Floods: The massive storm hit the Netherland's dikes when the tides were already high-- the worst possible time. By 3 AM, the dikes began to fail. People woke to the thunderous noise of the sea swamping 5 - 8% of the country; many made it to their rooftops, but nearly 2000 drowned. 70,000 people were ultimately evacuated.
Fires: The Australian Heat wave of January/February 2009 broke numerous records, including the hottest temperature ever recorded so far south. The hot dry weather set the stage for massive wildfires with flames higher than a ten story building that destroyed many towns and killed around 200 people(so far). "Hell in all its fury has visited the good people of Victoria" said the Australian Prime Minister.
So what do these two natural disasters have in common?
If you answered "Global Warming", you are wrong. The Netherlands floods happened in 1953.
If you answered "nothing" or "only that both involved people living in harm's way" you might well be right. But I hope not.
But first, let's talk about our nation's elite.
In 2006, a friend who worked for what was then a high-flying Wall Street firm emailed me (I've corrected some typos).
So the Banking division at [my firm] had a conference on Thursday and Friday, and [Alan] Greenspan came to talk to us for an hour (at what fee, who knows). Someone asked him about global warming, and his response was: the Kyoto protocol would be unenforceable, because the pressures for cheating and against meaningful enforcement are too strong. He figures we'll all take after the Dutch, and build dikes.
There are so many thing wrong with this, I don't know where to begin. One problem is that, as all of us know (but our elites don't seem to grasp) the problems of Global Warming go well beyond rising sea levels. Rivers fed by melting glaciers may run nearly dry in summer; half of all animal species on earth may die; crops may fail on a massive scale; fires may spread.
But there is a more fundamental problem. Even if rising seas were the only problem, who is the "we" who are going to build dikes?" Sure, the Netherlands and New York and Washington will all build dikes-- they can afford it. But the rising sea levels threaten millions of poor people in Asia and Pacific islands. They are, simply, too poor to build dikes.
When Alan Greenspan says "we" will build dikes, he means that the rich will build dikes.
Davos, 2007
As we all know, the world's elite congregate in Davos once per year. Here's a report from their 2007 meeting (emphasis mine).
Looking back over the week it feels like there was little sense of urgency in the world. There was a lot of discussion of the big problems: climate change, water, trade, economic imbalances, the dollar, religious and ethnic conflicts, rising China and India, extreme poverty and many more. But in the background was a global economy that felt fairly robust and from a business perspective times are good and no big threats appear imminent. You might call the mood complacent. There were no obvious big surprises or unanticipated crises.
The upside of that complacency was a sense that first of all the problems are well recognized and that we can even imagine how most, if not all can be addressed. There was, for example, a broad consensus that climate change was an urgent issue but the only real question was what was the mix of solutions.
Of course, this appears unintentionally hilarious (and tragic) from the viewpoint of 2009-- there seem to be a few problems missing from that list. But I suspect the Davos elite knew very well about, say, America's vanishing middle class, increasing indebtedness, and health care tragedies. They just didn't think it was their problem-- just like Alan Greenspan knows very well that Asians living on a dollar a day won't be building dikes anytime soon, but just doesn't think its his problem.
Jared Diamond on the Dutch Floods
Jared's Diamond book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed discusses this phenomenon in detail with specific reference to the Dutch Floods. I don't have a copy of the bookin front of me, but he makes similar points in this interview. (emphasis is mine)
"In Holland, a higher percentage of people belong to environmental organisations than anywhere else in the world... And on my last visit to Holland I asked my Dutch friends Why is it this high level of environmental awareness in Holland? And they said, ‘Look around. Most of us are living in Polders, in these lands that have been drained, reclaimed from the sea, they’re below sea level and they’re guided by the dykes’. In Holland everybody lives in the Polders, whether you’re rich or poor. It’s not the case that the rich people are living high up on the dykes and the poor people are living down in the Polders. So when the dyke is breached or there’s a flood, rich and poor people die alike. In particular in the North Sea floods in Holland in the late ‘40s and ‘50s, when the North Sea was swept by winds and tides 50 to 100 miles inland, all Dutch in the path of the floods died whether they were rich or poor. So my Dutch friends explained it to me that in Holland, rich people cannot insulate themselves from consequences of their actions...
Whereas in much of the rest of the world, rich people live in gated communities and drink bottled water. That’s increasingly the case in Los Angeles where I come from. So that wealthy people in much of the world are insulated from the consequences of their actions."
The Dutch floods were thus very different from Katrina. One of the many tragedies of Katrina is that it seems to have taught our elites the lesson Natural disasters kill those too poor to leave.
Australia's Fires From Hell
The recent fires in Australia have been diaried by JohnnyRook, FishOutofWater, alkatt, and me. They are the subject of intense coverage by Australian newspapers like the Sydney Morning Herald. And the Boston Globe has run some incredible photographs.
Briefly, climate scientists have long predicted that temperate regions of Australia will experience unprecedented heat and drought, followed by massive fires. For the last few weeks, temperate regions in southern Australia have experienced unprecedented heat and drought, followed by massive fires. No specific event can be definitively attributed to climate change, but we should expect more firestorms just like these in the future. A lot more.
Today, it seems like the focus is shifting to the arsonists who may have caused some of the fires. But it may happen that Australia's elite will realize that massive fires burn everyone's houses indiscriminately. And maybe they will help Australia to stop exporting coal, and to massively cut its greenhouse gas emissions.
If so, then one day the answer to the question in the title of this diary will be: "Both convinced a nation-- and its elite-- that it had a serious problem which would kill rich and poor alike unless they took immediate, appropriate action."
I hope so. I really hope so.