Brian Fagan -- The attacking ocean
====================================

It's a book about the places that have been attached and destroyed
by rising sea levels and storm surges.  There have been a variety of
causes of these destructive events: earthquakes and tsunamis for
one, cyclones and hurricanes for another.  And, rising sea levels
have been and will make those events even more destructive.  Fagan
gives accounts about how these events have affected human
populations over a long historical time period.

Fagan does a good job of emphasizing how incredibly costly it will
be for populated areas along sea coasts to protect themselves.
Building defensive structures around cites on the coast is very
costly, and Fagan is right to tell us that the maintenance on those
structures will be massively expensive, too, and that is *if* we do
shoulder the cost of building them in the first place.  Some regions
and nations, Fagan suggests, can afford to build these defensive
works in protection against rising and surging water.  According to
Fagan, the Netherlands seems to be one of those; Cairo and Egypt
seems not to be.  Perhaps even more worrisome are places and times
where there has been a will to build the defensive structures in the
first place, but then, either through negligence or an inability to
shoulder the costs, the maintenance work has not been kept up,
leaving people who were tempted to live in protected areas at risk.

Moving people away from threatened regions on the coast is another
strategy that Fagan discusses.  In some situations, that might be a
costly but acceptable strategy, in particular where the threatened
population is small and the buildings and infrastructure is not so
valuable that they cannot be given up.  But, even when that might
seem to some of us to be an acceptable option, to those who would
have to give up their homes and other buildings, it often seems not.
So, even then, this becomes an unacceptable (or at least,
unaccepted) solution, especially when those living in the threatened
area are wealthy and politically connected, or even when not and,
for example, a minority group can claim that their homes are being
unfairly sacrificed when those of the privileged are not.

Fagan, as you'd expect, does discuss climate change.  And, he dumps
a reasonable amount of scorn on those who deny climate change, its
effects and threats, and its human causes.  He makes clear that
there is more to this than the rise of the sea level by just a few
centimeters.  It's also that increased damage that will be caused
when that sea level rise is compounded with storm surges, especially
at high tides and, when we have, as we do already, subsidence along
the shoreline caused by ground water pumping.

And, in our age, there is another factor we should consider.  In
Fagan's time scales, hundreds and even thousands of years, formerly,
populations were much lower and smaller that they are currently.
Now, we have huge cities containing tens of millions of people
situated in threatened areas on the coasts and at the mouths of
rivers.  Where the number of lives threatened formerly was large,
now it is immense.  Any loss of life is deplorable, but in our
future, that loss of lives and the destruction of property that
likely will come with it will be catastrophic.

There is more to this book than stories of threatened regions.
Fagan also tells a story of the advance of civilization as weather
and climate and sea levels, too, have changed over the last 12,000
years.  You get some of that story in the early chapters of this
book.  You can find many more details about those millennium long
changes in one of Fagan's other books: "The little ice age".

There are chapters about rivers and deltas and the storms and storm
surges that attacked them.  And, there is a chapter about tsunamis
and the regions they destroyed.

I regret one thing about "The attaching ocean": I live near the U.S.
west coast (I'm actually in central California).  I've read that one
of the most threatened areas is the Pacific northwest and the coast
of Washington, Oregon, and northern California.    There is a fault,
a meeting between the tectonic plates off the coast of Oregon, that
has not given way for several hundred years. It's called the
Cascadia subduction zone.  (See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone) When that
earthquake comes, and it must, the damage and loss of life will be
severe.  I wish that Fagan had spent a few pages on that story.  He
is excellent at explaining and describing the risks that face us
along our coasts, and he'd have helped us understand that one, too.

In the later chapters of "The attaching ocean", Fagan explains why
all this matters, what it means to people across the world.  For
example: (1) Rising oceans will result in loss of agricultural land.
That means that the world will have less ability to produce food for
a population that is already pushing the limits of our ability to
provide for it.  There will be hunger.  (2) Rising oceans means that
there will be loss of land where people now live, resulting in huge
migrations of those who have lost their homes.  Fagan notes that the
population of cities near coast where there will be inevitable
flooding is huge.  In many cases, these populations and their
governments are poor and will be unable to afford the cost of
building the defensive works needed to offer some protection against
rising sea levels and will be unable to provide the relief and
alternative living space for those that will be displaced.

The ratchet effect -- Fagan makes clear that some populations and
nations across the globe are more able and can better afford to both
prepare for the effects of rising oceans and to deal with those
effects when they do come.  But, he also describes how being able to
do so is a mixed blessing and because it results in larger and
larger populations that live in threatened areas.  In effect,
eventually, what this means is that when those preparations and
defenses and accommodations fail, as they inevitable and eventually
will, many times more people will be harmed.  Nature's time-line is
not smooth.  It is not monotonic, regular, or predictable.  We are
preparing for a range of events that will eventually be exceeded.
Add to that the fact that a 100 year storm with today's sea level
will mean something different from that same storm with tomorrow's
higher sea level.  And, our preparations have the effect of
encouraging and enabling many more people to stay and live in the
areas that will be destroyed by tomorrow's storms and earthquakes.

I suggest that you look for Fagan's comments about salinity and
soils.  Yes, we live in an industrial and even post-industrial age.
But, we still depend on food grown on land, and as more of that land
becomes saline (either because of rising sea level or land
subsidence) our ability to feed ourselves will be threatened.

This is a frightening but fascinating book.

09/22/2016

.. vim:ft=rst:fo+=a: