Gentle Decline 2/8: Occasion and Opposition

In which the writer preaches to the choir. But maybe you can forward this on to people who live on the coast.

Hello. The weather is being particularly chaotic right around now, with a “flip” in temperatures from the mid to high 20s in parts of Europe on March 31st, followed by freezing and sub-freezing temperatures in the early days of April. I was ambling around in a t-shirt last week, complaining vaguely about it being too warm, and then there were snow showers on Monday and Tuesday morning. This uneven distribution of weather is the future.

(And for some slightly disturbing visuals on this, see fires burning in French vineyards to try to prevent frost damage.)

[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 Gentle Decline Pride T-shirt, and to be honest, I’m not going to try to say anything smart about that one. I will, however, donate the (small) profit to an appropriate charity for each one bought.]

I’ve seen a few conversations on social media - and exercised iron self-control in order to not jump straight into them - which come down to “well, so what if sea level rises? we already get high tides” and “a few more storms won’t make any difference” and so forth - essentially claiming that with a few small changes, life will continue as before in an era of more manifest climate crisis.

And I’d like to take a moment here to clarify one thing. One of Gentle Decline’s 3 Rules is “move inland”. If you’re renting, this is relatively easy (insofar as moving house is ever easy, and insofar as moving to a different town or county is ever easy). If you own your house, you have to look at selling it, and, well, for possibly the first time ever, let me point you at something on YouTube. I do not know if that’s Ben Shapiro’s real voice in the first bit (I have never knowingly heard him and don’t intend to), or if he’s been dubbed over for extra mockery. The gist is: if you own a house near the coast (or other low-lying areas that will be subject to more flooding in the future), then it is in your interest to sell it now, while there are still people who will buy it, rather than in the future when you have to talk to Arthur Curry about the value of cowrie shells. Are you passing the problem on to someone else? Absolutely you are. But for the moment, we live in a capitalist society, and if you don’t sell that problem to someone else, you’ll get to deal with it. Eventually, ideally, there should be a managed retreat program wherein governments buy coastal land, demolish the buildings, and leave it empty, as is being done in some parts of the US. But that’s an ideal that few enough governments are going to follow through on. If you’re already moved inland, you can help other people (3rd rule, Be Generous); if you haven’t, then you’re one of the people who’ll need help.

As an aside, though, if you’re selling to someone who’s buying a second (or third, fourth, etc.) house in order to rent it out, I feel the moral position gets a lot stronger. “Investment” in property is a concept that really needs to disappear, so any encouragement for it to do is on the side of the angels. This does mean that in the short term, it will look like you’ve lost money, or not made as much as you could. In the longer term, your buyer’s money, or that of whoever they in turn sell to, is literally sunk.

So, those minimising ah-it-won’t-be-that-bad attitudes. Here’s a picture of a part of Enniscorthy, which was the local “big town” for the area in which I grew up, from Google Streetview.

It’s a nice town, the more so now that it’s been bypassed and isn’t having the entire East Coast traffic load go through it. My uncle’s motor factor’s shop is in this picture, if you know where to look; several cousins live elsewhere in the town, and my brother lives a few kilometres outside it. The river is the Slaney.

Now, this is pretty much the same spot (with different focal lengths or some such camera stuff) in November 2014:

(Picture from the Wexford People newspaper)

Enniscorthy is at the tidal limit of the Slaney, and has “always” been prone to flooding; there’ve been severe floods in 1924, 1947, 1965, 2000, 2002, 2009, 2011, 2014 and 2015. Obviously, a quick glance at those dates shows that they’re all after the beginning of the 20th century, and most of them are within the last 20 years (21 if you want to be pedantic). But that’s with sea level where it is now. For every centimetre that sea level rises, those floods (which will obviously continue to happen) will get at least one centimetre higher - and given the shape of the Slaney valley, it might be more. Take a look at the second picture there and imagine those flood waters a metre higher, or two. Alternately, imagine that this is the water level at every spring tide, or every high tide at all. Clearly, this is no longer habitable.

I’m using Enniscorthy here because it’s a town I’m familiar with, and I can find the relevant points of view for comparison relatively easily. But it’s also worth noting how far inland it is.

(Image directly from Google Maps)

The same effects will happen on all rivers - places that are a long way inland will have much worse flooding, and may simply be underwater some of the time under tidal effects. And anywhere that’s at sea level is essentially done for. See this article in the NYT for an illustration of some houses at sea level (which I find straight-up terrifying), and also a discussion of where money to do something about this in the short term is going to come from. Some of those people are already stuck, though. Nobody in their right mind is going to buy those houses, even if, mind-bogglingly, there’s a rising market for holiday homes elsewhere in the same town. And many of them don’t want to leave a town they’ve lived in for a long time. I sympathise, but… unless you’re ok with waking up some stormy night to find your bed afloat, I just don’t think that’s a suitable place for living in anymore.

Ok, says our hypothetical interlocuter (who can conveniently be made to say some really daft things) but that’s just a few places; sea level isn’t supposed to go up by more than a metre or two in this whole century. And if you look at floodmap.net and set the rise to 2m, it really doesn’t look like much. The problem is that a lot of people live in that bit of coast, and there’s a lot of infrastructure there. I’ve talked before about how places like Bangladesh are going to be mostly underwater, and how many cities are on sea coasts. But if you zoom in and look at, say, Dublin with a 2m sea level rise, it’s not really a lot of the city.

There are two issues with this. First, “not really a lot” is still “some”, and it’s an area in which there are a lot of houses and infrastructure. Even a relatively small number of houses - a few hundred, say - becoming unusable will put a lot of pressure on things, the more so since they’re not, in the current market, low-priced houses. I just took a look at the prices of houses on the Strand Road in Sandymount, Dublin, and the cheapest one I could see was €595k, up to €3.5m in one case. Those houses either being thigh-deep in water, or having to take visible precautions to prevent that being the case, will change a lot. The infrastructure is no less important - the main (for which read: only) train line for the east coast of Ireland has some sections that are inches above the sea now, and can be shut down by any storm that causes high waves. A metre or two more of sea water will render that line unusable, and it’s not as though it can be shuffled inland without some serious demolishing of existing structures. And then think about the number of electrical and phone junction boxes that are in that area. See also (in one small bit of Dublin) the Poolbeg Power Station, the Dublin Waste to Energy Plant, and Dublin Port. All of those are going to have to be relocated.

Second, the one-or-two-metre map misses something: how far inland water will sometimes come. Most people are familiar with how far waves come in on a beach; where it’s flat, they can roll in for tens of metres over areas that aren’t really underwater. Beaches tend to have dunes or banks at the high-tide mark; these stop waves from coming further. Imagine, now, that those dunes or banks aren’t there - or rather, that they’re submerged, and new ones haven’t built up yet, because they take decades at best to do so. Without them, ordinary waves at high tide will reach inland another few tens of metres, maybe fifty or sixty in the right conditions. And storm waves, which currently break on waterfronts and toss sea-spray inland will roll in for silly distances. Where they’re compressed by streets and buildings, these can build to relatively high speeds and pressures; enough to loosen bricks and concrete. Underground car parks and the like are particularly vulnerable (that story is from 2011, one of Enniscorthy’s flood years, but is in Ballsbridge in Dublin). So the effects go way further - and sometimes in more unpredictable directions - than the flood mapping might indicate. If you add to that the effects that “flood mitigation” has - as in, places upriver making arrangements to have the water drain downriver faster - then you end up with a potential disaster zone a few kilometres deep along coasts and river valleys. And of course, cities are built on coasts where rivers run into the sea.

There are, absolutely, ways to mitigate these effects. First is the building of sea walls and other coastal defences, although it will be necessary to deal with some of these being moderately ugly and blocking views from cars (and houses, eventually). The views from cars thing is stupid, by the bye. The second is planting trees and allowing more vegetation in general (rewilding) in river valleys and uplands. This will involve removing sheep from many of Ireland’s mountains, and allowing trees to grow there; the bare-except-for-heather things we have at the moment are far from the natural state. Those trees will then absorb (and enable the soil around them to absorb) vastly more water than the bare ground currently there does. This is, of course, the direct opposite of the OPW’s current set of plans, which basically consist of clearing out or covering over streams and river valleys so that all the water is shunted downstream as quickly as possible.

The main problems with the two approaches are local opposition to sea walls, which, as noted above, is stupid, and farming organisations opposing the removal of sheep and rewilding of land, which is no less stupid. People not knowing what to do about climate issues is one thing; people knowing what to do and opposing the measures for short-term reasons, conservatism or greed (where those two are not the same thing, which is most of the time) are a thing calculated to annoy me.

So what can any individual do here? Well, Move Inland. Short of that, you can publicly support the construction of flood defences, query government at all levels about what they’re doing with infrastructure, and maybe make some contributions to organisations that are rewilding relevant areas. More on that - and on the actual move inland - in a future issue.

This issue brought to you by a very attentive spaniel, a return to carnivorous habits, and some really interesting consultancy work. Notwithstanding the last sentence of the previous paragraph, I've given up on trying to say what the next issue will be in advance, but I'm taking requests and questions. If you hit reply, you can send stuff straight to me!

Gentle Decline is on Twitter as @gentledecline, or you can visit gentledecline.org.

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