Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  The surviving human and natural archives reveal episodes of major climate change in the fourteenth century and in 1816, as well as in the seventeenth century. A series of articles by economic historian Bruce Campbell demonstrates that the 1310s and 1340s saw both ‘extreme instability’ in the climate and lethal disease (rinderpest in 1316–25 and bubonic plague 1346–53), at a time when both the bovine and human populations had reached unprecedented densities. England's excellent surviving records suggest these natural disasters ‘more than halved’ the population.7 The climate-induced catastrophe in 1816, another ‘year without a summer’, occurred when sunspots were few (the ‘Dalton Minimum’, 1795–1828), and just after the most powerful volcanic eruption recorded in the past 10,000 years, at Tambora in Indonesia: a combination that appears to have reduced average temperatures on earth by between 1#x00B0; and 2°C – exactly the same variation as in the mid-seventeenth century. This sufficed to produce not only global cooling but also extreme climatic events. In North America, throughout the summer, fronts of Arctic air dumped snow north of a line stretching from British Columbia to Georgia, producing temperature oscillations from 35°C to freezing in a single day; and in September 1816, New Hampshire experienced ‘the four greatest frosts known … at this season by any man living’. Across the Atlantic, intense cold prevailed for most of the summer from Finland to Morocco; rain fell on Ireland for 142 out of 153 days between May and September; England experienced the third coldest summer since continuous records began in 1659; and grapes in all French and Swiss vineyards ripened later than in any other year since continuous records began in 1437. In Asia, the monsoon failed in India, while snow fell in Jiangnan and Taiwan. In 1817 at Barnstead, New Hampshire, St Valentine's Day was ‘the coldest day [that] has been for forty years’; while at Salem, Massachusetts, the Reverend William Bentley spent ‘the first [day] in my life in which I kept house upon account of the cold’. The extreme weather also generated both disease and famine: a severe epidemic of typhus broke out in Europe while cholera ravaged India; scarcity of bread provoked widespread food riots in Europe; while ‘through[out] New England scarcely a tenth part of the usual crop of sound corn will be gathered’. The price of wheat in New York City in 1816 would not be surpassed until 1973.8

  The ‘Yankee Chills’ (as survivors in North America called their miserable summer) produced massive emigration from New England to the Midwest. ‘The lands to the westward are luxuriant, and the climate mild and salubrious,’ crooned a land promoter, and thousands of families believed him and abandoned their farms for the ‘golden Ohio country’: between 1817 and 1820 the population of the state of Ohio rose by 50 per cent, taking it above 500,000 for the first time. Most of the newcomers were New Englanders fleeing the sudden climate change.9

  Two centuries later, flight to Ohio would offer little relief if ‘Yankee Chills’ (or any other natural disaster) should strike New England. In the words of the 2011 version of the state of Ohio's Strategic Plan: ‘Getting food from farms to dinner tables involves a complex chain of events that could be interrupted at many different stages. Because food and agriculture are such vital industries to our state, Ohio must vigilantly protect animal, plant, and food supply chains’ – but with over 11 million Ohioans, it is hard to see how the state could also feed 50 per cent more in an emergency.10 Admittedly, if the ‘chills’ killed only corn, or only affected New England, the transport and distribution infrastructure that has developed in Ohio since 1816 could probably import sufficient emergency food rations from unaffected (or less affected) areas; but this might prove impossible in the wake of a natural disaster nearer home. In 2005 it took almost a week to get vital supplies of food and water into New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck, because the storm that flooded the city also severed road and rail links and disabled both landline and cellular telephones; while the evacuation of over one million people from areas of the Gulf Coast affected by the hurricane created a ‘hollowed economy’, with an infrastructure no longer capable of satisfying its basic food, water and health needs.11

  Although Katrina was the costliest natural disaster in the history of the United States, it was only one among 432 reported natural disasters of 2005 around the world, causing between them $176 billion of economic damage. That figure remained the record until 2011 when, although the total of reported national disasters fell to 302, the economic damage they caused exceeded $350 billion. This total included $2 billion caused by a tornado that struck Tuscaloosa, Alabama; $11 billion caused by the earthquake that struck Christchurch, New Zealand; $25 billion caused by another tornado that hit Joplin, Missouri; and $210 billion caused by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Between them, those four natural disasters killed well over 20,000 men, women and children. In addition, in 2011, over 106 million people around the world were affected by floods; almost 60 million more by drought; and a further 40 million by storms.12

  No human intervention could have prevented these natural catastrophes – although a better early-warning system, better popular education about evasive strategies, and faster and more effective emergency responses would surely have mitigated the consequences. Likewise, no human intervention can prevent volcanic eruptions, halt an El Niño episode, or delay the onset of another sunspot minimum – despite the certainty that each will affect the climate, reduce harvest yields, and cause starvation, economic dislocation, political instability and death.13 So what can be done to mitigate the consequences? The disastrous hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005 (which included not only Katrina but ‘seven of the nine costliest systems ever to strike the United States’) led the National Hurricane Center, a division of the National Weather Service located at Miami, Florida, to pose just this question. The Center concluded sadly that another ‘disastrous loss of life is inevitable in the future’, mainly because the majority of those living in areas at risk have ‘never experienced a direct hit by a major hurricane’ and seem incapable of envisaging what one is like, while even the rest ‘only remember the worst effects of a hurricane for about seven years’. For the National Hurricane Center, the problem lay less in the frequency of hurricanes than in the failure of human beings to learn from them: ‘The areas along the United States Gulf and Atlantic coasts, where most of this country's hurricane-related fatalities have occurred are also experiencing the country's most significant growth in population’ – striking testimony to the strong ‘culture of denial’ that prevails.14

  Nevertheless, as the social psychologist Paul Slovik pointed out, ‘The ability to sense and avoid harmful environmental conditions is necessary for the survival of all living organisms’, while ‘survival is also aided by an ability to codify and learn from past experience’. Moreover, Slovnik continued, ‘Humans have an additional capability that allows them to alter their environment as well as respond to it’.15 This ability to ‘alter’ our environment presupposes two distinct skills: learning processes (the observation, measurement and classification of natural phenomena) and learning steps (the development of techniques, practices and instructions designed to reduce vulnerability in future hazards). History offers numerous examples of both in action. Repeated floods in the lands around the North Sea in the Middle Ages led to the evolution not only of preventive measures and coping strategies but also of permanent cadres of ‘experts’ and an unusually resilient entrepreneurial culture: all underpinned the rise of the Dutch Republic as a world power. Likewise, the crescendo of urban fires in the mid-seventeenth century gave rise in one city after another to both better fire-fighting measures and (at least in Europe) to the development of a system of specialized insurance companies that now form some of the most powerful business enterprises in the modern world.16

  Nevertheless, in order to activate our ‘additional capability to alter [our] environment’, it seems that humans need to experience natural disasters ‘not only in magnitude but in frequency as well. Without repeated experiences, the process whereby managers evolve measures of coping with [disasters] do
es not take place.’17 Effective measures to prevent and to mitigate floods and fires therefore only seem to evolve after repeated disasters of unprecedented severity strike a community. Perhaps this defect in human cognition explains why, despite the fact that 2010 saw the warmest global surface temperatures ever recorded, and was the 34th consecutive year with global temperatures above the twentieth-century average, the Washington Post proclaimed in 2011 that global warming had become ‘a second-tier issue’.18

  This strange disconnect prompted a team of researchers to ask over 67,000 people in 47 different countries to answer the question: ‘How serious do you consider global warming?’ The findings, published in the Journal of Peace Research in 2012, supported the assertion of the Washington Post: ‘Global warming is not considered as an especially important environmental problem by the public.’ The data also suggested five broad explanations:

  • Concern about climate change correlates with education level, but not with age: those younger than 30 and those older than 60 both seem less concerned than those who are middle-aged.

  • ‘As countries become affluent, their citizens shift their concern from issues related to economic conditions and personal security’ to ‘issues related to political and individual freedom and environmental protection’.19

  • ‘A statistically significant negative correlation’ exists between Biblical Fundamentalism and ‘concern for the environment’, particularly among Christians in the United States, for many of whom natural disasters are divine punishments for sins and so must be accepted.20

  • Respondents in rich countries, and in countries with high carbon dioxide emission levels, showed less concern about global warming than those in poor countries, or in countries with low greenhouse gas emissions (perhaps because it is harder to accept global warming as a problem when it requires recognition that it is partly your fault: a relationship that has been labelled ‘uncomfortable truth’).

  • Finally, the level of concern about global warming is negatively correlated with concern for climate-related natural disasters: that is, people living in countries highly exposed to natural disasters (such as droughts or earthquakes) are less concerned about global warming, either because they perceive the other environmental problems they face as more acute, or because prolonged exposure to natural adversity has taught them to live with it – or, in the words of a study entitled The Culture of Disaster: ‘For the greater part of humanity, hazard and disaster are simply just accepted aspects of daily life.’21

  Until recently, the fact that almost all people killed and most people affected by natural disasters lived outside North America and Europe fostered two assumptions in the West: that such things only happened ‘somewhere else’ (an assumption encouraged by terms such as ‘Typhoon Alley’, ‘The ring of fire’ or ‘El Niño-prone’); and that certain groups are particularly ‘vulnerable’ not just because of where they live but also how they live (such as people who live in overpopulated cities or on marginal lands). Such views are not unfounded: for example, the Philippine archipelago really does experience more disasters than any other comparable area of the world, with 220 volcanoes (at least 12 of them active), 5 earthquakes a day, and up to 30 typhoons a year; while the Haitian earthquake of 2010 reminded the world that urban overcrowding and poverty magnify the impact of disasters.22 But now, natural disasters are also striking North America and Europe, where each one becomes an ‘insurance event’.

  According to a White Paper prepared for the European Commission, almost two-thirds of all ‘loss events’ between 1980 and 2007 were ‘directly attributable to weather and climate events (storms, floods and heat-waves)’ while a further quarter ‘are attributable to wild fires, cold spells, landslides and avalanches, which may also be linked to weather and climate’. Therefore, ‘95% of the overall losses of catastrophic events result from these weather and climate related events’. According to the same White Paper, ‘overall losses caused by weather and climate related events have increased during the period 1980–2007 from a decadal average of less than €7.2 billion (1980–1989) to about €13.7 billion (1998–2007)’. The central European floods of 2002, alone, ‘resulted in overall losses of €16.8 billion and insured losses of about €3.4 billion’.23

  These striking data have not escaped the attention of the world's insurance companies – indeed, their own estimate in 2009 was that ‘losses from weather events are growing at an annual 6 per cent, thus doubling every 12 years’ – and, in response, they have made some dramatic changes in coverage and premiums. Thus in the Netherlands, where over one-third of the country would be under water without artificial barriers, flood insurance is now unavailable; while in Great Britain it is currently available only for properties built before 2009, and for them only until a government re-insurance system expires at the end of 2012.24 In Florida, where in 1992 Hurricane Andrew caused more than $15 billion in insurance losses and bankrupted 12 insurance companies, the State government created a public alternative to the private market. Then came the hurricanes of 2004 and 2005, which forced private insurers to pay out a further $39 billion to ‘rebuild Florida’ – but when those insurers asked the State's permission to raise premiums to cover the increased risk, the State refused. Several private companies therefore refused to insure property in Florida, creating an ‘insurance crisis’ that has yet to be resolved. In the Bahamas, finally, where government declined to introduce a publicly guaranteed alternative to private insurance, after three major hurricanes between 1999 and 2004 ‘flood insurance (and consequently mortgage lending) became withdrawn [by private companies] for some low-lying areas and, without any State-backed alternative, houses have become abandoned as their value collapsed’.25

  These developments led the International Association for the Study of Insurance Economics, also known as ‘the Geneva Association’, to conclude that ‘Insurers need to emphasize that climate change brings societal problems to which insurance can only provide solutions in partnership with government and business’. This is easier said than done. Not everyone believes insurances companies, even when their message takes the form of dramatically higher premiums (if they did, no one would smoke tobacco because smokers pay so much more for life and health insurance.) Moreover, as the European Commission White Paper points out,

  In a number of regions, less populated and economically less performing, often located in areas that are particularly sensitive to climate change risks (coastal, mountainous), the costs to cover adaptation needs will be so huge that they exceed the capacity of public funding. In these areas, losses can take such massive dimensions also for the private sector that they rise eventually beyond the financial capacity of individual companies and businesses.26

  The impact of the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons on the Florida property market demonstrates why neither insurers nor ‘market forces’ nor local government are likely to cope with all the consequences of climate change. In 2009 the Florida Chamber of Commerce composed a report entitled Into the Storm, warning that the state's entry into the insurance business had created a $2 trillion exposure in property risks, so that taxpayers face ruin when the next major hurricane strikes. The report recommended two obvious steps: offering incentives to owners who improved their properties to minimize storm damage (and thus reduce the cost of compensation and repair); and allowing the state insurance scheme to ‘let risk determine rates’ (that is, in the pungent phrase of former Representative Dennis Ross, ‘The risk of living in high-risk areas should be borne by the people who choose to live in those areas’). The authors of Into the Storm envisaged only two other proposals: either to attract private insurers back by allowing them to raise premiums to levels that ‘reflect the risks that property owners actually take’; or else to ‘Push the Feds’, because without private insurers ‘We need to have a federal backstop for a Florida catastrophe’. The Chamber of Commerce recognized that neither proposal had much chance of success: allowing the ‘free market’ to determine property insurance pre
miums would result in rates that few owners could afford; while ‘any national legislation that might serve as a back-up to Florida's potential catastrophic losses due to natural disasters still faces a very steep uphill battle from states that argue Florida's extreme exposure to natural disasters would pose an unfair burden to U.S. taxpayers’. As Dennis Ross might have put it: ‘If you knew that devastating hurricanes strike Florida every year, why did you build a house here?’27

  Pessimism regarding support from Washington does not lack scriptural warrant. In the twenty-first century, federal agencies have slightly increased funding to states and cities for disaster response planning; and they have spent rather more on ‘mitigation’ – that is, on moving things out of harm's way (such as relocating houses out of flood plains) and improving physical defences against natural hazards (such as restoring levees, canals and coastal wetlands in areas threatened by hurricanes and floods). The majority of federal disaster spending, however, has taken the form of aid to help state and local governments to cope with disasters that have already happened. These funds have normally gone to support short-term activities in the days and weeks after the event: search and rescue; law enforcement; putting out fires; providing temporary shelter; organizing the emergency distribution of food, water and medicine. Relatively little federal funding has gone into helping vulnerable localities prepare for long-term recovery in the wake of a future disaster: how to ensure that local government continues to operate; how to re-house displaced people; how to prepare for the inevitable health problems, mental as well as physical.