100 Years of Climate Change: Part 2

I have a little catching up to do, as it’s now April and the year is almost a third gone.

This project is to take a look at weather events that took place a century ago, and relate them to the weather events we have experienced in recent times. Is the weather becoming weirder, as Thomas Friedman asserts? Are we now experiencing the sort of extreme, unprecedented weather phenomena that could be attributed to man-made climate change? Or were similar headline-making events happening 100 years ago, and are actually not so unusual, after all?

If you know me, then you’ll know that I incline to the latter way of thinking; I am sceptical about the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming, and I agree with outspoken meteorologist Joe Bastardi that extreme weather is not new to the world. You could argue, in fact, that I have already answered my own questions.

Be that as it may, however, it will still be an enjoyable exercise for me to head back in time to 1910 and see what dramatic weather events I can discover in that bygone age. Who knows – perhaps I will not find so many, and end up proving Mr Friedman’s point!

There have been numerous poster children for global warming, one of them, of course, being Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which some proclaimed a “wake-up call for America” and which prompted Al Gore to state that “What changed in the United States with Hurricane Katrina was a feeling that we have entered a period of consequences”. Along with the chaos, the loss of life and the damage to property and infrastructure caused by 175 miles-per-hour winds, it was surely the sobering images of a drowned city – New Orleans – that had the most impact. Photographs of boulevards covered by sheets of floodwater, news video coverage of abandoned homes and streets accessible only by boat convinced many that catastrophic global warming had now reached the stage where even a major city in one of the wealthiest of nations was not immune to its power.

And yet just over a century ago, back in January 1910, there was another city overwhelmed by a mighty flood. That city was Paris.

The year 1909 saw plenty of rain falling across France and its north-western environs. The 1909 Tour de France was famously plagued by appalling weather – torrential rain, hail and freezing temperatures (including snow in July! I wonder – does Thomas Friedman know how to say “global weirding” in French?) When Louis Bleriot made his record-breaking flight across the Channel on 25th July, he had to contend with powerful gusty winds and pouring rain. And there was record rainfall in Paris that summer.

The rain continued for month after month, as 1909 drew to its close. By 22nd January 1910, the river Seine had risen about six feet higher than its usual level, fed by a massive volume of run-off from the surrounding area (Paris is situated in the appropriately named Paris Basin, a low-lying region highly vulnerable to flooding.) Making the situation worse was the fact that the city’s excellent and modern network of sewers and its recently installed Métro system created, in effect, a subterranean water course which gave the floodwater easy and widespread access.

The Great Flood of Paris lasted for about a week or so, until 29th January, when the water began to subside at last. It caused approximately 400 million francs’ worth of damage (about 1.5 billion dollars or 1.4 billion euros today), and destroyed around 20,000 buildings. At its height, streets were several feet deep in floodwater, forcing residents and rescuers to paddle about in boats or shuffle over makeshift wooden walkways. Unlike in New Orleans, casualties appear to have been almost miraculously light – there is said to have been only a single fatality directly attributed to the flood itself (a soldier in a small boat, who was swept away); however, there may well have been others that were not recorded.

For a little while, before the modern world resumed with a vengeance, Parisians were transported back to an earlier epoch, unable to travel by Métro for three months and having to get about the city in obsolete horse-drawn buses. Georges Cain, a journalist working for the daily newspaper Le Figaro remarked: “Here we are, gone back in time 20 years. No electricity, no elevators, no telephones and it seems unbearable to us.”

Could global warming (man-made or otherwise) have been a factor in the Paris flood? Hardly. This took place right at the the start of the early 20th century warming period, and following a time of cooling that had begun in the 1880s. There would be plenty of northern hemisphere warming to come, culminating in the 1920s and 1930s, when some became concerned at the loss of polar sea ice, but that would be decades in the future.

So what were the causes? Geography and geology played their part, ensuring that huge volumes of floodwater in the region were contained and funnelled towards Paris. Weather also played its part, of course, the months of continuous rain having been caused by persistent low-pressure systems, themselves influenced by oceanic cycles. And land use was a factor, the Parisians having unwittingly aided the flood by developing and extending the sewers and the Métro.

What I’m seeing here is a convincing demonstration of Nature’s power that left a great city underwater, but at a time of relative cold when atmospheric CO2, we are told, was still at around 290 ppm. Should an inundation of similar type and magnitude overtake yet another of our mighty cities, here in the 21st century, I think we might do well to recall that such events are not unprecedented.

The picture for this blog was created using a photo I found on Wikipedia; there are a number of similar photos on Historic Cities, an interesting website which has a good collection of online documents, mostly ancient city maps. I gathered other information from Paris Under Water, a site connected with a new book on this subject. Entitled Paris Under Water: How The City of Light Survived The Great Flood of 1910, by historian Jeffrey H. Jackson, and published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010, it promises to be an excellent read – definitely one for my list.

Olaf Stabledon: Last and First Men

Think of epic science fiction and works such as Asimov’s Foundation series and Herbert’s Dune saga spring to mind – sets of novels that are truly on a grand scale, with plots that span millennia and cover vast distances across interstellar space. Yet long before these were written, there existed novels every bit as epic and gigantic in scope. Written by philosopher and pacifist Olaf Stabledon way back in 1930, Last and First Men is certainly one of them.

It is not a novel in the conventional sense, as there are no real characters save for the narrator, who is one of the 18th Men living on Neptune two million years hence and is broadcasting his thoughts back through time into the mind of a contemporary human. Though it could also be said that the story’s protagonists are, in fact, the various races – the First, Second, Third (and so on) Men, who succeed one another and enjoy their moment on the world’s stage. Last and First Men is basically a future history of the human race, from the twentieth to the twenty thousandth century, and a titanic tale of struggle, technical and cultural development, heroic achievements, bitter warfare, near total extinction and the rise and inexorable fall of mighty civilisations.

The scope of the story is absolutely breathtaking. As from an aeroplane travelling across some vast continent, the reader mostly looks down upon the temporal equivalent of a majestic landscape viewed from several thousand feet, with great plains and mountain ranges visible but lacking intimate detail. At times, however, just as the plane must descend to ground level periodically, the narrative sometimes closes in on some pivotal moment in the life of the race – a battle, a discovery, a scientific breakthrough – and then even the occasional individual might briefly come into view. Afterwards, though, it is always time to soar back up to the Olympian heights for another few aeons of world history.

There is much that I enjoyed in Last and First Men. First and foremost, the stupendous scale of Stabledon’s project. “Man’s sojourn on Venus lasted somewhat longer than his whole career on the Earth” is a typical Stabledon sentence, which has all the more impact for being completely undramatic.

And there are some pretty neat ideas in there. The human form as something plastic and malleable, ready to be shaped to suit new circumstances, such as adapting to the hostile environment of Venus or Neptune. Winged folks thronging the Venusian skies, seal-men swimming in alien seas, monkey-like men, giant sessile brains encased in fortresses… I am not sure whether Last and First Men was the first novel to address the theme (in effect, the idea of genetic engineering, decades before its time), but I would not be surprised if this turns out to be the case.

In addition, the Martian cloud-jellies are credible aliens – floating clusters or swarms of living particles that are capable of forming formidable hive minds (a forerunner of the neural network idea, perhaps.) Their long and bitter fight for dominance over the Second Men seems all too realistic – neither side being completely victorious – and resembles the “arms race” type of constant evolutionary struggle (e.g., between plants and insects.)

There’s also, it has to be said, some rather strange science. In around AD 5000, the people of the First World State rely completely on coal for their energy, and relapse into complete barbarism once it runs out, being curiously unable to come up with any viable new energy source. About 100,000 years later, the Patagonian civilisation is wiped out by an atomic explosion which creates a runaway global cataclysm (silly, maybe, but this was a genuine fear in the days of the Manhattan Project.) And roughly 400,000 years after that, the Fifth Men have to decamp to Venus, as the orbit of Earth’s Moon has become dangerously low – due to the effect of thought radiation from humanity’s advanced minds.

And there is also some equally odd future history and psychology. One choice moment that had me scratching my head in puzzlement comes early on in Last and First Men, when representatives of the two superpowers – a decadent Chinaman and a puritanical American – meet on a remote Pacific island to decide the future of the world, only to both fall in love with a mysterious young female native who emerges, as if by magic, to play an unaccountably crucial part in the proceedings. This struck me as being decidedly wacky (although, goodness knows, equally wacky things happen in this reality too.)

In addition, a particular theme that now comes across as very mid twentieth-century (along with the whole idea of telepathy in SF) is that of the group or race mind – humans adding their mental powers to the collectivity until it is capable of becoming a sort of supercharged being, thinking truly god-like thoughts. What might have seemed noble and exalted in 1930, however, now seems rather sinister and repugnant – to my somewhat small and mortal mind, anyway.

Yet despite its oddities and quaint qualities, First and Last Men remains absolutely a work of classic science fiction (“timeless” even, to use the cliché). Indeed reading it can be compared to being fed into the Total Perspective Vortex (in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams) an ominous machine which is able to produce a virtual model of the entire universe and show anyone who enters it just how incredibly tiny and insignificant they are.

But Olaf Stabledon’s masterpiece does so in quite a positive and uplifting way. The reader is left marvelling at the sheer immensity of it all, and forgetful of all the world’s problems, which on this scale are as trifling as the merest speck of dust.

UPDATE

I wish I had thought of the Total Perspective Vortex comparison by myself, but alas I didn’t; I read it in this excellent review by Tal Cohen.

The picture for this blog is a detail from a rather good illustration that was made for the Great Moon Hoax, a hugely successful but completely fictitious 19th-century newspaper story. This could almost be a flock of Seventh Men (and Women), fluttering happily about in the atmosphere of Venus.