Shooting Gallery

30th June 1908: A huge explosion flattens over 800 square miles of Siberian forest in the remote region of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. In the absence of detailed information, wild theories abound – it might have been a miniature black hole, perhaps even an alien spacecraft in difficulties. However, the general view is that it was an asteroid or comet fragment entering the Earth’s atmosphere and bursting in mid air, possibly a piece of Encke’s Comet; witness accounts mention repeated sounds like artillery, which perhaps means that Siberia was under bombardment by a series of separate fragments.

13th August 1930: There are reports of three large explosions in the Brazilian rain forest near the Peruvian border – local inhabitants talk of burning trees and a widespread ash cloud. Observatory records suggest that these were caused by one or more asteroid impacts coinciding with the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower.

2nd February, 1932: Explorer and intelligence officer St. John Philby (father of double agent Kim Philby) discovers pieces of meteoric iron littering the remote Arabian desert in the Empty Quarter or “Rub’ al Khali”. Later, three impact craters are found in the sand at Wabar, which suggests that an asteroid exploded in mid-air over the Arabian Peninsula (with the force of a 16-kiloton nuclear weapon, approximately), maybe as recently as 1891.

16th July, 1994: The first of many fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crash into Jupiter, the comet having been captured by the gas giant’s gravity in the 1960s or ’70s and fallen victim to Jupiter’s crushing tidal forces. Over the next few days, big pieces of comet slam into the planet’s atmosphere one after the other, creating vast dark spots which are clearly visible by telescope from Earth. The largest of these pieces (fragment G), impacting on 18th July, smashes with a force equivalent to 6,000,000 megatons.

15th February, 2013: A meteor explodes high over the Urals in Russia, creating a massive fireball, damaging buildings in six cities across the region and injuring over a thousand people (mainly cuts caused by shattering window glass). This happens 16 hours before asteroid 2012DA14 is due to pass by Earth; NASA tells us, however, that the two events are not related, the trajectories of the two objects being very different.

The meteor that lit up the skies over Chelyabinsk last week exploded with a force of nearly 500 kilotons and is estimated to have had a diameter of up to an estimated 56 feet. However, near-earth asteroid 2012DA14 which skimmed past us the same day has a diameter of around 160 feet and would have made a correspondingly bigger bang, had it collided with Earth instead – it would not have been in the Shoemaker-Levy class (thankfully!) but might have done considerably more than create smoke trails and smash windows.

To those who say that global warming is the greatest long-term threat to the human race, I think we might have to agree to disagree. In the Solar System’s great meteoric shooting gallery – going by a century’s worth of occasional impacts and near misses – it seems we have been relatively fortunate. So far, anyway.

Some useful links:

Wikipedia on the Tunguska Event:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
Article on the Armagh Observatory website about the Brazilian meteors of 1930:
http://star.arm.ac.uk/impact-hazard/Brazil.html
Wikipedia on Wabar impact craters:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabar_craters
Wikipedia on Shoemaker-Levy 9:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker-Levy_9
Wikipedia on the Russian meteor event of 2013:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Russian_meteor_event

Catastrophic Storm Tide, 1953

Last week saw the 60th anniversary of the great North Sea storms and flooding of 1953, which occurred over the night of 31st January and the following morning, and which wrought terrible havoc across Britain, Holland, Belgium and France, when a strong area of low pressure acted in combination with a high spring tide. A trawl through the newspaper stories at the time makes for some grim reading.

On 1st February 1953, an AP news article reported on the loss of the ferry Princess Victoria (she was one of the first roll-on/roll off ferries), which was sailing between Stranraer in Scotland and Larne in Northern Ireland, a distance of only 20 miles.

Dazed survivors said the 2,694-ton vessel plying between Scotland and Ireland went under after “five hours of hell”.

At 11:13 p.m., hours after the disaster, port officials announced there were only 49 known survivors [Wikipedia says 40 survivors] out of the 177 [Wiki has 179] persons aboard the Princess Victoria.

She was battered by 115-mile-an-hour winds. Huge waves splintered lifeboats before they could be launched.

Terror-struck passengers, all outfitted with lifebelts, plunged into the seething waters as the skipper, Capt. James Ferguson, gave the order to abandon ship. It was barely five miles off the mouth of Belfast harbor in the Irish Sea.

Survivors reaching this port said the Princess Victoria went down within minutes after Ferguson gave the abandon ship order.

She was not the only ship to founder in the storm – many fishing boats and other vessels were also lost that night. The situation was no better on land, however, as the storm surge battered North Sea coastlines, from Scotland down to the Low Countries. AP news again, from 2nd February:

Tidal seas – churned by hurricane winds – flooded thousands of coastal towns and drowned at least 408 persons in England, Holland and Belgium. Fears grew Tuesday that the toll in the three nations might go far higher.

The death of 132 persons on the British carferry Princess Victoria in a hurricane in the Irish Sea Saturday boosted the toll to 540 in two days.

Winds were abating but thousands of relief workers – including many American airmen – worked through the night in near freezing waters to evacuate survivors in flooded English coastal areas. It was estimated that 25,000 persons would have to be moved from their homes.

Hundreds were drowned or made homeless in Scotland and in England along the North Sea coast, at places like Crovie in Scotland, King’s Lynn, Hunstanton and also Canvey Island in Essex. The Sydney Morning Herald reports, 5th February:

The battle to reclaim Britain’s flooded areas is the biggest combined military and civil operation ever staged in peacetime.

It must be won in 12 days before the new high tide which is expected about February 16.

Planes, ships, trucks and trains are carrying millions of sandbags to troops, airmen and civil defence teams of volunteers, who are toiling round the clock to plug the gaps in the sea walls.

However, it was in the Netherlands that the true scale of the catastrophe revealed itself, where almost 2,000 people and 30,000 animals died when the storm surge overcame sea defences and flooded vast areas of farmland, destroying 10,000 buildings. The Age reports, 5th February:

News has been lacking for three days from parts of Holland since the pounding North Sea breached the dykes.

Many Dutch defences which withstood the first onslaught are reported crumbling today, brining danger to the farms and villages which hitherto had escaped.

The North Sea is rolling unhindered across the shattered dykes of the Scheldte estuary islands and south-western Holland covering with salt water an estimated one-sixth of Holland’s total area.

Out of this catastrophe arose the construction some of humanity’s most ambitious flood defences, including the mighty Delta Works in Holland, and the Thames Barrier in London.

As with “Superstorm Sandy” last year in the United States, several events happened coincidentally to make things worse – in the case of the North Sea floods, there was a powerful low-pressure weather system bringing gales, a high spring tide and also the fact that the disaster happened at night, on a Saturday (when local radio stations in Holland were not broadcasting, for example) and in the freezing cold of winter.

If a similar episode of storms and flooding happened again in the North Sea, it would naturally be taken by some commentators (as was Sandy) to be evidence of man-made global warming, which they claim is contributing to the severity of extreme weather events. However, this took place at a time when the globe was relatively cooler – in fact, over 30 years before the late 20th century warming was even a gleam in James Hansen’s eye.

And, although there have been storms and floods in the region after 1953, nothing quite as bad as this has happened here in the decades since.

Some links:

Rome News Tribune – Feb 1, 1953: Howling Storm Sinks British Ferry; 128 Perish Within Sight of Shore:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=J5UFAAAAIBAJ&sjid=UDEDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6320,4761405&dq

The Milwaukee Sentinel – Feb 2, 1953: Hundreds Dead as Floods Sweep Britain, Holland:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=jUMxAAAAIBAJ&sjid=EhAEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6926,2109405&dq

The Sydney Morning Herald – Feb 5, 1953: Hundreds Still Missing:
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/18356010

The Age – Feb 5, 1953: Gale Endangers Flood Rescues: Deaths in Holland Exceed 1200:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=u8NVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=SsMDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6220,3565919&dq

Norwich Under Water

In a recent interview with Deutsche Welle, neuroscientist Stephen Emmott talked about his play Ten Billion (about which, I will write soon) and also mentioned some of the notable weather events of the summer, including the floods in Manila.

…60 percent of Manila is currently under water. I mean, can you imagine? It’s a capital city of a very populous country – the Philippines. Can you imagine if 60 percent of London were under water, or 60 percent of Washington, D.C.? It’s just unimaginable.

It’s not unimaginable, though. If you have access to history books or the internet, and take an interest in these matters, you will know that Paris had very widespread flooding in 1910 (which I blogged about, last year.) As for the Phillipines, according to the journal Engineering News (January-June, 1913) Baguio City had a record 46 inches of rain over 24 hours in July 1911, an event which caused colossal landslides, destroyed roads and at least one bridge and caused the city to be entirely cut off from the outside world for eight days.

The trouble is, of course, there was no television and no internet in those times. Were the same events to have happened in summer 2012, there can be no doubt that people like Professor Emmott would make quick use of them in interviews to support the case that we’re currently heading for immanent climate doom. But go back in history, and you will find similar or worse events almost wherever you look.

Exactly a hundred years ago it was the turn of Norwich in England, the city where I grew up, to experience catastrophic flooding.

In Norfolk it had rained continuously for two days (Friday 23rd and Saturday 24th August 1912) and after a break for the Sabbath, the storm resumed in earnest on Monday 26th August, 7 inches of rainfall being measured over 30 hours, and many places ending up with five times the monthly average. Powerful winds caused havoc, rivers burst their banks across East Anglia, 40 bridges were destroyed, railways were blocked and the harvest was lost.

After the storm, the river Wensum burst its banks and flood water began to surge into low-lying districts of the city, forcing residents to be evacuated by boat. Here are some newspaper accounts from the time.

DAMAGE ELSEWHERE.

London 27th August. Owing to the floods, Norwich resembles an island city. The railways and telegraphs are interrupted. The flood is the greatest for a quarter of a century. Harvest fields are submerged. Many houses in Huntingdon are flooded, and the inhabitants of parts of Leicester are living in the upper stories, the lower stories being invaded by water. There have been heavy losses of stock in the Midlands.

RAIN FALLS INCESSANTLY FOR SEVENTEEN HOURS. BUSINESS AT A STANDSTILL. CITY IN DARKNESS.

London 28th August. Telegrams dated Norwich, Monday, arrived in London (ninety-eight miles distant) last night. They conveyed the information that it had rained incessantly for seventeen hours, and there were several feet of water in many of the streets, on which boats were plying. Hundreds of people had quitted their houses and taken refuge in the schools on the higher levels, where food was being conveyed to them. Business was at a standstill in the city. The rainfall for twelve hours was 6.32 inches, and it was still raining. The rising waters yesterday stopped the majority of the dynamos on which the electric lighting system is dependent, and the city was plunged into darkness. The flood-waters have washed away a portion of the high mound on which the old Norman castle stands, near the centre of the city. King’s Lynn and the East Coast resorts, Cromer, Sheringham, and Mundesley, are still isolated. A goods train fell through a viaduct which had collapsed near Fakenham, twenty-four miles north-west of Norwich. Several county railway bridges have been destroyed. Further floods are reported in Warwickshire. In the poorer quarters of Norwich yesterday the flood waters reached a depth of thirteen feet. The city is threatened with a shortage of water for domestic purposes, the waterworks pumping station being flooded and the machinery useless. The high-level reservoir contains only sufficient water for two days’ supply.

FLOODS IN ENGLAND

London, Aug 31. The damage in the city of Norwich is estimated at £100,000. The trees are infested with rats, which are taking refuge from the flood. The waters receding have left the flood gauge again visible. It has been hidden for the first time since 1614.

As the above newspaper accounts have mentioned, the floods were not limited to Norwich – they affected many areas in East Anglia and the Midlands. However, Norwich appears to have been hardest hit; four people drowned there, including a local hero – George Brodie, a fish porter – who rescued others before losing his own life.

Not far from where I was born is Cringleford Mill, situated on the River Yare, south of Norwich. During the great flood of 1912, the water rose to what has been described as unprecedented levels, inundating both the mill itself and the mill house and requiring the owner’s daughter to be rescued by boat from a first-floor window. About a mile upstream, there is an area of land, very close to the river and also perhaps threatened by the rising waters, that was then part of the Earlham Hall Estate but which later became a golf course and after that the site for a university campus, where in the 1970s a unit was formed to study the changing climate.

That university is, of course, the University of East Anglia or UEA, and the unit is the Climatic Research Unit, or CRU.

Better Angels, These Days

I often listen to the radio in my car, as I shuttle back and forth every day between home and workplace – there’s often something interesting to listen to. Much of it is ephemera – it might remain on BBC’s iPlayer, for instance, for a few days but then will be gone for ever. Occasionally, however, I’ll make an effort to find it later on the internet, make an audio recording of it before it vanishes, and then perhaps write up a transcript. This is what I did after hearing a brief interview with psychologist Steven Pinker on the BBC’s PM programme last week – you can read the transcript here.

The Better Angels of Our Nature is a book I’m now intending to read. Steven Pinker’s argument (that the long-term trend is of a reduction in human violence) seems to fit in, generally, with lines of thought expressed by some others, such as Daniel Ben Ami in Ferraris for All and Matt Ridley in The Rational Optimist – he is saying that despite the fact that there are places in the world where violent incidents are happening, there are many more places where such events are not happening, and that the overall incidence of violence is going down. This may be cold comfort for residents of the Syrian city of Homs, for example, in recent months, but of course there are vast expanses of the Earth where violence on that scale is not occurring and where peace largely reigns, unreported by the media.

We have become used to the idea that the world is heading for hell in a handbasket and that as humanity becomes more numerous the dangers of ecological collapse and societal breakdown loom ever closer. So it seems odd to learn that the world is actually becoming more peaceful. Just as people experience storms and floods, and look back to a mythical time of climate stability and “normal” weather, we also watch explosions and shootings on the TV news, and hark back to a slower, gentler, more peaceful era in human history – that never really was.

Things not looking too good in 3991 AD…

I heard on the radio this morning that committed computer gamer James Moore has spent the last decade playing Civilisation 2 (not continuously, it has to be said) and has now reached the virtual year of 3991 AD. Things have taken a somewhat nasty turn over the millennia – the world has been stuck in a vicious, Orwellian three-nation standoff for centuries, and has been through a generally rather tough time, what with famine, nuclear war, mass population die-off and also runaway global warming (the ice caps have somehow melted over twenty times – which is interesting in itself, as logically one would assume they’d need to grow back, in between melts.)

Daniel Knowles from the Telegraph explained, over the radio, that the game had certain assumptions build into it, which he deemed reasonable and not particularly outlandish. He mentioned nuclear war and a stop to the production of green technology as scenarios which would have certain consequences; for example, stopping green technology – in the universe of this game, at any rate – would of course lead to dangerous global warming.

What I find interesting is that James Moore has now become mired in something of an impasse – his nation (the Celts) is stuck in a permanent stalemate and nothing seems likely to change it – indeed, there’s a possibility that the game has now reached some kind of terminal state. And this, I think, speaks volumes about the limits of any kind of simulation, whether it be a humble game or the sort of computer models used to try and predict what the economy or the climate will do. There are always fixed assumptions and a finite number of possibilities. If the assumptions are incorrect, and if stuff happens that hasn’t been accounted for when the model was designed, then the simulation will be wrong, although it might be quite useful (and also entertaining, if it’s in the form of a game.) And the longer it runs, the wronger it will get.

In the real world, the unexpected can always happen. And often does! And in unexpected ways, too! And just when you thought it wouldn’t!

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?

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.

100 Years of Climate Change: Part 3

Time seems to have speeded up – somehow it’s now 2011 and I’m left with a backlog of climate stories from 1910. If this was my day job I’d be in big trouble, but thankfully this is just a blog and there is no manager or editor looking over my shoulder and telling me to pull my socks up.

So imagine, if you will, that it is still 2010, and I’m not horribly behind with everything.

There are stories from 1910 that are very relevant to this era, as many of us have been experiencing yet another cold and snowy winter across the northern hemisphere, and these include accounts of the great avalanches at Wellington and at Rogers Pass.

During the winter of 1909-10 there were strong La Nina conditions prevailing, just as there are now, with heavy snowfalls across North America that were similar to those that have been plaguing the continent a century later. Starting on 16th February, Ohio endured a state-wide snowstorm that was reputedly the worst in its history, with 10-foot deep drifts and older buildings collapsing under the weight of accumulated snow. Even at the end of March, Santa Fe in New Mexico was experiencing heavy snow, according to the papers of the time, and Denver, Colorado, was struck by a storm that was “almost of the proportions of a mid-winter blizzard”.

And with the widespread snowfalls came a couple of major weather-related tragedies, in quick succession.

The scene of the Wellington disaster was a remote mountain pass in Washington State, where two trains from the eastern US to Seattle had become stranded, due to the thick snow, despite heroic efforts of the railroadmen to clear the line. Aside from shovels and sheer human grit and determination, they had at their disposal two huge rotary snow ploughs mounted on a locomotive, which could cut through snowdrifts up to 13 feet thick but used up coal at a prodigious rate; however, even with these state-of-the-art machines, they were unable to clear the line.

On 1st March 1910, during a lightning storm at night, a total of 96 people died when a great avalanche swept down off the mountainside and struck the stranded trains, crushing them down into a snow-filled canyon. Ironically, many of the people who perished were women and children sleeping in their railway carriages because everyone had thought they would be safest there.

It is an absorbing and tragic story, to which I clearly won’t be able to do justice here. I recommend that you read it on this blog by John J. McKay, where it is told in vivid and sombre detail. In terms of lives lost, this was the worst ever avalanche in the history of the United States. Later the town was quietly renamed Tye (after the nearby Tye River) and then abandoned and burned. These days it is just another peaceful stop on the scenic Iron Goat Trail – although some say the place is haunted.

I’ve just read that this month has seen heavy snow again in the Cascade mountains, and that the Wellington site – just as it was 101 years ago – has been inaccessible from the outside world.

On 4th March 1910, three days after Wellington, there was a similar disaster in Canada which took 62 lives, when a huge mass of snow slid down from Cheops Mountain and buried work crews of railroadmen who had been sent out to clear the debris of a previous avalanche from the track, along with their locomotive. A few men had lucky escapes, one man surviving after being blown out of the train by the strong wind that accompanied the avalanche. The bodies of the dead were buried under 10 metres of snow. Four of them could not be found at the time, and were recovered later in the spring when the snow had melted.

Like the Wellington event, this avalanche set a record and is officially the worst in Canadian history.

The dead included 32 Japanese, who had been employed by the Canada Nippon Supply Company and contracted by Canadian Pacific Railway. Last year, on 4th March there was a commemorative service in the mountain resort of Revelstoke, British Columbia, during which the 62 men who died were remembered and honoured. It was attended by three members of the Yamaji family, who had not known that an ancestor of theirs – Mannusoke Yamaji – had been one of the dead, until a researcher into the history of the disaster had contacted them shortly before the anniversary. At the memorial service were hundreds of well-wishers, Christian and Buddhist clerics and a gift of hundreds of origami cranes.

Nowadays it is perhaps difficult to fully imagine the challenges our forbears faced a century ago when combating the elements and striving to overcome the most intractable of natural obstacles using only the brute power of steam engines and human muscle, without the benefit of radio communications, modern power tools, the internal combustion engine or heavier-than-air flight.

These stories from a long-ago winter are a reminder of a side of nature – relentless, awesome and unpredictable – that even in these latter days, cushioned as we are by our technology and our fossil-fuelled wealth, we ignore at our peril.

Fall of the Alexian Empire

One thousand six hundred years ago last Tuesday, a very significant event occurred in the ancient world. An army of barbarian Visigoths sacked Rome in AD 410, storming in through a gate in the north-eastern city walls occupying the city for three days and grabbing a load of valuable commodities including gold, silver and silk, before making off again. It has been hailed as the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire.

Our understanding of this event has changed over the years. At first, I suppose the general picture was like something out of Conan the Barbarian – an unstoppable tide of hirsute warriors rampaging in with blood-stained axes, putting innocent citizens to the sword, smashing valuable vases and works of art, burning temples and libraries, spray-painting rude slogans on walls and carrying off comely maidens (I’m probably making up some of this.) Now we know that although some looting, burning and mayhem did go on, the situation was a little more complicated than had first been thought.

Alaric and the Visigoths had actually started out as Roman allies, the Empire having sub-contracted much of its army to its northern Germanic neighbours. Also, the Eastern Empire, based at Constantinople, was on the path to become increasingly more powerful and significant than Rome itself. Rome and the Western Empire had remained wealthy but had ended up fragmented and militarily feeble, propped up by subject peoples who were often treated with barely disguised contempt, if accounts from that time are to be believed.

According to Wikipedia, Alaric was a leader of foederati, companies of Gothic soldiers who fought for Rome and were paid for out of Roman taxes, the Romans being unwilling now to participate directly in their own military. He was in a good position to learn about the Empire’s weaknesses, and was also becoming increasingly disgruntled at his treatment at the hands of his Roman masters, being passed over for promotion. And he was not alone; according to Wiki, “the situation was ripe for rebellion”.

So the signs were there. I know about the fall of civilisation only too well, having been in charge of a few empires myself – not, it must be said, in what is usually known as the “real world”, where unlike my ancient Macedonian namesake I am a relatively modest and obscure individual. No, my imperial adventures have taken place in the magical and alluring realm of computer games.

World-building computer games are difficult, and normally my preference has been for games where you mostly have to run around and shoot people (Tomb Raider) or sneak around and steal things (Thief: The Dark Project). It takes a very different kind of mind set to play a game where you have to establish an entire civilisation from scratch, work out the best places to put streets and houses, always try to keep within a tight budget. This requires patience, fortitude, long-term planning and luck. It can be frustrating. There’s quite a steep learning curve – get it wrong, and you may fail and crash quite spectacularly. Even at the best of times, things are always going awry and you start to develop a terrible urge to run around and shoot lots of people. But you can’t! It isn’t that kind of game.

One of my civilisations, New Hounslow, doing quite well at the moment, is technically not really an empire but a modern metropolis in the game Sim City 3000. Plus I have another world-builder – Zeus: Master of Olympus – which is more complicated than Sim City, and which involves constructing an entire Bronze Age economy, complete with urban areas, farms and fortifications, and with gods, heroes and monsters thrown into the mix. My current civilisation, New Mordor, is a moderately successful and prosperous land; its predecessor, though – the Alexian Empire, or Empire of Alex – is the stuff of legend. It rose out of nothing, soared to dizzy heights of prosperity and splendour, then descended into a nightmarish welter of war, debt, plague, fire, devastation and utter and complete doom. Even now, it is a byword for, I don’t know, “chaos” or “Ragnarok” or some such doom-laden word.

It had started out so promisingly, too. Once upon a time in ancient Greece, a few peaceful sheep-herders settled along an unoccupied stretch of coast, building small settlements and roads that cris-crossed the tranquil pastoral landscape. After a while, more settlers began to arrive, setting up cottage industries and demanding amenities. Hamlets became villages, villages became towns, towns coalesced into a mighty city. Luckily there was a good supply of seed capital to get the whole enterprise under way, and I dipped into this many a time to fund this thriving and expanding boom town.

And thus the Alexian Empire came into being, rising from its humble beginnings into a mighty and bustling metropolis. But soon a cascade of problems began to appear. For a start, unemployment was up. This was due to the fact that I was unaware of how to shift workers from one kind of workplace (threshing floor, carding shed, clothes emporium, etc) to another – it left growing numbers of citizens hanging around idly instead of engaging in productive labour.

And so GDP gradually began to falter. But spending went on unabated! Fires broke out, so I built fire stations (or their ancient Greek equivalent). People suffered from outbreaks of plague – I built hospitals. Houses crumbled into dust – I built lots of new ones! Some neighbouring states were unfriendly and hostile, demanding tribute – instead, I sent them a series of increasingly rude messages. Other states wanted to lend me money – I gladly accepted all offers, but never paid them back!

The Empire entered a grandiose new phase, as I kept spending my way out of difficulties and threw my funds into putting up a number of horribly expensive public buildings – a sports stadium and a score of vainglorious monuments to myself, which were about as useful as urban wind farms. Defence spending was non-existent, there being only a few (scandalously underpaid) soldiers and no city walls or fortifications. And still unemployment was rising, the mob was restless, my foreign creditors were starting to make threatening noises, and I was burning through money at an unbelievable rate.

The end came swiftly. Untended, the houses of my subjects burned down en masse and collapsed into heaps of rubble. Gangs of people roamed about, rioting and dropping dead of plague. My angry creditors then began to send army after army swarming across the plains and across the frontier into the beleaguered Alexian Empire. My puny squads of infantry were quickly overrun, and in desperation I started creating sheep and scattering them in the path of the oncoming enemy like landmines, in the hope that these woolly obstructions would buy me some time.

Sadly, the sheep ruse didn’t work. All was lost, and the Empire fell. It is long gone, but maybe in some forgotten corner of my computer’s hard drive are some ancient zeros and ones which represent the decaying ruins of my once magnificent Alexian People’s Sports Palace, surrounded perhaps by grazing sheep, descendants of those few who managed to survive that cataclysmic final battle. Nothing else remains.

So what lessons are there to be learned from the fall of the Alexian Empire? (And the Empire of the Romans as well, let’s not forget about them!)

1. Avoid getting into debt, and if you are in debt, get out of it as soon as you can.
2. If you find yourself in charge of a nation, better look after your military. Sooner or later, you will need them.
3. Think carefully before alienating people, as allies can become potential enemies.
4. In any civilisation, proper infrastructure is basic and essential – neglect it at your peril.
5. Be vigilant and never complacent – no Empire is too big to fail.

Are these rules sensible? I believe so, yes. Are they obvious? Again yes, pretty much no-brainers, really.

Are our current crop of leaders following them, in that case?

Well… I hope so.