THE FLOODED EARTH

Reviewed 9/01/2010

The Flooded Earth, by Peter D. Ward

THE FLOODED EARTH
Our Future in a World Without Ice Caps
Peter D. Ward
New York: Basic Books, June 2010

Rating:

4.5

High

ISBN-13 978-0-465-00949-7
ISBN 0-465-00949-2 261pp. HC/GSI $25.95

This book begins and ends with disaster scenarios. Each of its eight chapters opens with one or more scenarios set in a future year with a specified level of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere. These tales are intended to dramatize Dr. Ward's very appropriate concerns about how the world is going to look to our descendants, and they do a good job at that. Indeed, these grim scenarios are all too plausible, if we grant his assumptions. However, the book falls down in places on the explanations which follow these stories. It seems Dr. Ward has once again encountered an editor who fails to catch the instances of missing words or confusing syntax which occur in his writing.1 That's unfortunate, because the message Dr. Ward imparts here (and in his previous book Under a Green Sky) is one to which everyone on this planet should pay heed.

To put it as briefly and unemotionally as possible, that message is a warning that if we continue to conduct business as per the past two centuries, a steadily warming climate will bring drastic changes in the way water is distributed on our world. Rainfall patterns will shift, parching some areas while drenching others. Meanwhile, melting polar ice will raise sea levels, flooding some coastlines and pushing salt into once-fertile soils. The net result will be starvation and disruption.2

Irrigation Irritation

Crops need water, and they get it either from rainfall or by irrigation. Climate change threatens to disrupt both those ways of getting water to the crops we depend on.

Models predict longer and more frequent droughts for the western U.S. and especially for California's Central Valley, now a cornucopia for crops of many kinds. Those crops depend on fresh water piled up as snow in the Sierra and the lower Cascades during winter, which when it melts is stored in vast reservoirs and distributed mostly by canals and pipelines. Some 25 million people also depend on those mountain snowpacks, and the snowpacks are disappearing. California is already short of water. Both crops and people will suffer when the mountain peaks turn brown, as will native plants and animals. Reduced fresh water means less lettuce and other produce, less water for drinking, washing and industry, and one more thing: salt intrusion. Pulled by dropping fresh-water pressure, pushed by rising sea levels, salty water will invade the Central Valley not visibly, but through the soil, making it harder to grow anything but bracken.

As the blurb for this book points out, "Sea level rise will happen no matter what we do." It accurately reports the magnitude of that rise as one meter, or just over three feet. And it correctly notes that some benefits, such as new oil and mineral deposits, will accrue from the disappearance of ice — as will fierce competition over who gets to exploit these newly uncovered resources.

Brothers Grim

Like Stephan Faris in Forecast, Dr. Ward pulls no punches in describing the projected effects of climate change. But while Faris focuses on drought and disease, Ward reserves his grimmest projections for the impacts of the slowly rising sea.

Bangladesh is most at risk; it already has inundation and salt intrusion on coastal cropland. Its plight will only get worse. The Netherlands, richer and better prepared for the sea's onslaught, will ultimately fare no better. Neither will many of the world's great seaports. A few, including Rio de Janeiro and Seattle, have the luxury of resting partly on higher ground. Others, like Bangkok, New Orleans, and Venice,3 do not. Dr. Ward charts the elevations of certain streets in Manhattan, showing that some will one day be awash even if we could magically stop emitting CO2 today.

Venice will drown. So will parts of Manhattan and many other cities. Dr. Ward points out the impossibility of moving a city. All that's left is triage: deciding what's worth saving.

The two grimmest scenarios are found in Chapter 7. The first portrays widespread starvation and migration due to the collapse of agriculture in regions like Bangladesh, and the subsequent extermination of the migrating hordes by military forces of the nations they invade, using nuclear weapons. Last comes the view of a future Seattle, now diminished in geographic area, size of population, and quality of life: exemplar of a world where humans endure despite massive extinction.

"Ultimately, Greenland and Antarctica will become ice free—and in so becoming, they will have caused sea level to rise more than 200 feet. With their loss, the final act of human-engineered climate change will play out. What began as an industrial revolution in the 1800s and progressed to an oil economy in the 1900s, only to end as a coal economy in the 2100s and 2200s, will offer us a recipe for potential human extinction."

– Page 147

The picture the book paints is not one of unrelieved gloom and doom. In the final chapter of his book, Dr. Ward mentions a number of measures that could be employed to stave off, or at least minimize, the disasters he foresees. These measures include behavioral changes like driving less, relatively easy things like planting trees, burying carbon ("biochar") and painting rooftops white, and the technological whiz-bangs of geoengineering — seeding the seas with iron compounds, blasting sulfur into the stratosphere, or placing gigantic mirrors in orbit. He is properly dubious about the geoengineering schemes, noting that they are complex, expensive, and rife with the possibility of unintended consequences. They also share one major defect: none of them removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere; therefore, ocean acidification proceeds unchecked.

I marked this book down one notch because of its numerous confusing passages. Despite that, its combination of dramatic scenarios and mostly solid explanations of the science behind them is effective in getting the message across to the readers. Extensive endnotes and a good index enhance its usefulness for research. There is also a fifteen-page list of references, organized into nine topics. And, like Under a Green Sky, it describes some of its author's own adventures. I therefore consider the book a must read and, for those who follow the climate change controversy, a definite keeper.

1 Elsewhere I've speculated that these errors result from Dr. Ward dashing off a manuscript and turning it over to his publisher and then, with his busy schedule, essentially abandoning it to the tender mercies of whichever editor is assigned. That may be what happened here, once again, with The Flooded Earth.
2 There is of course no firm prediction of how fast the seas will rise. But analysis of mangrove remains shows that around 16,000 years ago, sea levels rose by 50 feet in 300 years — 15 feet per century (page 30). That's scary fast.
3 Among cities, Venice is a special, and especially illustrative, case. It now floods sixty times per year, up from the historical norm of 10 floods annually. National and international attention to the problem began in 1973; but thanks to squabbling in Italy's government, and other international priorities, little was done until the final years of the twentieth century. Then, construction began on a set of movable barriers to hold back the Adriatic. This €4.3 billion system is due to be completed in 2011. Unless carbon dioxide emissions are curbed, it will fail sometime this century.
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