Tewkesbury is a quaint little place.

Tewkesbury is a quaint little place of about 17,000 people a couple of hours outside of London. Formerly famous for its cathedral, now famous for being under water. In Canada, we are reassured on the front pages of the national newspapers that all this is quite understandable now because government scientists have confirmed that global warming is creating a wetter north and a drier south. So we can plan. Isn’t that great!

It’s like attending a play where you’ve read the prologue and you’ve figured out how Acts I to III are going to unfold. Tewkesbury will be remembered as the opening Act. There are 300,000 people displaced by the current high water in the United Kingdom. Act II will be London under water. Try and imagine the city of London under water just like Tewkesbury. Fifteen million displaced people, that’s the population of London and environs. Then try and imagine it happening again.  Then try and imagine millions of very comfortable people having to find some other place else to live. They ain’t going south because it will be too hot and dry. 

The prologue to Act I is the theory of fat tail change which was elaborated several decades ago by scientists who weren’t government employees. Fat tail says that the carbon loading of the atmosphere is creating a new atmospheric balance, which will result in weather change that isn’t smooth or gradual but spikes sharply straight up. It will continue to go straight up for many years even if the annual carbon loading stabilizes or reduces, (which is isn’t, it’s increasing). This is exactly what has happened and is happening. Since 1997, municipalities across Ontario have seen fat tail change at work. Each year is hotter and wetter than the last.  Municipalities are now building storm sewers for 200 and 250 year floods; that means they are expecting annual rain storms with volumes that in the past we only saw every 200 or 250 years.

This is what is happening. Rain storms of tremendous ferocity are regularly rolling down the Ottawa Valley to drown summer fields and flood city basements. The last one was just a couple of weeks ago. Last winter, Ottawa had 17 separate ‘weather events’. A weather event is an exceptional circumstance, e.g. freezing rain, flash freezes, extreme precipitation. Stratford, Ontario could be thought of as the Tewkesbury of Canada. It is now re-building its entire storm sewer system after being flooded from one end to the other. Stratford can do this because it’s a relatively small city and relatively rich. You can’t do this for a city the size of Toronto, Montreal or Ottawa, the costs are simply too large. All you can do is start replacing the ‘mains’ which will take decades. But even if your city has 250 year storm sewers, if the water table rises, no storm sewer in the world will protect your city, it just floods.

Don’t refinish your basement. Don’t use carpet anywhere. Use tile. Do not have expensive, difficult to move furniture or electronics. Have nothing in the basement that can’t be moved easily or be repaired by anything more complicated than washing and drying. And don’t expect the city to protect you from storms beyond the 100 year horizon because that’s all they have been built for and they can’t be changed overnight. Suing the city may seem like a satisfactory alternative but when the entire city or large portions of it are underwater – whom do you sue? At the end of the day, you are the city.

This kind of knowledge and planning is useful in that it can mitigate the damage in the short term. But the long term continues to look grim as the folks who control the planet’s thermostat – the federal governments of the largest, most polluting nations, China, India, the United States, Russia, Canada – continue to preach that religious extremism is the greatest threat to humanity’s well being. While the greater threat, of the planet’s ice cover from Greenland to the Antarctic disappearing into the oceans and those oceans rising and moving into people’s living rooms, continues to elude them. 

We can be confident that sooner or later, they will grasp this large but simple relationship but the problem is fat tail theory teaches us when London is under water, it will be too late. Climate change doesn’t work on election cycles.

Comments

[Rosemary Kralik]

Dear Clive,

Thank you for your very practical advice & especially for juxtaposing the beliefs that the major danger lies in religious extremism rather than nature's response to our presence.

The former divides humanity; the latter could be the force that unites the world in a common objective. It is the most obvious excuse to change the direction, values & emphasis on micro (personal) & macro (international) levels.

Years ago when we were at Fisher, I wondered what would happen to all those students who cut history classes, opted out of sciences, didn't do their math... now I know they are in decision making positions foisting their ignorance on the world at large.

To make matters worse, budget cuts to education seal our fate as we churn out masses who cannot fathom problem solving on any level, have no faculties of analytical or critical thought & very little notion of how to express themselves verbally or in writing.

I hope it doesn't take us as long to change our ways as it did to reach here. I always believed the instant of recognition was the moment one changed one's behaviour but not everyone cares enough.

Thank you also for the children who SHOULD be playing hopscotch outside together...we all did. The City has more important things to do than wash off children's chalk marks...like patrolling the streets to protect them.

Cheers,

Rosemary