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Is This the End?
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WE’D seen it before: the Piazza San Marco in Venice submerged by the acqua alta; New Orleans underwater in the aftermath of Katrina; the wreckage-strewn beaches of Indonesia left behind by the tsunami of 2004. We just hadn’t seen it here. (Last summer’s Hurricane Irene did a lot of damage on the East Coast, but New York City was spared the worst.) “Fear death by water,” T. S. Eliot intoned in “The Waste Land.” We do now.
There had been warnings. In 2009, the New York City Panel on Climate Change issued a prophetic report. “In the coming decades, our coastal city will most likely face more rapidly rising sea levels and warmer temperatures, as well as potentially more droughts and floods, which will all have impacts on New York City’s critical infrastructure,” said William Solecki, a geographer at Hunter College and a member of the panel. But what good are warnings? Intelligence agents received advance word that terrorists were hoping to hijack commercial jets. Who listened? (Not George W. Bush.) If we can’t imagine our own deaths, as Freud insisted, how can we be expected to imagine the death of a city?
History is a series of random events organized in a seemingly sensible order. We experience it as chronology, with ourselves as the end point — not the end point, but as the culmination of events that leads to the very moment in which we happen to live. “Historical events might be unique, and given pattern by an end,” the critic Frank Kermode proposed in “The Sense of an Ending,” his classic work on literary narrative, “yet there are perpetuities which defy both the uniqueness and the end.” What he’s saying (I think) is that there is no pattern. Flux is all.
Last month’s “weather event” should have taught us that. Whether in 50 or 100 or 200 years, there’s a good chance that New York City will sink beneath the sea. But if there are no patterns, it means that nothing is inevitable either. History offers less dire scenarios: the city could move to another island, the way Torcello was moved to Venice, stone by stone, after the lagoon turned into a swamp and its citizens succumbed to a plague of malaria. The city managed to survive, if not where it had begun. Perhaps the day will come when skyscrapers rise out of downtown Scarsdale.
Humans are ingenious. Our species tends to see nature as something of a nuisance, a phenomenon to be outwitted. Consider efforts to save Venice: planners have hatched one scheme after another to prevent the city from sinking. Industrial development has been curtailed. Buildings dating from the Renaissance have been “relocated.”
The most ambitious project, begun a decade ago, is the installation of mobile gates in the lagoons. Known by the acronym MOSE — the Italian name for Moses, who mythically parted the Red Sea — it’s an intricate engineering feat: whenever the tide rises, metal barriers that lie in concrete bunkers on the sea floor are lifted by compressed air pressure and pivoted into place on hinges.
Is the Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico — the project’s official name — some engineer’s fantasy? It was scheduled for completion this year, but that has been put off until 2014. Even if, by some miracle, the gates materialize, they will be only a stay against the inevitable. Look at the unfortunate Easter Islanders, who left behind as evidence of their existence a mountainside of huge blank-faced busts, or the Polynesians of Pitcairn Island, who didn’t leave behind much more than a few burial sites and a bunch of stone tools. Every civilization must go.
Yet each goes in its own way. In “Collapse,” Jared Diamond showed how the disappearance of a civilization has multiple causes. A cascade of events with unforeseen consequences invariably brings it to a close. The Norse of Greenland cut down their trees (for firewood and other purposes) until there were no more trees, which made it a challenge to build houses or boats. There were other causes, too: violent clashes with the Inuit, bad weather, ice pileups in the fjords blocking trade routes. But deforestation was the prime factor. By the end, no tree fell in the forest, as there was none; and there would have been no one to hear it if it had.
“Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice,” declared Robert Frost. Another alternative would be lava. Pliny the Younger’s letters to Tacitus described the eruption of Mount Vesuvius: A plume of dirt and ash rose in the sky; rocks pelted Pompeii; and then darkness arrived. “It was not like a moonless or cloudy night, but like being in an enclosed place where the light has been doused.” Who did this? It must have been the gods. “Many were raising their hands to implore the gods, but more took the view that no gods now existed anywhere, and that this was an eternal and final darkness hanging over the world.” But of course it wasn’t the end of the world: it was just the end of them.
Contemplating our ephemerality can be a profound experience. To wander the once magnificent Roman cities strung along the Lycian coast of Turkey — now largely reduced to rubble, much still unexcavated — is to realize how extensive, how magisterial this civilization was. Whole cities are underwater; you can snorkel over them and read inscriptions carved into ancient monoliths. Ephesus, pop. 300,000 in the second century A.D., is a vast necropolis. The amphitheater that accommodated nearly 25,000 people sits empty. The Temple of Artemis, said to have been four times larger than the Parthenon, is a handful of slender columns.
YET we return home from our travels intoxicated by beauty, not truth. It doesn’t occur to us that we, too, will one day be described in a guidebook (Fodor’s North America 2212?) as metropolitans who resided in 60-story towers and traveled beneath the waves in metal-sheathed trains.
It’s this willed ignorance, I suspect, that explains why it’s difficult to process the implications of climate change for New York, even in the face of explicit warnings from politicians, not the most future-oriented people. Governor Andrew M. Cuomo has been courageous to make global warming a subject of public debate, but will taxpayers support his proposal to build a levee in New York Harbor? Wouldn’t it be easier to think of Sandy as a “once in a lifetime” storm? Even as Lower Manhattan continues to bail itself out — this time in the literal sense — One World Trade Center rises, floor by floor. The governor notes that “we have a 100-year flood every two years now,” which doesn’t stop rents from going up in Battery Park City.
Walking on New York’s Upper East Side, I was reminded by the gargantuan white box atop a busy construction site that the Second Avenue line, first proposed in 1929, remains very much in the works. And why not? Should images of water pouring into the subway tunnels that occupied our newspapers a few weeks back be sufficient to stay us from progress? “I must live till I die,” says the hero of a Joseph Conrad novel. The same could be said of cities.
When, on my way home at night, I climb the steps from the subway by the American Museum of Natural History — itself a monument to transience, with its dinosaurs and its mammoth and its skeleton of a dodo bird, that doomed species whose name has become an idiom for extinction — I feel more keenly than ever the miraculousness, the improbability of New York.
Looking down Central Park West, I’m thrilled by the necklace of green-and-red traffic lights extending toward Columbus Circle and the glittering tower of One57, that vertical paradise for billionaires. And as I walk past the splashing fountain in front of the museum’s south entrance on West 77th Street, I recall a sentence from Edward Gibbon’s ode to evanescence, “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” in which “the learned Poggius” gazes down at the remains of the city from the Capitoline hill: “The public and private edifices, that were founded for eternity, lie prostrate, naked, and broken, like the limbs of a mighty giant; and the ruin is the more visible, from the stupendous relics that have survived the injuries of time and fortune.”
This is our fate. All the more reason to appreciate what we have while we have it.
23 Comments on "Is This the End?"
BillT on Tue, 27th Nov 2012 9:42 am
In the end. all will end. In my novel, the oceans rise only 60 meters, but that is enough to flood most coastal cities and back rivers up to flood even those not along the oceans of the world.
That would put the Pentagon and the US capital under 150 feet of water.
Central Park under 100 feet.
Much of New Jersey, Delaware and Florida would be gone. A few islands at best.
Big Ben would be up to it’s roof top.
Venice, gone.
Paris, gone.
Sydney, gone.
Rome & the Vatican, gone.
The list is almost endless if it rises even 60 meters or less.
Keep in mind, that if all of the ice on Greenland and Antarctica were to melt, it would be even worse. Add in the expansion from heating and the oceans would rewrite the shape of the world, wiping out most of the works of humanity.
Ken Nohe on Tue, 27th Nov 2012 11:44 am
Prediction tell us more about our time than anything else. Look at “communications” on a Star Trek episode of the 1970s with its wall-mounted monitors, and that was only 40 years ago. We have almost no ideas of the challenges that people will face in the year 2050. By then it is highly likely that artificial intelligence will have advanced beyond what we are capable of, offering new solutions to old problems.
The challenge of our time is not to worry about the sun becoming a red giant, humans will have evolved beyond anything we could recognize by then, it is to cope with the challenges of “today” literally.
The fact that our incomes in developed countries have been stagnating in real terms over the last 10 years is intricately linked to the exhaustion of natural resources. In spite of that, to maintain our lifestyle we are running our life the Toyota way with “Zero stocks” just hoping that nothing wrong will happen. This is a very dangerous strategy in the not so long term as necessarily “shit happens” using the words of the great American philosopher Donald Rumsfeld.
Following Katrina and more recently Sandy, America is focused on the Ocean but the risk of a major quake on the West coast would easily surpass the damages of Sandy. Likewise, our society would be greatly affected by a large solar flare or a large volcanic eruption. We don’t need to freak out about it but history shows us that eventually something will happens and if we are not ready by then…
csatadi on Tue, 27th Nov 2012 3:58 pm
60meters sea level rise? It would take 2000 years with the current 0,3mm/year rise.
New cultures, religions and countries may rise and fall during this time.
I’m not sure those buildings can survive such a long period.
Rick on Tue, 27th Nov 2012 4:39 pm
I don’t see 60 meters happening. Not in my lifetime, or even in a 100 years.
@csatadi — you’re right.
Beery on Tue, 27th Nov 2012 6:34 pm
@ BillT: Where does this 60 meter rise in sea level come from if not from Greenland, Antarctica and expansion from heating?
If you think arctic ice melt will cause sea levels to rise 60 meters, I think you’re mistaken. Arctic ice is sea ice – 90% of it is below sea level. Also, ice takes up more volume than water, so any ice melt above sea level will be balanced by the ice that melts below sea level. Arctic ice melt will probably not cause sea levels to rise even a meter. The only ice melt that can cause sea levels to rise is the ice on solid ground. That and global seawater warming are the only things that can cause a rise in sea levels.
Arthur on Tue, 27th Nov 2012 9:24 pm
Rise sealevel if all ice melts:
Antarctica = ca 100 m
Greenland = 7 m
Northpole = 0 m
cipi604 on Tue, 27th Nov 2012 9:50 pm
what warming?! http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/10/14/article-2217286-157E3ADF000005DC-561_644x358.jpg
econ101 on Tue, 27th Nov 2012 10:27 pm
In answer to the authors question: no.
Rick2 on Tue, 27th Nov 2012 10:35 pm
@Beery: That’s why he said ‘ANTarctica’ and Greenland, both of these contain land based ice. You are correct the melting of floating ice does not change the sea level, although it will accelerate global warming once it is gone as ice reflects solar, where as open ocean absorbs it. The best prediction on sea level rise right now is considered to be between 0.8 and 2 meters in 100 years. But its widely accepted that this could be worse due to the dynamic way that ice sheets respond to melting.
actioncjackson on Wed, 28th Nov 2012 12:05 am
Star Trek, artificial intelligence, really?
BillT on Wed, 28th Nov 2012 1:07 am
Thanks Arthur, you are correct according to my research for my book.
Too many have no idea what humankind is dealing with. Mother Nature does. She could wipe us out in less than a year if she wanted to. According to my research, there are 42 volcanoes under the ice on Antarctica. Inactive for now but potentially dangerous. In my book, they are activated, moving most of the miles deep ice off of the continent in a matter of days as they melt the ice and create rivers under the glaciers, washing them to the sea.
Doubt the ocean rising all you want, but that does not prevent it or slow it down.
And Ken, techies will not save us. Technology requires huge amounts of money to be spent in research and development. That too will disappear when the financial system collapses under the debt mountain. Star Trek is fun, but no more a prediction of our future than the TV show, The Jetsons was.
Ken Nohe on Wed, 28th Nov 2012 4:19 am
Sorry my “Star Trek” comment wasn’t clear enough. It was just to illustrate the fact that we have no visibility whatsoever beyond a decade or two. Star Trek belongs to the 1970s not to the XXIII century.
Oceans rising is not an issue right now since the rise is minimal for the time being so we’d be better off working on real issues, not potential ones. Also, we will not stabilize CO2 because we can’t. This is a done deal. The only reason why developed countries have stabilized CO2 until now is that polluting industries have been “exported” mostly to China. But the overall result for the planet is the same. Growth means more CO2.
Still, over the last 2 hundred years, technology has brought solution. This is why the Malthus predictions have been proven wrong again and again. Yes, we bump into limits, but we also always find solutions. We can always replace something with something else. Just as a typical example, Japan right now has a dreadful “rare earth” problem thanks to China. Some people predicted the end of the world as we know it when this happened. Well, within 2 to 3 years most technologies based on rare earth will have been replaced and it will just be the end of that particular story.
But there is an exception which is oil. We simply cannot replace oil with a cheaper, denser energy source. Consequently, as the price of oil rises, our lifestyle will decline. We can extract tar sands, frack deep layers of oily rocks, liquefy coal and we will. Thanks to that production will be maintained and may even grow a little, but at a steep price. First to our “real” income which will decline, this is already the case, then to our environment which we will massively degrade. This too is already the case, but far from where we live so few people are aware of it.
Compared to that, the sea rising is trivial. More acqua alta in Venice will not kill our civilization, not even the city. If the worst came to pass and seas really did rise, well most developed countries would become like the Netherlands where 1/3 of the land is below sea level. Then what? This is simply not a key issue.
SOS on Wed, 28th Nov 2012 4:36 am
Ken, wonderful post!
BillT on Wed, 28th Nov 2012 10:41 am
Ken, you are not seeing the picture. Sea rise IS important because it will NOT be equal all over the world. The rise will be greater at the equator and less as you go north or south. That is simple physics.
Oil IS the tech society. When and as it goes, so goes tech. ALL tech starts in mines. Mines mined with oil. Mines will NOT be run by solar or wind or tide or the fantasy fusion that will NEVER happen.
You see that we will slide down the energy slope and have a 3rd world economy (if we are lucky) when it hits bottom. But, you seem to think that there is a tech magic wand that will make a difference. Nope!
And the ice cover on Antarctica (South Pole not Arctic) Would raise the oceans 340 feet, plus another 20 feet from Greenland, plus heat expansion = not the Netherlands, but Atlantis. ALL major cities in the world would be underwater if they were at an elevation less than 260 feet, which is most, if not all cities of any use.
BillT on Wed, 28th Nov 2012 10:44 am
360 feet…not 260
Arthur on Wed, 28th Nov 2012 10:54 am
http://www.trouw.nl/tr/nl/4332/Groen/article/detail/3354776/2012/11/28/Zeespiegel-stijgt-sneller-dan-voorspeld.dhtml
Rate of sealevel rising is increasing and was 3.2 mm last year. According to UN rise will be 18-59 cm in this century. Other researchers say 50-100 cm.
csatadi on Wed, 28th Nov 2012 10:59 am
@BillT
“According to my research, there are 42 volcanoes under the ice on Antarctica. Inactive for now but potentially dangerous. In my book, they are activated, moving most of the miles deep ice off of the continent in a matter of days as they melt the ice and create rivers under the glaciers, washing them to the sea.”
If I were you I would choose a single supervolcanoe eruption on the Antarctica than dozens of regular ones. It is more believable.
Arthur on Wed, 28th Nov 2012 11:03 am
“Oil IS the tech society. When and as it goes, so goes tech. ALL tech starts in mines. Mines mined with oil. Mines will NOT be run by solar or wind or tide or the fantasy fusion that will NEVER happen.”
Driving an hour in a car costs 50,000 times the amount of energy it costs to read webpages for an hour on an ipad. That’s why cars and planes will not survive the end of the carbon age but low energy footprint electronics will. It does not make sense to advocate a return to the middle ages if we do not have to. There will be oil, gas and coal for centuries to come if we are able to apply demand destruction to suffient levels to kill the biggest villain on the planet, the car.
Ken Nohe on Wed, 28th Nov 2012 3:16 pm
3.2mm per year is insignificant. We can cope with that. I live about 50m above sea level and dig up some shells in my garden from time to time. Not yet fossilized, they are only 100,000 years old but clearly the sea was there not so long ago and it will be back but not worryingly soon. It did make a good try last year though; the tsunami was about 5m high on the coast 30 km away. In Japan and along the Pacific coast, the risk of a tsunami is much more real and immediate than the sea rising. I am sure you will agree with that. Still, life goes on. Painfully but it goes on.
I am not a global warming denier, but I do believe that the risk is far lower than what people make of it. Looking at the long term, our planet is right in the middle of a long ice age with very short periods of less cold periods in-between. We just happen to be in the middle of one of these, probably not too far from the end in fact. (That is what 20m years of ice on the South pole continent is telling us.) So if we really want to worry about the long term, global cooling may be a better bet than global warming. Worse, a slight rise in temperature may indeed increase the outflow of ice in the northern part of the ocean, mostly from Greenland. But if that happens, a direct result may be a slowing down of the global conveyor belt bringing up… a quick and widespread cooling!
Still, too much CO2 in the atmosphere is probably not good as it is forcing the system (which we still do not understand well) in unknown ways. My point is simply that we can’t help it beyond mere rhetoric. Doing something significant would be so painful, including wars and revolutions that it cannot happen voluntarily. (I am not saying that it won’t happen, I actually believe it will, just not voluntarily.) And oil will most probably have a lot to do with it, as the most valuable natural resource. Compared to that the sea rising 20 cm in 30 or 40 years will be trivial.
Arthur on Wed, 28th Nov 2012 4:19 pm
I must correct myself, these 3.2 mm was not just in 2011 but on average per year between 1990 en 2011 or 7 cm in the last 20 year. Holland can survive 100 cm, after that it will game over soon for us, at least in the western provinces North-Holland, South-Holland and Zealand.
actioncjackson on Wed, 28th Nov 2012 5:00 pm
Rising sea levels is only one of the consequences of global warming. Another catastrophic consequence is the death of land based biological life when the hospitable temperature spectrum threshold is breached and critical tree and plant ecosystems are destroyed so rapidly that adaptation is impossible, destroying life’s current configuration. I recall that threshold being predicted at around 10 degrees fahrenheit but need source on that number.
Ken Nohe on Wed, 28th Nov 2012 8:55 pm
As for Holland, I was wondering if post-glacial rebound would not save the country but as I checked on the net, it looks like although the North of England is indeed rebounding, the South conversely is sinking slightly, about 5 cm per century. I would guess it is the same for the Netherlands and in that case, clearly it won’t help.
As for ecosystems, they are rarely “destroyed” naturally; they just “move” away and are replaced. This is very much part of the natural cycle and a major driver of evolution. But mankind does “destroy” ecosystems and massively. Most of the forest of South-East Asia have been replaced by plantations. It still looks green but under the trees, it is a desert. This is a far more radical and rapid change than what global warming can ever do but few people seems to care about it.
csatadi on Thu, 29th Nov 2012 12:09 am
Sea level changes by NOAA:
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.shtml
If the average of the annual sea level rise will rise to 4mm/year within 4-6 years then I admit there is an accelerating trend.