Welcome to 2012

Another year, another sign from the Chinese zodiac! In this case, the dragon – or Black Water Dragon to be precise.

Happy New Year – a little late, you might be thinking. The Chinese New Year starts tomorrow, 23rd January, though, so I’m actually a day early.

What sort of year will 2012 be? According to various sources, a Black Water Dragon year will be a “strong Water year”, where “the unexpected may happen”.

I’ll go further than that – I’m sure that in 2012, the unexpected will happen – and frequently!

Things, in fact, would be rather amiss if it didn’t.

Dreamliners Over the Great Circle

Some reasons to be cheerful, as 2011 draws to its close. Firstly, the Great Circle Route over the North Pole has now been cleared for Virgin Atlantic’s new twin-engined Boeing 787 Dreamliners (as reported here in Watts Up With That.) One day I would love to revisit Hawaii, and it would be very nice to fly direct from London Heathrow and enjoy gazing down over the Arctic ice en route.

I have flown over the Arctic before, having returned to London from Tokyo in 1984 with a JAL flight which had a brief stopover in Anchorage, and I have several photos of the distant ice pack taken from my window seat. It would be great to see it again, insulated by the great altitude from the usual nuisances of Arctic travel such as attack from roving polar bears (which I gather are increasing in number.)

Of course, a major spanner in the works would be another volcanic eruption in Iceland, perhaps bigger and nastier than Eyjafjallajokull in 2010. Katla could blow up at any time (it last erupted in 1918, so the next one is probably overdue) and earthquakes in its vicinity have becoming more frequent, perhaps signalling something more violent about to happen.

However, a new technology called AVOID (airborne volcanic object imaging detector) might be of great help, should that happen. It involves mounting infrared cameras on the wings of aircraft, making pilots aware of unhealthy concentrations of volcanic ash in the flight path, so that they can change course and avoid disaster. This was tested this year over Etna, and now easyJet are planning to equip their airliners with these devices next summer. Hopefully other airlines will follow suit, and (fingers crossed) we will not see a repeat of the blanket ban over Europe during the Eyjafjallajokull eruption, which caused so much travel chaos.

Human idiocy is of course far more intractable a problem than mere forces of nature, such as volcanoes. I’m referring here to the sclerotic EU and its carbon tax on international airlines. China is threatening a trade war over it, and on this subject at least, I’m with the Chinese (and the U.S. and other nations who stand to lose by it and might be persuaded to take on the mouldering EU empire.) Of course, EU Climate Commissioner (and committed carbon-cutting careerist) Connie Hedegaard is pleased with the European Court of Justice and its recent blessing and support for the tax. Well, she would be, wouldn’t she. My hope, on the other hand is that economic reality will finally prevail and overwhelm the bureaucrats in a financial dust cloud that will ground – for good – all the wonderful low-carbon plans they have for us. Sooner rather than later, preferably!

Mustn’t turn this into too much of a rant, although the temptation is certainly there. As I wrote earlier, there are reasons to be positive, even though I find you have to go deliberately looking for them sometimes. And it’s the season of goodwill, after all. So…

Here’s to enterprise, innovation, liberty, modernity, wealth, joy and new adventures – cheers!

Donna Laframboise: The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert

This is a book review that I’ve very recently posted on Amazon.co.uk. I thought hard about whether to award this book 4 or 5 stars; I agree with another commentator, Robin Guenier, that the author presents a view of the Y2K episode that is not entirely correct, having myself been one of those who worked behind the scenes to correct Y2K issues. However, in my opinion, this does not detract from the main thrust of the book – so 5 stars it is. (Y2K is actually a very interesting story in itself, and I may blog about that in future.)

It’s an all too familiar story – something that when viewed from a distance appears perfectly fine but on closer inspection turns out to be a mess. The flawless makeup concealing a face covered in blemishes, the smooth paint job disguising a lethally decrepit car, the beautiful mansion later found to be riddled with dry rot, the brilliant and charismatic politician with – alas – feet of clay.

This can equally apply to institutions. Take the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Ever since it was established in 1988, the IPCC has been held up as an exemplary organisation, representing a “gold standard” for the synthesis of climate science. Operating with utter transparency and relying only on solid, peer-reviewed material, an army of 2,500 expert reviewers and over a thousand contributing and lead authors from all over the globe have been working tirelessly to build a superlative up-to-date and reliable picture of the science of climate change, which in turn can be used, with absolute confidence, to inform and underpin the policies of governments the world over.

Except – it turns out that this is not exactly the case. Enter Donna Laframboise, Canadian writer and blogger, who, aided by a team of citizen auditors, has painstakingly examined the workings of the IPCC, placed them under the microscope, so to speak, and reports her findings in this very timely book. And what she has uncovered is a picture radically different to the one the IPCC would like the world to see. One by one, she refutes and demolishes a number of key assertions made by the IPCC and its supporters over the years.

The IPCC’s material is prepared by the finest scientific minds? Well, no – many of them are little more than activists, who have worked for Greenpeace or for wildlife charity turned climate-campaigning behemoth, WWF. People at the top of their profession? Hardly – quite a few of them have been graduate students in their twenties. The IPCC only uses peer-reviewed scientific literature? No again – many of its sources have been newspaper and magazine articles, press releases and documents from environmental organisations. And authoritative? Some of its bolder claims, for instance that 20-30% of all plant and animal species are at risk of extinction due to global warming, are based on flawed and controversial scientific studies. Behind the crisp, definitive headline statements like Ban Ki-moon’s “the world’s scientists have spoken, clearly and with one voice”, exists something far less clear-cut – a body of work that is more like a perplexing, indeterminate mass of uncertainties, likelihoods, suggestions, coulds, mights and maybes.

In addition, the author describes the IPCC’s various underhand practices, its lack of openness, its defensiveness and its arrival at predetermined conclusions. What she reveals is an unattractive picture of an organisation staffed with activists and reliant on “grey material” from partisan lobby groups, an organisation which has been set up to promulgate a certain point of view, and accordingly has employed whatever means it feels is justified, including the frequent breaking of its own rules. An organisation that is meant to be “policy-neutral”, but whose chairman is an outspoken advocate for carbon prices, vegetarianism, aviation taxes and, overall, a “radical value shift” in the western world.

The next IPPC report on the state of climate science (AR8) is due out in 2013, and even if a fraction of what Donna Laframboise reports in her book is accurate, an urgent root-and-branch reform of this organisation is sorely needed, at the very least. Whether this will happen in time to make a real difference is another matter entirely.

In The Delinquent Teenager, Donna Laframboise has written a succinct and hard-hitting book, which I think should be read and heeded by those from all sides of the climate debate. It is a product of the sort of methodical investigative journalism the mainstream media have consistently failed to deploy when it comes to climate change, and it arrives at a time when the institutions of climate science, with all their shortcomings, deserve to be under more scrutiny than ever before.

Summer’s End

It’s that time of the year again. Mornings and evenings are becoming noticeably shadowy and chill. August is behind us and we’re starting to head back down into the cold and the dark of the year. Time to bolt the doors, draw the curtains, turn up the lights and settle down to some blogging once more.

This is a particularly beautiful time of year, I always feel. The autumn leaves are just starting to fall, fungi are ripening, the woods and parks and riverside areas of west London are still full of colour. This is when garden spiders are at their largest and most fearsome, and when the dew on their webs sparkles in the bright morning sunshine. Michaelmas daisies are everywhere, suddenly.

Definitely time to get down to some more writing – and there’s lots to write about.

UPDATE

And now it’s November. Yes, must do some writing before year’s end! I’ll probably do a sort of round-up edition of “100 Years of Climate Change” towards the close of 2011, but before then, I’m planning to write a few book reviews.

100 Years of Climate Change: Part 5

In my little area of the world, we’re enjoying something of a mini heat wave at the moment, with temperatures in this neighbourhood set to reach 27 degrees Celsius tomorrow. However, we’re also assured that, in true classic English summer style, it will all end on Tuesday in a crescendo of thunderstorms, hail, driving rain and flash floods. I’m looking forward to that, in a way, as we haven’t had a decent thunderstorm in ages.

And talking of which… On Saturday 4th June the Derby took place at Epsom, as it does at around this time every year, and the weather was pleasant, according to an account by MeteoGroup – fine, warm, rather breezy. It has not always been thus – the MeteoGroup article mentions previous Derby Days when the weather was a lot less nice – heavy snow showers in 1867, a gale in 1830, torrential rain in 1891.

And in 1911 – there was the mother of all thunderstorms.

A hundred years ago, the Epsom Derby was held on 31st May, a Wednesday. It had been a hot day, and in the late afternoon, just after the conclusion of the race, the weather broke. It rained, it hailed and it thundered, several people dying in the vicinity of the racecourse itself, under a fusilade of lightning strikes. This was no ordinary storm. A total of 15cm of hail fell to earth over the Downs, and the London Weather website tells us that 91mm of rain was recorded on this day at Banstead in Surrey.

Multiple storm centres converged on the London area, thunder shaking the houses and rain flooding into cellars and basements, also causing landslides which blocked railway lines near Merstham and Coulsdon, a few miles north and south-east of Banstead, respectively. At Sutton, a ferocious lightning storm killed or injured several people, and hailstones up to 2 inches in diameter smashed down, stripping the leaves from trees and shrubs.

Juliet Nicolson, author of The Perfect Summer: Dancing into Shadow in 1911, takes up the story:

As the race-goers left the Epsom stands the sun was just visible through the veil of clouds, a shimmering ball of hot metal. Early that evening the stable lads taking the horses for a final gallop on the Downs heard a distant rumble, and as dusk began to settle there was a stupendous crash, followed by lightning which landed in flat white patches, irradiating rooms with a ‘ghastly illumination’. Hailstones the size of sovereigns began to fall, and rain hissed and whipped against windowpanes. Forty-five cars travelling back to London had to be abandoned between Epsom and Sutton. Four horses were killed by lightning that evening and seventeen people died, including a stable lad in a van at the course, two policemen, and Mrs Hester, a grave-digger’s wife, who had slipped out to the village churchyard to take her husband a cup of tea as he worked. She died in front of him, crushed by the graveyard wall that collapsed under the force of lightning and fell on top of her.

Now imagine if this had happened in 2011, instead… There is no doubt that such a violent and destructive thunderstorm would be held up as an example of just the sort of extreme weather event we can expect to see more of, due to man-made global warming. There would be sombre articles in the Guardian, and wise people like Bill McKibben telling us it was a perfect example of the way we are “making the Earth a more dynamic and violent place.”

Well, it might certainly look that way, to someone who was completely oblivious to the historical record.

Via the very helpful Google News function on the internet, I’m now looking at a page from a New Zealand newspaper called the Grey River Argus. It’s dated 1st June 1911, and there’s an article about the Derby Day storm, which provides a very brief but fascinating account of the event and its consequences:

A spell of tropical heat culminated in a series of thunderstorms in the Home counties. The streets in many places were flooded. The Epsom crowd returning from the races were in a sorry plight. The lightning killed two policemen, and three other racegoers. Although seven deaths are reported already, many were severely injured by lightning. Two city churches were struck. The underground railway was flooded and the system short circuited the water [sic]. There were extraordinary scenes at Bostock’s gungle [sic] at the White City. The thunder infuriated the pumas, who attacked and mauled the lady trainer. The pavilion was crowded with people escaping from the torrential rain, and there was great excitement. The trainer was rescued by the attendants using crowbars.

The article writer is referring to Bostock’s Jungle, which was a sort of travelling menagerie and wild-animal show that was popular at the time. I’m wondering what became of the lady trainer, by the way – did she survive and recover from her ordeal? What became of the pumas, for that matter?

I suppose I shall never know.

UPDATE

Weather expert Philip Eden quotes an even more dramatic passage found by John Bird, a local meteorologist, in a contemporary newspaper:

It would have taxed the skill of the finest word painter to describe the scene at the height of the storm. It was an inferno of water, mud, thunder, lightning and hail. Innumerable cars hors de combat, horses plunging with fright, a confusing heap of figures inextricably jumbled together in narrow roadways, half-drowned pedestrians, drenched cyclists, terrified women and children, and battalions of men helpless against the mighty powers of nature in one of here savage moods.

1911 – “Global Weirding” Then and Now

Last week I read a couple of rather dramatic articles about recent weather events (hat tip to Jeremy who runs the Make Wealth History website – he’s not an AGW sceptic but publishes much that is of interest to believers and sceptics alike.)

The first is this rather scary piece by John Vidal of the Guardian – Warning: extreme weather ahead.

Drought zones have been declared across much of England and Wales, yet Scotland has just registered its wettest-ever May. The warmest British spring in 100 years followed one of the coldest UK winters in 300 years. June in London has been colder than March. February was warm enough to strip on Snowdon, but last Saturday it snowed there.

Welcome to the climate rollercoaster, or what is being coined the “new normal” of weather. What was, until quite recently, predictable, temperate, mild and equable British weather, guaranteed to be warmish and wettish, ensuring green lawns in August, now sees the seasons reversed and temperature and rainfall records broken almost every year. When Kent receives as much rain (4mm) in May as Timbuktu, Manchester has more sunshine than Marbella, and soils in southern England are drier than those in Egypt, something is happening.

And so it goes. Droughts, mega heat waves, floods, tornadoes, the signs are all there. Something is happening. And while no scientist can point to an individual weather event and blame man-made climate change, “many argue that these phenomena are textbook examples of the kind of impact that can be expected in a warming world.”

The second article is an op-ed in the Washington Post by climate campaigner Bill McKibben, entitled A link between climate change and Joplin tornadoes? Never!

Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections. When you see pictures of rubble like this week’s shots from Joplin, Mo., you should not wonder: Is this somehow related to the tornado outbreak three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or the enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that (which, together, comprised the most active April for tornadoes in U.S. history). No, that doesn’t mean a thing.

And so it goes. When Bill says don’t make connections between these extreme weather events, of course, he’s being ironical, in a rather heavy-handed way, and meaning do please make connections between these tornado outbreaks and that it is vitally important to go ahead and link the lot of them (and much more besides) to man-made climate change.

On reading these and similar articles (and, for my sins, I’ve read plenty of them over recent years), it is difficult to avoid the impression that the climate system of planet Earth is falling apart at the seams, like a person on the edge of some sort of devastating nervous and physical breakdown. At this point, one might be forgiven for wondering how many months this can all continue, before the entire world spirals into an insane, chaotic, flood-drenched, drought-scorched, tornado-battered, lightning-blasted, freezing, blazing, melting, belching, squelching inferno of total and utter weather-related doom, which will threaten to make the scariest of Roland Emmerich’s disaster movies seem like the most sedate and uneventful of teddy bears’ picnics by comparison.

With these articles in mind, what sort of typical year might we expect to have in future? What kinds of extreme weather events and accompanying humanitarian disasters can we anticipate, once out-of-control “global weirding” has tightened its grip?

Perhaps the following scenario can give us a few hints.

- In March, tropical cyclones devastate coastal towns in Queensland, Australia, and sink a large passenger ship with all hands.

- At the end of May, a violent thunderstorm creates havoc in southern England, killing 17 people.

- Over the summer, the river Yangtze in China floods, causing an estimated 100,000 deaths, creating a vast lake, 80 miles long and 35 miles wide, and also creating 3.7 million “climate refugees”.

- July brings a crippling 11-day heat wave in the north-eastern US, causing almost 150 deaths in New York City alone and setting temperature records in some places that will stand for a century.

- Also in July, the Philippines endure record rainfall, with 46 inches falling in Baguio City over 24 hours, during a super typhoon.

- In England there is a summer heat wave, with temperature records broken in the east of England and in Epsom, milk shortages due to parched conditions, farming coming to a complete standstill in some parts, food rotting on the London docks and also the threat of civil unrest.

- In Ontario, Canada, an early spring and an abnormally dry summer leads to one of the most devastating forest fires ever recorded there.

- In August, an Atlantic hurricane causes great damage in Charleston, reducing houses and ships to matchwood and taking 17 lives.

- In southern Angola, this year marks the start of a period of almost unbelievable hardship, in which a total of 250,000 people will die from drought, famine, disease and forced labour.

- In Australia, some regions are at their driest for the entire century, with the start of a major period of drought, punctuated by one of the heaviest downpours ever recorded in Western Queensland.

- In November, there is a remarkable weather anomaly in the American mid-west, with many cities, such as Oklahoma City, recording record high temperatures and record lows all on the same day, and with blizzards, a dust storm and outbreaks of tornadoes thrown in.

A picture of things to come?

Actually, this was the year 1911, exactly a century ago.

I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that for many writers in the climate debate, history seems to have begun sometime in the late 1970s, with everything before that in a kind of climate limbo. But “global weirding” has always been with us! And 1911 wasn’t even particularly unusual, disaster-wise – the only reason I’m singling it out is that it was precisely 100 years ago. The “new normal” of weather extremes is actually not very new at all.

If the idea of dangerous man-made global warming had been prevalent at the time, what sort of newspaper articles the Edwardian counterparts of John Vidal and Bill McKibben would have written, I wonder?

And how many months or years might they have given the world, before things got even worse?

Gliese 581, Rogue Planets and Towel Day

Last month, there was some interesting news from the world of extrasolar planets – firstly, the publication of a new study in Astrophysical Journal Letters which suggested that a planet in the nearby Gliese 581 star system might be hospitable enough to support liquid water, and which thus highlighted the possibility of oceans, clouds, rainfall and all the perplexing and wonderful climatic complications we enjoy so much here on this planet.

Granted, the new evidence stems not from actual observations but from computer models, so a note of caution is perhaps in order, but even so, this news is rather heartening.

Gliese 581, like our own dear old solar system, is in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy, just over 20 light years from us and in the constellation of Libra. Its star is a red dwarf, and to date, astronomers have determined that there are at least four and maybe even six planets in orbit around it.

The four planets astronomers think definitely exist are (from innermost to outermost) Gliese 581-e, Gliese 581-b, Gliese 581-c and Gliese 581-d. Apart from having stunningly imaginative names, the other things to note are that 1) there is no planet Gliese-a, as this is the red dwarf star itself (took me a while to figure this out) and 2) they are named in order of discovery, which is why the physical sequence goes confusingly from e through to d. (By the way, some scientists think Gliese 581 also has stars f and g, but these may not actually exist and so are, much like Schrödinger’s cat, in a sort of indeterminate state, which has to be rather worrying for the planets’ inhabitants, if any.)

The innermost is e, discovered in 2009; it appears to be small (about 1.7 times the mass of Earth) and scientists think it might also be rocky. It’s also probably very hot, as it is much closer to its star than is advisable for any sensible planet thinking of supporting life forms.

Next is b, the first to be discovered (in 2005), and this one’s about as big as Neptune.

After that comes c, discovered in 2007 and about 5 and a half times as massive as our world, thus in a category of planet called the “super-Earth”. Alas, it probably is not inhabited by super-Earthlings, because, like its neighbours e and b, it’s still a little too close to its parent star for comfort.

And then there’s d, another super-Earth and about the same size as c. Discovered in 2009, it is just on the edge of the “Goldilocks zone” where liquid water – and, therefore, life – might exist (and in fact it was this planet that was the subject of the recent study.) In 2009, a radio message was beamed towards Gliese-d by the Australians, in the hope that some sufficiently advanced Gliesans might intercept and decode it (and be friendly enough not to send us an invasion fleet by return of post.)

The reason I find all this rather encouraging is that if planets are very common in our universe – and the fact that we’ve managed to spot dozens of them only a few light years away suggests that they are – and if there are huge numbers of planets in the Goldilocks zone (which, again, seems quite possible), then somewhere, surely, there must be aliens. And maybe, just maybe, there are even a few ETs living in our own neighbourhood. I think it more than likely that they would only be analogues of Earthly life-forms such as algae or bacteria, so making small talk with them might be a little dull, but even so.

The other bit of planetary news I liked was the announcement from a joint Japanese/New Zealand astronomical survey that there are probably vast numbers of solitary planets which are not orbiting around stars but appear to be roaming around the galaxy all by themselves. Rogue planets! And hundreds of billions of them in this galaxy alone – twice as many as there are main-sequence stars, according to the astronomers. They would probably be very cold and dark indeed, and I’m somehow reminded of the home world of the Eddorians, supreme baddies in EE Doc Smith’s magnificent Lensman series of novels, who exist on an orphan planet which, in the stories, has arrived in this universe from another (and presumably far nastier) dimension.

Even if not inhabited by a frigid-blooded, poison-breathing race of monstrosities eager to bend the galaxy to their rule, these myriads of rogue planets could, I suppose, be considered at least hazards to navigation. Of course, that will only be a problem for us in the millennia to come, I suppose, once humanity develops faster-than-light travel, so we won’t need to worry about them for a while. Unless, of course, a rogue planet happens to show up in our solar system next year, to coincide with the end of the Mayan calendar, let’s say – in which case, it might be an appropriate time to panic.

Panic, however, is not normally a very useful response, a fact that was recognised by the late Douglas Adams, who designed his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with large friendly letters on the cover which said quite clearly “Don’t Panic”. Which leads me to the other thing I wanted to mention, that a couple of weeks ago it was Towel Day, a sort of commemoration of Douglas Adams, and a celebration of the towel, which, according to the Guide, is “about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.”

I had completely forgotten about this. But looking at my diary, I realise that by utter good fortune, I had indeed known where my towel was, on Towel Day. Because I had taken the opportunity to pop out of the office at lunchtime and go for a nice cool swim at my local sports centre.

My towel is a large, sturdy one, made of plain blue cotton. It lacks advanced nutritional features such as stripes containing protein, vitamin B and C complexes or wheatgerm extract, which would come in handy if I ever found myself trapped in the hold of a Vogon constructor ship, on the way to one of the neighbouring exo-planets we’ve been discovering of late. However, for something like a welcome dip in the pool on a warm Wednesday afternoon in May, it is just about perfect.

100 Years of Climate Change: Part 4

The weather is pleasantly warm here in the South East of England, the sun is (mostly) shining, birds are tweeting, trees and garden plants are in full leaf and there’s talk of drought and hosepipe bans on the way – yes, it seems that summer is almost on us.

Weatherwise, plenty was going on in the summer of 1911, so I’m busy getting prepared for quite a few instalments of “100 Years of Climate Change” in the months ahead.

For now, though, I’d like to look back a bit. We’ve had devastating earthquakes this year in New Zealand and Japan, which are still very fresh in the mind, but a few weeks before those disasters burst upon the world’s media, do you remember the floods and storms that were impacting Queensland, Australia?

In particular, you might recall Cyclone Yasi, a tropical cyclone that hammered Northern Queensland at the beginning of February this year, destroying houses in several towns and causing billions of dollars of damage to the sugar cane and banana crops. In an article dated 2nd February, Damian Carrington of the Guardian wondered whether this new “monster, killer storm” would affect attitudes to global warming. Professor Ross Garnaut, climate change advisor to the Australian government, spoke of even more extreme events to come, and warned that “if we are seeing an intensification of extreme weather events now, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

In the event, although it did great economic damage and destroyed homes and infrastructure, Cyclone Yasi turned out not to be quite as devastating as it could have been. It missed the city of Cairns, where over 150,000 people live, and there was but a single death attributed to the storm (a man died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a portable generator.)

Compare this, if you will, to Cyclone Tracy which mauled the city of Darwin in 1974 (under similar La Nina conditions, by the way, which also saw Brisbane under more flood water than it experienced this year), destroying 70% of its buildings, killing 71 people and causing a humanitarian disaster which was “without parallel in Australia’s history”, according to one commentator and which occurred well before the late 20th century warm spell began.

Back in 1911, there were also some pretty destructive cyclones making landfall in this region. In January, a big storm and gale-force winds caused havoc at Marburg in South West Queensland. In February, two great cyclones struck at Port Douglas, destroying crops, almost completely flattening the town and taking two lives.

And then, when a further massive cyclone approached the coast in March 1911, there was a further tragic loss. The steamer S.S. Yongala, a 350-foot vessel built in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, had just put out to sea from Mackay, heading north to Townsville. There were 122 people on board, and the ship’s cargo included a bull and a racehorse called Moonshine. On 23rd March, a signal station at Mackay received a telegram warning of the cyclone but they had no way of warning the Yongala, which had just left, as the ship had no radio. And although the skipper, Captain William Knight was an experienced and well-regarded seaman, the storm proved to be a disaster for the steamer – she sank, with all aboard her perishing. The only body to be washed ashore was that of Moonshine, the racehorse. The wreck lay undisturbed for almost half a century and was not fully located and identified until 1958.

There was a tragic irony in that a radio had actually been on its way to the Yongala – a wireless set had been ordered from the Marconi Company in England, but it arrived too late. If there had been a radio aboard, it would probably have made the difference between life and death.

Earlier this year, the centenary of the sinking of the Yongala was marked by a memorial ceremony at the maritime museum at Townsville.

There are two points I suppose I’d like to make. Firstly, to see cyclones, hurricanes and floods in their proper context, look at history (as today’s global warming enthusiasts seem unwilling to do.) These are not new phenomena, whipped up out of nowhere by man’s fondness for fossil fuels. The sort of extreme weather events we see taking place in recent times have also taken place repeatedly in times past, with – as far as we know – no greater frequency or intensity than they are taking place now.

Secondly, modern technology is the key to having a better chance of surviving these tantrums of nature. Using radio and telephone communications, towns and cities can be evacuated, isolated people can be warned and lives can be saved. This is what happened in Queensland earlier this year when Yasi was threatening, and it is what could have saved the Yongala and her passengers and crew a hundred years ago.

Up in the Treetops

During my recent visit to Tokyo, and strolling one afternoon through a park in Koto-ku, I glimpsed something through the foliage overhead, something high in the sky, shiny and metallic. The long-distance photo I took that day (which I’ve decided not to publish here) did not do it justice, for it is, in fact, a very tall, very modern and impressive structure indeed. What I had seen, for the first time was the Tokyo Sky Tree.

Very tall structures are not unknown in the Tokyo area, which may seem paradoxical, given the restlessness of the Earth’s crust under this particular region; in fact, or so Wikipedia tells us, Tokyo has no less than 44 buildings and structures taller than 180 metres. I’m familiar with Shinjuku’s garden of skyscrapers, which includes the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building No. 1 (or Tocho), and also the orange-and-white Tokyo Tower over in Minato-ku, completed in 1958 and now the second-tallest building in the city. I never got around to visiting Tokyo Tower when living there during the late 1980s, but I did visit Yokohama Marine Tower many years ago, and, more recently, have been to the Sky Garden, an observation deck 273 metres from the ground, at the top of the Yokohama Landmark Tower (highly recommended – the view of the harbour district and the surrounding city is breathtaking.)

The secret to withstanding the sort of kaiju-grade earthquakes that rock Japan from time to time, is of course clever and sophisticated construction techniques, employing devices such as the tuned mass damper, which reduces the amplitude of the a quake’s destructive vibrations. Yokohama Landmark Tower, for example, has two of these dampers, and the Tokyo Sky Tree is built around a central shaft of reinforced concrete, which can move separately to the steel framing and acts both as a damper and as a stairwell. It also has a tuned mass damper right at the top, and pilings which spread out through the soil beneath the structure just like the roots of a mighty tree, and which also help to keep it secure.

What is the Tokyo Sky Tree, anyway? It is a tower, and currently the tallest one in the world (also the second tallest structure in the world, after Dubai’s Burj Khalifa), of lattice construction, like its forbears Tokyo Tower and the venerable Eiffel Tower. It will serve as a TV and radio broadcasting tower, being tall enough to beam terrestrial television over the surrounding high-rise cityscape, and will also have an observatory and a restaurant. They hope to finish building it in December this year and open it to the public in spring 2012, and I would very much like to visit the Sky Tree when I next come to Tokyo.

Here are a few more assorted facts about this structure. It is white with a touch of indigo (to symbolise the bluish white – aijiro – of Japanese porcelain) and will be lit up at night by arrays of LED lights, in blue and purple on alternate days. It will be precisely 634 metres tall, and this is a clever example of Japanese wordplay, as the numbers 6, 3 and 4 can be rendered in Japanese as “mu”, “sa” and “shi”, making up the word Musashi, which is the old name for the province of eastern Japan which incorporated Tokyo and its neighbouring prefectures.

My interest in these sorts of massive constructions has grown in recent years, as they represent for me the sort of high-tech, modern and aspirational world I want this to be. Some years ago I read about the plans for something even more ambitious, a 2000-metre tall, 500-floor skyscraper in the Tokyo Bay area called Aeropolis 2001, which would have been a decent first attempt at building an arcology – a vast and self-contained high-density human habitat, the like of which has existed, as yet, only in science fiction. Sadly, the bursting of Japan’s “bubble economy” in the 1990s, and the resulting slow-burning recession, meant that Aeropolis 2001 never became a reality. However, the completion of the Tokyo Sky Tree will mark, for me, the return of something like that confident, soaring and future-oriented spirit.

Sitting high above the human jungle, this is the closest one can be to outer space, without travelling in an aeroplane, rocket or balloon. When I next return to Tokyo, I’m looking forward to going up to the observatory of the Sky Tree, having a cup of coffee perhaps, and simply enjoying the magnificent view.

Are We Nearly Doomed Yet? Part 2.

While I’m at it, here’s the second instalment of a (sort of) yearly series keeping tabs on anything looming up that might just be the end of our civilisation. Since Part 1 in December 2009, there have been a number of events that, while undoubtedly calamitous for thousands of people across the globe, have fortunately not been of the sheer scale that would categorise them as threats to all of humanity.

During 2010, there were big earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, Turkey, China and Indonesia which killed almost 250,000 people, mostly in Haiti. In 2011, so far there have been over 14,000 deaths, mostly in Japan (the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami) but also in Christchurch, New Zealand, and in Burma. In 2010, there were also a number of big volcanic eruptions, including Eyjafjallajökul in Iceland, Mount Merapi in Indonesia (causing hundreds of deaths there) and various other places in the world, such as Ecuador, Guatamala and the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia.

There have also been massive floods (such as Pakistan in summer 2010, Queensland, Australia in winter 2010-11) and a heat wave in continental Europe which contributed to a series of wildfires in Russia during the summer of 2010, factors in these events being a “freezing” of the jet stream in mid-2010 and La Nina conditions towards the end of that year.

None of these events, tragic and hugely disruptive that many of them were, constituted an actual threat to civilisation.

Anyway, what’s threatening us at the moment?

1. Asteroids. A few small ones have whizzed past Earth over the past year or so, according to NASA. In November this year Asteroid 2005 YU55, which is a respectable 400 metres in size, will pass within 0.85 lunar distances, but won’t be a threat. There’s another big near-Earth asteroid – 99942 Apophis – which Russian scientists have recently suggested might actually hit us in 2036, but NASA says no. So unless something huge and unexpected appears in the firmament this year, I conclude that we’re safe from killer meteors, for the time being.

2. Supervolcanoes. There have been several articles this year, such as this one in National Geographic, about the land over the great magma bubble of Yellowstone rising by as much as 10 inches between 2007 and 2010. However, as this and other articles explain, according to current theory, the ground may rise and fall for thousands of years without actually erupting, as the molten rock shifts up and then sideways, almost as if the magma chamber is slowly breathing. It doesn’t look as though the famous National Park will blow up any time soon, which is the main thing.

3. Everything else. Seems quiet enough – no especially terrifying new viruses, rogue nanotech outbreaks, escalating nuclear arms races or incipient alien invasions have been brought to my attention recently. Unless one of these scenarios is quietly brewing, out of sight of the world’s media, or an equally scary but completely unprecedented “black swan” type event is waiting in the wings, it looks as though civilisation will make it through to 2012 unscathed.

Ah yes… 2012. A bumper edition of Are We Nearly Doomed Yet? is on the cards, when we approach the start to that famously portentous year. The Mayan calendar running out, Planet Earth likewise coming to some sort of a sticky end, and Planet Nibiru making its long-foretold flying visit to our normally uneventful little corner of the Solar System – oh my. Time to get set for some truly excellent, weapons-grade weirdness.

In the meantime, that’s quite enough doom for this year. It’s likely to be the hottest April on record here in the UK, so we’re told, and it has been a lovely Easter weekend here in west London, with the sun shining and flowers blossoming all over the place. I’m off for a nice evening stroll, while the warm weather lasts.