Brian Fagan, whose The Great Warming is the single best history of climactic change over the course of history, writes this week in The New York Times of the unseen dangers of rising sea levels:
Fifty thousand drowned, steamships aground with their bows among trees, cattle rolled head over heels by gigantic waves — stories of great sea surges from past centuries abound. Many of them cascaded ashore when coastlines were relatively stable, killing everyone in their path. Today, we live in a warming world of rising sea levels, where tens of millions of us live a few meters above the ocean. The potential for sudden cataclysm is greater than ever.
The record of history is sobering. On Jan. 16, 1362, a severe southwesterly storm swept across the British Isles. The wooden spire of Norwich cathedral in eastern England collapsed.
Hours later, the Grote Mandrenke, “The Great Killing of Men,” descended on the Low Countries at high tide. Huge waves carried everything before them. “An infinity of people perished,” fishing fleets became matchwood, entire herds of cattle and sheep perished in the raging waters. Three centuries later, in 1634, another cataclysmic storm surge brought sea levels four meters above normal to the Strand Islands off northern Germany. As many as 15,000 people and 50,000 livestock drowned.
The point is that we fool ourselves if we suppose that the seemingly modest annual rise in sea level has no consequences in our lives today. Witness Katrina, witness Sandy (the risks for damage from both were accurately projected by scientists. by the way).
But lets open our eyes to a less scientific and more thoughtful analysis of the changing sea, by the great editor Lewis Lapham, formerly of Harper's, writing this one for Tom Dispatch. He points out that Rachel Carson, among many other great writers, thought of the vast ever-changing sea as somehow beyond the reach of our powers, and found great reassurance there. But it's no longer true:
Rachel Carson, the perceptive and far-seeing naturalist, in 1951 assured the readers of The Sea Around Us that mankind "cannot control or change the ocean as, in his brief tenancy on earth, he has subdued and plundered the continents." She subsequently revised the opinion, remarking in one of her later notebooks, "Even in the vast and mysterious reaches of the sea we are brought back to the fundamental truth that nothing lives to itself." […]
We needn't call upon an angry god to make the sea an object of no small terror. Every year we withdraw from it 160 million tons of fish, deposit in it 7 million tons of garbage. Poisonous chemicals in the Gulf of Mexico have formed a pool of dead water equivalent in size to the state of New Jersey; among the several hundred dead zones elsewhere in the world, one encircles the Chinese coastline.
If the sea levels continue to rise at their current rate, the day is not far off when Miami and Atlantic City become beds for oysters. The fishing in the sea that was once near the surface now is done by trawls the length of locomotives dropped to the depth of a mile and dragged across the bottom, reducing many thousands of square miles of the ocean floor to barren deserts no longer giving birth to the tiny organisms from which emerge the great chains of being that sustain the life of the planet.
Nothing in the sea lives by itself, nothing either on the earth or in the air or in the minds of men. To know the sea is mortal is to know that we are not apart from it. Man is nature creatively refashioning itself. The abyss is human, not divine, a work in progress, whether made with a poet's metaphor or with a vast prodigious bulk of Styrofoam.
"The abyss is human" = we have remade the sea.
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Kit Stolz 