age, led, between 1560 and 1660, to witch hunts and ritual killings.67 Who will be the scapegoats for future climate disasters? Coal miners and oil drillers? We could update John Wesley’s imprecation that there is “no divine visitation which is likely to have so general an influence upon sinners as an earthquake” to “there is no manifestation likely to have so general an influence on climate sceptics as a succession of heat waves, intense hurricanes, or floods.” After the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons, the proportion of Americans who disbelieved global warming dropped to its lowest-ever proportion, at 30 percent.68 By 2010, as the intense hurricanes stayed away, that number had risen 60 percent (to 48 percent). Polling after the English floods in early 2014 showed that for one-quarter of the population the floods had strengthened their belief in “human-induced climate change.”69
Even the Conference to the Parties (COP) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is not immune to the emotional force of catastrophes. In November 2013, the devastation of Tacloban wrought by Typhoon Haiyan was widely perceived to have influenced the Warsaw COP19 to authorize the “Loss and Damage” agenda (i.e., seeking compensation for the costs of permanent loss and unstoppable climate change damage). Yet how much should countries adapt before declaring protection a lost cause? By 2100, without intervention, rising seas will largely drown four whole countries: Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, and the Maldives. China has shown that political will, supplemented by giant dredgers pumping millions of tons of sand, can turn even submerged reefs into garrisoned island airports. What constitutes “sufficient adaptation” may be left to the courts as the rich world argues over their liabilities for loss and damage.
Catastrophes can make the visceral argument for action on reducing emissions more powerfully than 100 scientists and their climate projections. Until large numbers of people become seriously frightened by climate disasters, it seems we will never achieve enough on emissions reduction. Yet disasters cannot be summoned on command. We are reckless to entrust the fate of the planet to the spontaneous advocacy of catastrophes.70