The day the dam broke--a Carbon Based original

    On December 26 in a local church, a neighbor read several stories by James Thurber.  One of these was "The Day the Dam Broke," which recounts a stretch of two hours in 1913 when sudden rumors of a failed dam in Columbus, Ohio, provoked a mass panic.  Thurber says, "The fact that we were all as safe as kittens under a cook stove did not, however, assuage in the least the fine despair and the grotesque desperation which seized upon the residents of the East Side when the cry spread like a grass fire that the dam had given way." 

    To comic effect, Thurber dwells on the terror that erupts instantly and the citizens' shamefaced return to their lives when no waters appear.  (Actually, a similar theme crops up in a number of Thurber stories, such as, "The Night the Bed Fell Down.")

    Residents fled east to avoid the rushing waters of the Scioto River. There were none. Authorities worsened the alarm.  Soldiers patrolling the streets announced that the dam had NOT failed.  Everyone heard as, "The dam has NOW failed.

    But were the citizens of Columbus so irrational to flee? Dams do break, and it's usually disastrous when they do.  In fact, in a real dam break, everyone downstream must act quickly to reach higher ground.  Thurber observes that everybody ran because the starting the cars of that era required a crank, and presumably that took too much time with an inundation gushing at one's heels.  

    The irrational part lay in not bothering to check for water, even after some minutes.  But coastal dwellers today, if they heard a tsunami warning, would remember the horrifying YouTube videos of the Aceh tidal wave coming ashore in 2010.  They would flee in an instant. I know I would.

    Nothing in Thurber's story considers the dam's soundness and its state of repair, or the quality of its management.  But presumably, after the panic of 1913, the leaders of Columbus probably checked the dam and made inquiries into what they could do to prepare for an actual dam break.  But that's a much less amusing story.

    This is how everyone wants climate change to turn out -- a hasty alarm that we slink away from when its foolishness is revealed. But of course, that doesn't fit the climate change pattern.  Evidence from direct observations, the paleoclimate record, and climate models all corroborate anthropogenic global warming.   This means intensified water cycles, more weather-related disasters, and a variety of other effects.

    What's more pertinent is speed. Climate change as a whole does not suddenly appear full blown. It builds slowly and on any given day doesn't impinge on people's minds or their lives. A catastrophe right in front of us grabs all our attention, but sorting out the climate signal it contains is not so obvious, nor is it the most pressing task when the waters are rising. 

    The analogy between Thurber's story and climate change would be even better if there were a well-funded movement in Columbus whose goal was to stop any effort to maintain the dam. Actually, something similar has happened to infrastructure in the United States, as state and local governments have allowed bridges, roads, dams, water treatment plants, and so on to fall into disrepair.  Decades of skimped maintenance has resulted in degraded service and outright failures.  The American Society of Civil Engineers gives US infrastructure a "D," and estimates a five-year investment of $2.2 trillion will be necessary to bring everything into good repair.

    We have time to prepare for slow-moving risks.  The cry of denialists notwithstanding, it's worth spending money today to avoid a catastrophe tomorrow.  Of course, we've already lost decades in the battle against climate change, thanks to fossil fuel industry's propaganda onslaught.  But there is still plenty we could do, and we will need to spend decades at it.

    Not long after our neighbor finished his Thurber reading, a sleeting snowstorm began, and was still underway a day later.  But everyone returned to their homes in an orderly way.

Thurber's own illustration for "The Day the Dam Broke"

Climate change novels -- faulty simulators of environmental politics

Adam Trexler, a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Exeter, has a great article over at Policyinnnovations.org: Over the last three decades, more than 200 novels have been written that try to imagine our future in a climate-changed world. Novels are fanciful by nature, doomsaying or utopian, and would never be confused for serious policy arguments. However, this collection of novels, taken as a whole, indicates some of the fundamental difficulties we have in articulating a just and sustainable future.

Despite decades spent talking about climate change, our culture remains mired in political uncertainty. Anthony Giddens recently described the crux of the problem as follows: An effective response to global warming must be multilateral, but we lack the institutions, mechanisms, and international relationships needed to make progress. Simply put, we lack a politics of climate change.

Imagining what could fill this gap has proved as problematic as predicting the physical climate. The IPCC has long used emissions scenarios—narratives about policy, technology, population, the economy, and emissions—to describe climate outcomes. While no particular scenario is likely to come true 100 percent, the scenarios help describe some of the complex interactions we should expect.

...Across the board, the novel has long depended on human conflicts—national, social, and political—to narrate different points of view. Bilateral negotiation, ultimatums, two-party politics, and activist resistance have unfolded along the same logic. However, these recent novels about global warming suggest we need new ways of envisioning political alliances, blending technocratic and utopian aspects of policy...

Artwork created by Stefan Prohaczka for Wikipedia in the development of an article, from http://stefanparis.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d2qcpr0, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Ominous skies

Driving around yesterday with a camera, I saw this sky over a field in Canaan, Connecticut. It reminded me of one of John Ruskin's nutty but prophetic essays, The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century. Ruskin noted, "In many of the reports given by the daily press, my assertion of radical change, during recent years, in weather aspect was scouted as imaginary, or insane. I am indeed, every day of my yet spared life, more and more grateful that my mind is capable of imaginative vision, and liable to the noble dangers of delusion which separate the speculative intellect of humanity from the dreamless instinct of brutes: but I have been able, during all active work, to use or refuse my power of contemplative imagination, with as easy command of it as a physicist's of his telescope: the times of morbid are just as easily distinguished by me from those of healthy vision, as by men of ordinary faculty, dream from waking; nor is there a single fact stated in the following pages which I have not verified with a chemist's analysis, and a geometer's precision."


He also says, in a letter to the editor of the St. James's Gazette: "I have been a very constant though not a scientific observer of the sky for a period of forty years; and I confess to a certain feeling of astonishment at the way in which the "recent celestial phenomena" seem to have taken the whole body of scientific observers by surprise. It would even appear that something like these extraordinary sunsets was necessary to call the attention of such observers to what has long been a source of perplexity to a variety of common folk, like sailors, farmers, and fishermen. But to such people the look of the weather, and what comes of that look, is of far more consequence than the exact amount of ozone or the depth or width of a band of the spectrum.

'Now, to all such observers, including myself, it has been plain that of late neither the look of the sky nor the character of the weather has been, as we should say, what it used to be; and those whose eyes were strong enough to look now and then toward the sun have noticed a very marked increase of what some would call a watery look about him, which might perhaps be better expressed as a white sheen or glare, at times developing into solar halo or mock suns, as noted in your paper of the 2d of October last year.

He goes on to blame industrialization for the spread of the Storm Cloud, or "plague cloud" as he sometimes calls it.

Maybe he was on to something.

J.G. Ballard -- no longer running wild

One of my favorite writers died today. As I observed in a long previous post, J.G. Ballard often dwelled on the psychic implications of humans disconnected from nature, lost in anomie and madness. From the Telegraph (UK): Before the success of Empire of the Sun Ballard was known principally for darkly surreal novels such as The Crystal World (1966), which described a West African country undergoing an inexplicable process of petrifaction, and Crash (1973), in which he put forward the idea that modern society finds traffic accidents erotic. Despising the term science fiction, Ballard never used it, preferring to describe his work as "apocalyptic".

….He became a professional writer and his first novel The Drowned World was published in 1961. In it he put forward one of the first theories about global warming causing the flooding of the world's major cities. His second book, The Terminal Beach, followed a year later.

….Ballard returned to his "apocalyptic" vision of the future with The Day of Creation (1988). The novel told the story of a doctor, working in Africa, who opens a small spring which rapidly grows into a river. As the flood transforms the country around it the doctor feels compelled to find the source of the river and to try to dam the flow. "Obsessions again," Ballard recalled. "I think people often feel like that, they create something and then become frightened of it, people become jealous of their own children."…

Wildflower declines in Thoreau's Concord woods are due to climate changes

Science Daily: Drawing on records dating back to the journals of Henry David Thoreau, scientists at Harvard University have found that different plant families near Walden Pond have borne the effects of climate change in strikingly different ways. Some of the plant families hit hardest by global warming have included beloved species like lilies, orchids, violets, roses, and dogwoods.

Over the past 150 years, some of the plants in Thoreau's woods have shifted their flowering time by as much as three weeks as spring temperatures have risen, the researchers say, while others have been less flexible. Many plant families that have proven unable to adjust their flowering time have experienced sharp declines or even elimination from the local landscape -- the fate of nearly two-thirds of the plants Thoreau found in the 1850s around Walden Pond in Concord, Mass.

"It had been thought that climate change would result in uniform shifts across plant species, but our work shows that plant species do not respond to climate change uniformly or randomly," says Charles C. Davis, assistant professor of organismic and evolutionary biology in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "Some plants around Walden Pond have been quite resilient in the face of climate change, while others have fared far worse. Closely related species that are not able to adjust their flowering times in the face of rising temperatures are decreasing in abundance."

Some 27 percent of all species Thoreau recorded in the mid-19th century are now locally extinct, and another 36 percent are so sparse that extinction may be imminent. Plant families that have been especially hard-hit by global warming have included lilies, orchids, buttercups, violets, roses, dogwoods, and mints. Many of the gainers have been weedier mustards and knotweeds, along with various non-native species…..

Arthur C. Clarke dies at 90

Back when I used to read science fiction by the pound, I disdained the late Arthur C. Clarke. He was too scientific, too plodding, not literary enough, or so I thought. Sure he foretold geosynchronous satellites and space elevators, but these imaginative feats that did not impress me.

About 12 years ago, a viewing of Kubrick's 2001 prompted me to reread the book. I discovered that the movie achieved its greatness through reduction, through eliminating clues and making the alien presence that drives the story more mysterious. Clarke spells more out and gives the aliens plausible motives for what they do. I found myself much more excited by the story than I expected. Clarke's approach differed entirely from Kubrick's because the aliens were not removed and transcendent in the long run. They were beings with purposes and he wanted to connect with them.

From the first book in the quartet, I went to 2010, then to 2067, and then to 3001. I fished a copy of Rendezvous with Rama that a friend had urged on me and devoured that, finishing each with a growing sense that my 14-year-old literary judgement wasn't the last word.

His gallantry and good cheer in the face of a crippling case of post-polio syndrome always impressed me. So many features of our modern lives first appeared in his stories, a case of life imitating art not once, but many times. Clark was a great writer and I will always remember him with admiration and pleasure.

Monolith as displayed at the "Hackers at Large" conference in Enschede, The Netherlands, 10-11-12 August 2001, photo by Brinkie, Wikimedia Commons

A climate change visionary: J.G. Ballard

In an interview in the Times (UK), I read the dreadful news that J.G. Ballard has prostate cancer. He's written a new autobiography to try to get everything down as quickly as he can.

This great writer is best known, perhaps, as the author of Empire of the Sun, his memoir of a boyhood spent in China as a prisoner in a Japanese slave labor camp. Even the peppy Steven Spielberg film version can't quite gloss over Ballard's dark vision of the will to survive. It's hard to forget the scene when the young Ballard witnesses the detonation of the atomic bomb that destroyed Nagasaki just over the horizon.

One of Ballard's great strengths as a writer has been his eerie ability to convey a sense of humans and nature out of balance. Sometimes the world is submerged, or the jungle begins intruding on a decayed resort, or a high-rise building reverts to savagery. In one science fiction story after another, he's described the psychological impact of climate instability.

The reasons vary in the stories, and as far as I know Ballard hasn't often focused directly on global warming as such. Perhaps in Day of Creation, which is set in an African drought. But nobody has a firmer grip on the radiating psychological unease of a world where the climate no longer behaves.