Gentle Decline 2/10: Summer & Submersion
Gentle Decline 2/10: Summer & Submersion
Floods, fires, new heat records, and some recognition of reality in the media.
Hello. It’s being a chaotic summer all over the Northern Hemisphere, and a chaotic winter all over the Southern. This is, unfortunately, pretty much as predicted by climate science, and as denied and belittled by corporate and political entities everywhere. In this issue, I’m going to take a look at the climate-driven disasters we’re seeing; what could be done to prevent future disasters (mostly at a level of at least the local authority); some other preventative work on damage from sea-level rise; and directly connected to these, some thoughts about individualism and ways in which it can be dangerous. Pot-shots at capitalism along the way are probably inevitable, but I’ll try to keep things on topic.
[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. You can support the newsletter via Patreon, Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise. The spotlighted product for this issue is the D&D-oriented collection of Post-Apocalyptic Character Class T-shirts & Hoodies, thus far available for the Druid, Warlock, and Bard classes. More coming soon!]
It’s early August as I sit down to write this. Our own backyard raspberries didn’t do very well this year, but given the stellar crop we had last year, I can’t complain. Instead, Nina and I went to a pick-your-own fruit farm in the hills of south Dublin - which had a fantastic view out over the city, too - and got a little over 4kg of raspberries in an hour’s picking. I made jam from it, which came to about 7kg all told, and it is ridiculously good. It looks like the blackberry harvest this year could also be excellent (last year’s looked that way and turned out poor, though), and the elderberries are well on the way. We have elderberry wine made last year, which should be good by now.
We had a heatwave - not huge by global standards, but up to 28C some days, and enough to turn me semi-nocturnal for a week or so - and we’ve had some intense rain, but that’s been about it for extreme weather right here. Other places in Ireland have had very localised flash floods, and in the UK, there was serious flooding. Since that was in London, it got more media attention than it might otherwise have done. There was also fairly extreme flooding in New York, and in China and Germany (& Belgium) there were full-on disasters. Meantime, of course, there are wildfires in many parts of the Western US, Greece, Turkey and a wide swathe of Siberia. Also, there was giant hail in Italy:
In the Southern Hemisphere, snow fell in Brazil and low temperature records were broken in South Africa. By anyone’s standards, that’s a mess, and it follows wildfires in the US and Australia in 2020, flooding in more places than I can link to, and is generally a pattern of more chaotic weather in general.
The major thing that’s striking people about many of these is their unexpected nature (in the specific, at least). In particular, the German and Belgian floods were caused by direct rainfall, and happened in places that really had no significant preparations made. Forecasts and warnings were issued in good time, but the affected areas simply did not have any way to handle the level of rain that fell. That could, unfortunately, happen anywhere in Europe in years to come - slow-moving, extremely intense rainfall is a characteristic of predicted weather from now on. And anywhere that has trees and gets dry can have fires - there were extensive fires in Kerry and in the Mourne Mountains in April of this year.
There are ways to help deal with this, but they’re going to involve changes to land usage, and it’s generally accurate to say that land-owners, as a class of people, hate change. Soakage areas are one of the most important aspects - this involves leaving river channels undeveloped, encouraging the growth of trees on their banks, allowing flood plains to be flooded, and not building the kind of ‘flood prevention’ that channels all the water downstream. In Ireland, the OPW are notorious for this, and other short-sighted efforts - the tactic appears to be “stop the water overflowing here, and shunt it downstream”, with no particular regard for what will happen afterwards.
There’s also a need to look at architecture, roads, bridges, and so forth, and work out what’s going to happen if that particular structure is hit by a large flow of water. As can be seen from the pictures of Germany and Belgium, unprepared infrastructure can be washed away. And having worked out what needs to be done, the changes then need to be made - soakage provided, drainage channels dug to enable off-flow, flood barriers emplaced, and so on. There’s a need for informational infrastructure too; there were forecasts and warnings for the European floods, but people were not evacuated. The article I’ve linked there calls attention to the need for people to actually imagine the outcomes of floods:
Effective flood warnings require people to be able to see into the future and imagine their house full of water, to assess the likelihood of that happening, and to see the multiple paths they could take to keep them, their family, and their property safe. […W]e are seeing what happens when people cannot visualise the threat of a river ripping down their street, or a lake appearing in their house.
In that vein, there’s been a trend lately on Twitter for maps showing local effects of climate change.
These are probably more helpful in convincing people that there is an issue that will affect them than broader points of view (although there will always be some people who deny reality; we’ve seen people dying of COVID-19 continuing to claim it’s a hoax in recent weeks).
It’s worthwhile looking at your own immediate area, and trying to work out what would happen if a very large, slow-moving rainstorm were to park itself overhead for a day or so. For those who aren’t familiar with the area where I live, Maynooth - like much of Kildare - is very flat. The Irish name is Maigh Nuad; “the plains of Nuada”. I did a good bit of looking at maps and checking flow directions and so forth before we bought this house. It isn’t absolutely perfect - we’re at the back of an estate that slopes gently down from the road at the front - but in the exceptional circumstances that there was enough water to generate flow, most of it would go past the next block of houses over on the slope, and any water coming directly past us would flow straight into the next estate (where it would probably wreak havoc on the houses of our immediate neighbours there, who are a good 45cm below us). There’s a lot of green space within the estate, though, so there’d be significant soakage from that. Ironically, as I’m writing this paragraph, there’s enough rain to make the road behind the house (outside the estate and behind a high, solid wall) look flooded. In reality, it’s only a few millimetres deep. The other danger would be from the relatively nearby stream, but it runs in a partially underground channel, which will result in most of an exceptional flow backing up on the other side of the motorway in farmland.
The motorway, in this case, acts like a dyke, which leads me neatly into my next topic: what the Dutch are doing about sea level rise. Gav, frequent contributor to this newsletter in one form or another, pointed me at a video about the storm gates that have been constructed in the Netherlands. (Yes, I am linking to YouTube. Yes, it is about the second time ever. No, I still do not think YouTube is a useful medium for information. But the animations in this are useful.)
Broadly, the Dutch have built a large and fairly complex system to prevent storms from flooding their country, a large amount of which is below sea level. However, for the rest of the world, this is one of the really annoying areas where the technology and the knowledge already exist, and governments - and people, in many cases - are not only not doing anything about it, but are opposed to it. There's my favourite case in Clontarf, in North Dublin, where an installed sea wall was lowered because it was blocking the view, and the concept of "managed retreat" along Irish coastlines and river valleys - which is an essential part of the Dutch strategy - won't quite get you lynched in the relevant areas, but the attitude isn't good.
There's a pretty constant refrain of "it's too expensive", too. Actually measuring what the Netherlands has spent on water defences since 1953 (when there was a large storm with a number of fatalities) is hard, because maybe half of it is at local levels, but a billion euros a year, every year, since 1953, building on the stuff that's been going in with less investment since the 13th century, seems to be in the right ballpark. Ireland has no history of it, and and putting in the (absolute shot in the dark, likely low) €30-40 billion to get started on protecting cities and the more valuable coastal farmland seems like it'll be a hard hill to climb until some areas are underwater - at which point it'll be even more expensive.
The Dutch approach is absolutely the right technology (particularly because it already exists, rather than needing to be invented still) and the right strategy. But there's no political will, anywhere else, to make it work.
Gav did point out that some work has in fact been done on the Dodder river in Dublin to make it better at handling flood waters, and provided me with some pictures. One of the defences that’s been put in place are flood walls made partially of glass:
and also metal gates that can be closed over:
… all of which will probably handle a 3-4m rise in the water level there, and prevent flooding as happened in 2011.
I have two points of scepticism to sound there, though. First is that Ballsbridge is a moderately wealthy area of Dublin, and it’s interesting to see that it has solid flood defences installed while other parts don’t, and the second is that these defences will only work against a flood slightly worse than that of 2011. That flooding was caused by a fall of 90mm of rain in 6 hours coinciding with a high tide. 90mm in six hours absolutely is exceptional, by 20th century standards. I would be unsurprised to see rainfall like that - or, importantly, more - every decade or so in the 21st. And these defences do nothing but prevent Ballsbridge from being flooded; they shunt the water downriver and out to sea, instead of providing any runoff-handling, soakage, or the like. To be fair, that’s not a thing Ballsbridge should be trying to do; there isn’t room in a dense urban environment to do it. What should be done is to plant trees and clear out flood plains further upriver, and that’s the measure most vociferously opposed in Ireland, where no article about environmental measures ever goes without mention of the cost.
However, I am seeing (the start of) a turnaround in the global media, if not Irish. There was a lot more acknowledgement than I expected in the coverage of the European floods that the climate crisis was connected. Rebecca Solnit observes in the Guardian that:
The rise in public engagement [… is] definitely growing, both as an increasingly powerful movement and as a matter of individual consciousness.
and Jonathan Watts in the same paper observes that attitudes to summer are changing, which I feel is about time. And researcher Juan Moreno-Cruz is singing from my hymnsheet:
(There’s a good thread of his commentary below that; do click through.)
In that context, though, one of the things with which I wrestle regularly is that this newsletter is broadly dedicated to allowing - or encouraging - individuals to cope with the effects of the climate crisis, rather than focusing on collective efforts to deal with it. In the long term, this isn’t healthy - we cannot, as individuals, survive the coming changes. We need communities, support structures, towns and cities; we cannot all move to south-facing cottages on non-flooding ground in which to grow potatoes and keep goats. But at the same time, if some of us don’t do that, then there are no toeholds, no anchors for the people who can’t.
There’s a lot of philosophical and literary stuff tied up in the concept of individualism. Historically, in Western thought, it really only begins to crop up in the Renaissance, and if you go digging, you can find strange statements like “people did not think as individuals before Shakespeare”. I don’t have the philosophical chops (nor, really, the inclination) to go digging through that, but there is a point buried in it. I don’t mean that people before the 17th century were hive-minds, or didn’t think of themselves at all, but it’s pretty clear that work was done to advance the family and the household rather than any one person. People outside of community structures were regarded with suspicion (the laws concerning vagabonds are indicative), and personal profit was in some cases literally illegal (engrossing, forestalling and regrating, all things we now regard as being part of normal commercial operations, were against the law in England for long periods).
We’re now in an era where personal freedoms are considered so important - particularly in the US, where it’s essentially a fetish - that people will refuse to wear masks or get vaccines in a pandemic, place street furniture on which you can’t sleep or sometimes even sit, and protest against universal healthcare because they don’t want to contribute to the benefit of other people. This ethos, for want of a better word, has swamped conservatism in many places.
Of my three maxims for coping with climate crisis - Move Inland; Grow Food; Be Generous - this falls under “Be Generous”. Looking out only for yourself, making preparations that benefit only you, and in extremes, acting to prevent others from benefiting, will only ever end badly. The American prepper idea of sitting in a bunker with five years worth of canned food and fifty years worth of ammunition simply cannot work; sooner or later you need to climb out, and the communities that have survived will not be keen on armed freeloaders (see Cory Doctorow’s story Masque of the Red Death for an illustration).
At the same time, it is very evident that the world in general simply will not move to deal with the changes that are coming. This is not to say that there are no things happening - as detailed above, there are, and they will help - but there there are not sufficient changes being made, and that it is too late to prevent disasters. So any individual has to look to their own preparation, while encouraging others to do the same, and including looking after other people in their plans.
Finally, a very large number of you - and a good few people who don’t actually subscribe to GD - sent me an Irish Times article about Ireland being one of the top 5 places in the world to survive a global collapse of society. This must be that “strong personal brand” thing. However, while I don’t disagree with it in broad principle, there’ve been a number of issues identified with that study, and in particular, it assumes that food production can continue as before. As I’ve pointed out before, early 21st century food production is hugely dependent on fossil fuels, and electric vehicles cannot replace that - if, indeed, we were able to construct electric vehicles in Ireland. But if a very great many of us switch back to food production, the initial study holds its ground pretty well. In any case, Ireland will probably be a better place than most to be in the years and decades to come.
[Support this newsletter (and Commonplace, its food-related sibling) and allow me to keep on eating while I hammer on the keyboard and stare at the sky. Patreon is here, and for those thinking more of the one-time coin in the hat, Ko-fi is available. And the merchandise shop is here. Major research contributions in this issue by Cee.]