coastlinesproject

Oklahoma; Tornado, Orrin Pilkey.

coastlinesproject — Wed, 22 May 2013 01:13:08 +0000

Deadly twister slams Oklahoma

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

By:

A storm-battered meteorologist who survived yesterday’s monstrous Oklahoma twister — possibly one of the worst in the nation’s recent history — told the Herald he’s living a “nightmare scenario,” as a climate expert warned similar mega-tornadoes won’t spare any part of the country, including the Bay State.

The nearly mile-wide EF-4 tornado — with wind speeds surpassing 200 mph — hit midday in Moore, Okla., plowing over five schools and countless homes and businesses. The death toll has been revised to 24 this morning, with more deaths expected.

“I never want to say it’s as bad as it can get,” said an emotional Bill Bunting, National Weather Service meteorologist in Norman, Okla., “but this violent tornado hit in a highly populated area at a time of day when people are out. I can’t imagine a bigger nightmare scenario.”

Bunting said some co-workers in his office were scrambling to reach loved ones caught in the ruins left by the supercell that morphed into a tornado that struck just north of his office. Speaking on a cellphone as he stepped outside, Bunting said, “We have catastrophic damage.”

Bunting, whose job it is to warn people about the path of the tornado, said he hoped his alerts issued throughout the afternoon were able to save some lives.

“I just hope we got the word out in time,” Bunting said.

Witnesses reported that horses were seen flying through the air, cars were crushed, homes went up in flames and trees snapped.

“We need prayers,” Oklahoma City Manager Jim Couch told CBS News.

“Our hearts are broken,” Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin said last night about reports of children killed, as she announced the climbing death toll.

Such wild storms whipped by global warming are now a deadly reality, said Orrin H. Pilkey, Duke University professor emeritus of earth and ocean sciences and author of “The Rising Sea.”

“Fires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes — this is huge,” Pilkey said last night. “It’s frightening. This is global climate change coming upon us.”

He said the Northeast will experience more powerful hurricanes and hail, the violent kind that can damage cars.

“No matter where you live, you have to have a plan and put it into action when it’s your time,” a rattled Bunting said.

Despite some strong thunderstorms this week, the Bay State is not going to see anything close to the savage tornadoes that roared through Oklahoma.

“The chance of us receiving a tornado over the next few days is very low,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Nicole Belk in Taunton.

Still, Belk said the storms today through Thursday could have some potentially damaging wind and hail.

Jordan Graham contributed to this report.

Read more in; Storm Surge; A Coastal Village Battles the Atlantic, Beach Wars; 10,000 Years on a Barrier Beach and The View From Strawberry Hill; Reflections on the Hottest Year on Record. See Strawberry Hill, UPNE, and Schiffer book tabs at the top of this page.

Oklahoma; Tornado Is extreme weather now the norm?

coastlinesproject — Tue, 21 May 2013 02:28:52 +0000

Two-mile-wide tornado kills at least 51 — including 7 elementary school students

By Nick Valencia and Dana Ford, CNN

updated 9:34 PM EDT, Mon May 20, 2013

View more photos of the aftermath in the region." src="http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/130520214656-08-oklahoma-city-tornado-0520-horizontal-gallery.jpg" width="640" height="360" border="0" />Rescue workers help free one of more than a dozen people who were trapped at a medical center in Moore, Oklahoma, after a tornado tore through the area on Monday, May 20. The death toll from the tornado that hit the Oklahoma City suburb was climbing Monday night. It was part of a tornado outbreak that began in the Midwest and Plains on Sunday, May 19. View more photos of the aftermath in the region.

HIDE CAPTION

Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

NEW: A father of a missing third-grader waits for news
Rescue workers are digging through debris at the school
They’re racing against time and the onset of darkness
The preliminary rating of damage is at least EF4

Are you experiencing severe weather in your area? Send photos and videos to CNN iReport. But please remember to stay safe.

For local coverage of Monday’s devastating storms in Oklahoma, go to these CNN affiliates: KFOR, KOCO, KOKH, KOKI.

Moore, Oklahoma (CNN) – Rescue workers raced against time and the oncoming night Monday looking for survivors after a powerful tornado blasted an area outside of Oklahoma City, leveling homes and killing at least 51 people.

At least seven of the dead were children from Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, which lay directly in the path of the monster storm’s wall of wind.

Seventy-five students and staff members had been huddled at the school when the storm hit, CNN affiliate KFOR reported.

As nightfall approached, determined searchers in hard hats dug in the debris for students possibly trapped, but authorities described the work as a recovery, not rescue, effort.

A father of a third-grader still missing sat quietly on a stool. Tears fell from his eyes as he waited for news of his son.

First images of damage from Okla. tornado

Photos: Tornadoes wreak havoc in Midwest

Tornado hits Oklahoma school

Watch tornado form over Oklahoma

‘Everything was just … gone’

A temporary flight restriction was put in place over the school so that aircraft would stay away and emergency officials on the ground might hear any cries for help, said Lynn Lunsford with the Federal Aviation Administration.

After the ear-shattering howl of the killer storm subsided, survivors along the miles of destruction emerged from shelters to see an apocalyptic vision — the remnants of cars twisted and piled on each other to make what had been a parking lot look like a junk yard. Bright orange flames flew from a structure that was blazing even as rain continued to fall.

“Our worst fears are becoming realized this afternoon,” Bill Bunting, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Prediction Center, told CNN.

Get the latest developments in the story

“We certainly hope everyone heeded the warnings, but it’s a populated area and we just fear that not everyone may have gotten the word,” he said.

Bodies of those killed in the storm were being sent to Oklahoma’s office of the chief medical examiner, said the office’s Amy Elliott. Authorities had no immediate estimate on the number of injured.

The preliminary rating of damage created by the tornado is at least EF4 (winds 166 to 200 mph) — the second-most severe classification on a scale of zero to five — the National Weather Service said.

The tornado was estimated to be at least two miles wide at one point as it moved through Moore, KFOR reported.

Lando Hite, shirtless and spattered in mud, told the affilaite about the storm hitting the Orr Family Farm in Moore, which had about 80 horses.

“It was just like the movie ‘Twister,’” he said, standing amid the debris. “There were horses and stuff flying around everywhere.”

The tornado damaged several barns and he was worried many of the animals were killed.

Hite said he did not hear any warnings or sirens.

“It was real windy and everything stopped. Being from Oklahoma, I knew that was not right.”

Watch tornado travel across field

Tornadoes rip through Oklahoma

Tornadoes leave path of destruction

Storm chasers capture Kansas tornadoes

Twenty patients, including 12 adults and eight children, were in trauma rooms at Oklahoma University (OU) Medical Center and at the Children’s Hospital at OU Medical Center, said spokesman Scott Coppenbarger.

Injuries ranged from minor to critical.

Moore Medical Center in Oklahoma was evacuated after it sustained damage, a hospital spokeswoman said.

All patients were being evacuated to Norman Regional Hospital and Healthplex Hospital, and residents injured in the storm were being told to go to those centers as well.

Norman Regional Hospital and the Healthplex were treating an unspecified number of people with “signs of trauma, lacerations and broken bones,” spokeswoman Melissa Herron said.

10 deadliest tornadoes on record

Interstate 35 in Moore was closed as a result of debris from the tornado, Oklahoma Department of Transportation spokesman Cole Hackett said. Crews were heading to the north-south highway to start the cleanup process.

“People are trapped. You are going to see the devastation for days to come,” said Betsy Randolph, spokeswoman for Oklahoma Highway Patrol. She did not say how many people were trapped.

More than 38,000 electricity customers in Oklahoma are without power, according to local power providers.

As authorities and rescue workers struggle to get handle on the damage, NOAA’s Bunting warned the worst may be yet to come.

“These storms are going to continue producing additional tornadoes. They’ll also produce some very, very large hail, perhaps larger than the size of baseballs. We’re also concerned that there may be an enhanced and widespread damaging wind threat with storms as they merge together,” he said.

“As bad as today is, this is not over yet.”

Track severe weather

Oklahoma resident: ‘It’s just all gone‘

The severe weather came after tornadoes and powerful storms ripped through Oklahoma and the Midwest earlier Monday and on Sunday.

Forecasters had said that the destructive weather, which killed at least two people, was perhaps just a preview.

Even before Monday afternoon’s devastation, residents in areas hard hit by weekend storms were combing through rubble where their homes once stood.

“My mind is, like, blown, completely blown,” said Jessie Addington, 21, who found that few pieces of her childhood home in Shawnee, Oklahoma, were still standing Monday.

Addington, who now lives in a nearby town, said her mother huddled in the mobile home’s bathroom when the weekend storm hit. But the tornado still tossed her around like a rag doll, leaving her bruised.

When Addington arrived, she was shocked to find the neighborhood where she had lived for 17 years reduced to ruins.

“I’m feeling cheated, to be honest,” she said, “like, it’s just all gone.”

An estimated 300 homes were damaged or destroyed across Oklahoma in weekend weather, Red Cross spokesman Ken Garcia said.

Two men, both in their 70s, were confirmed dead as a result of an earlier tornado that hit Shawnee, said Elliott, the spokeswoman for the state medical examiner’s office.

As many as 28 tornadoes were reported in Oklahoma, Kansas, Illinois and Iowa, according to the National Weather Service, with Oklahoma and Kansas the hardest hit. Some of those reports might have been of the same tornado.

A combination of factors — including strong winds and warm, moist air banging against dry air — means severe weather could continue sweeping across a wide swath of the United States for days, Petersons said.

“Keep in mind we have all the ingredients out there that we need,” she said.

Severe weather 101

Tornado watches were in effect for portions of southeastern Kansas, western and central Missouri, northwest Arkansas, central and eastern Oklahoma and northwestern Texas until 10 p.m. (11 p.m. ET).

CNN’s Nick Valencia reported from Oklahoma and Dana Ford reported from Atlanta. CNN’s Gary Tuchman, Monte Plott, Catherine E. Shoichet, Phil Gast, Joe Sutton, Devon Sayers, George Howell, Sean Morris and Debra Goldschmidt contributed to this report.

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Climate Change causes fish to move to colder waters.

coastlinesproject — Tue, 21 May 2013 02:18:46 +0000

Climate Change: Fish Forced to Move to Colder Waters, Study Says

May 17, 2013 01:50 PM EDT | Michael Briggs

Tags Climate change, Oceans, Fish

Rising sea temperatures are forcing fish and other marine life to migrate to cooler, deeper waters, according to a new study.

Researchers from the University of British Columbia studied the movements of 968 species of marine life for the three-decade long study. While previous studies looked to follow the migration patterns of fish and invertebrates within a specific region, this was the first that looked at the far-reaching effects climate change had on species across the entire planet.

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“One way for marine animals to respond to ocean warming is by moving to cooler regions,” says the study’s lead author William Cheung, an assistant professor at UBC’s Fisheries Centre.

“As a result, places like New England on the northeast coast of the U.S. saw new species typically found in warmer waters, closer to the tropics,” Cheung added. “Meanwhile in the tropics, climate change meant fewer marine species and reduced catches, with serious implications for food security.”

Others agreed that the migration of these species could be disruptive to local ecosystems.

“There’ll be changes in the kinds of fish that are available to people who would like to follow that kind of (eating local) strategy,” said Michael Fogarty, a biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center not involved with the study, to NBC News.

As tropical fish move North, they leave an abandoned spot in the environment. This worries fishermen in these parts of the world that rely on the fish for their livelihood.

“We’ve been talking about climate change as if it’s something that’s going to happen in the distant future – our study shows that it has been affecting our fisheries and oceans for decades,” says Daniel Pauly, principal investigator with UBC’s Sea Around Us Project and the study’s co-author.

“These global changes have implications for everyone in every part of the planet.”

Climate change will cut habitats by 2080.

coastlinesproject — Mon, 20 May 2013 02:14:32 +0000

Study: Climate change will cut habitats by 2080

Dan Vergano, USA TODAY5:15 p.m. EDT May 12, 2013

Climate change leaves many plants and animals only a few decades to adjust. A study warms that losses of living space will afflict plants and animals worldwide, raising extinction worries.

Global warming will destroy more than half of the habitats of most plants and a third of animals by 2080, biologists conclude, unless steps are taken to limit greenhouse gases.

Over the past century, average global surface temperatures have increased about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the National Academy of Sciences. This global warming is largely due to burning fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and natural gas, which retain heat and warm the atmosphere. Temperatures worldwide are expected to rise roughly 7 degrees by 2100 if the use of fossil fuels continues without attempts to mitigate their effects.

Without mitigation, “large range contractions can be expected even amongst common and widespread species,” concludes the study led by Rachel Warrenof the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia. It was published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

In the study, biologists and climate researchers looked at the effects of these increasing temperatures on the living space of 48,786 animal and plant species worldwide. “With no mitigation, the climate becomes particularly unsuitable for both plants and animals in sub-Saharan Africa, Central America, Amazonia and Australia.”

Overall, the study finds that 57% of plants and 34% of animals will see their habitats cut by 50% or more by 2050, as temperature changes make them unsuitable for the species. Given warming that has already occurred, some of those losses are locked in already, but they could be reduced by 60% if greenhouse gas emissions were to peak in 2016, the study shows.

“The terrifying loss of biodiversity predicted by this study shows that climate chaos will fundamentally transform our planet,” Shaye Wolf of the Center for Biological Diversity, a conservation group, says in a statement on the study. “We need to cut emissions now, before our ecosystems suffer catastrophic damage.”

The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report had estimated that more than 20% of species worldwide are at “high risk” of extinction if temperatures rise more than 3.6 degrees in this century.

97% of climate science papers agree warming is man-made.

coastlinesproject — Sun, 19 May 2013 00:41:59 +0000

Survey finds 97% of climate science papers agree warming is man-made

Overwhelming majority of peer-reviewed papers taking a position on global warming say humans are causing it

Porters carry cores of ancient glacial ice down from the 6542m summit of Mt Sajama in Bolivia. 97% of scientific papers taking a position on climate change say it is man-made. Photograph: George Steinmetz/Corbis

Our team of citizen science volunteers at Skeptical Science has published a new survey in the journal Environmental Research Letters of over 12,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers, as the Guardian reports today. This is the most comprehensive survey of its kind, and the inspiration of this blog’s name: Climate Consensus – the 97%.

The survey

In 2004, Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of 928 peer-reviewed climate papers published between 1993 and 2003, finding none that rejected the human cause of global warming. We decided that it was time to expand upon Oreskes’ work by performing a keyword search of peer-reviewed scientific journal publications for the terms ‘global warming’ and ‘global climate change’ between the years 1991 and 2011.

Our team agreed upon definitions of categories to put the papers in: explicit or implicit endorsement of human-caused global warming, no opinion, and implicit or explicit rejection or minimization of the human influence, and began the long process of rating over 12,000 abstracts.

We decided from the start to take a conservative approach in our ratings. For example, a study which takes it for granted that global warming will continue for the foreseeable future could easily be put into the implicit endorsement category; there is no reason to expect global warming to continue indefinitely unless humans are causing it. However, unless an abstract included language about the cause of the warming, we categorized it as ‘no opinion’.

Each paper was rated by at least two people, and a dozen volunteers completed most of the 24,000 ratings. The volunteers were a very internationally diverse group. Team members’ home countries included Australia, USA, Canada, UK, New Zealand, Germany, Finland, and Italy.

We also decided that asking the scientists to rate their own papers would be the ideal way to check our results. Who knows what the papers say better than the authors who wrote them? We received responses from 1,200 scientists who rated a total of over 2,100 papers. Unlike our team’s ratings that only considered the summary of each paper presented in the abstract, the scientists considered the entire paper in the self-ratings.

The results

Based on our abstract ratings, we found that just over 4,000 papers took a position on the cause of global warming, 97.1% of which endorsed human-caused global warming. In the scientist self-ratings, nearly 1,400 papers were rated as taking a position, 97.2% of which endorsed human-caused global warming. Many papers captured in our literature search simply investigated an issue related to climate change without taking a position on its cause.

Our survey found that the consensus has grown slowly over time, and reached about 98% as of 2011. Our results are also consistent withseveral previous surveys finding a 97% consensus amongst climate experts on the human cause of global warming.

The growth of the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming in the peer-reviewed literature from 1991 to 2011

Why is this important?

Several studies have shown that people who are aware of scientific consensus on human-caused global warming are more likely to support government action to curb greenhouse gas emissions. This was most recently shown by a paper just published in the journal Climatic Change. People will generally defer to the judgment of experts, and they trust climate scientists on the subject of global warming.

However, vested interests have long realized this and engaged in a campaign to misinform the public about the scientific consensus. For example, a memo from communications strategist Frank Luntz leaked in 2002 advised Republicans,

“Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate“

This campaign has been successful. A 2012 poll from US Pew Research Center found less than half of Americans thought scientists agreed humans were causing global warming. The media has assisted in this public misconception, with most climate stories “balanced” with a “skeptic” perspective. However, this results in making the 2–3% seem like 50%. In trying to achieve “balance”, the media has actually created a very unbalanced perception of reality. As a result, people believe scientists are still split about what’s causing global warming, and therefore there is not nearly enough public support or motivation to solve the problem.

Check our results for yourself

We chose to submit our paper to Environmental Research Letters because it is a well-respected, high-impact journal, but also because it offers the option of making a paper open access, free for anyone to download.

We have also set up a public ratings system at Skeptical Science where anybody can duplicate our survey. Read and rate as many abstracts as you like, and see what level of consensus you find. You can compare your results to our abstract ratings, and to the author self-ratings.

Human-caused global warming

We fully anticipate that climate contrarians will respond by saying “we don’t dispute that humans cause some global warming.” First, there are a lot of people who do dispute that humans cause any global warming. Our paper shows that their position is not supported in the scientific literature.

Most papers don’t quantify the human contribution to global warming, because it doesn’t take tens of thousands of papers to establish that reality. However, as noted above, if a paper minimized the human contribution, we classified that as a ‘rejection’. For example, if a paper were to say “the sun caused most of the global warming over the past century,” that would be included in the less than 3% of papers rejecting or minimizing human-caused global warming.

Many studies simply defer to the expert summary of climate science research put together by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which says that most of the global warming since the mid-20th century has been caused by humans. And according to recent research, that statement is actually too conservative. Of the papers which specifically examine the contributors to global warming, they virtually all conclude that humans are the dominant cause over the past 50 to 100 years.

Summary of results from 8 studies of the causes of global warming.Most studies simply accept this fact and go on to examine the consequences of this human-caused global warming and associated climate change.

Another important point is that once you accept that humans are causing global warming, you must also accept that global warming is still happening. We cause global warming by increasing the greenhouse effect, and our greenhouse gas emissions just keep accelerating. This ties in to the fact that as recent research has showed, global warming is accelerating. If you accept that humans are causing global warming, as over 97% of peer-reviewed scientific papers do, then this conclusion should not be at all controversial. Global warming cannot have suddenly stopped.

Spread the word

Given the importance of the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming in peoples’ decisions whether to support action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and the public lack of awareness of the consensus, we need to make people aware of these results. To that end, design and advertising firm SJI Associates generously created a website pro-bono, centered around the results of our survey. The website can be viewed at TheConsensusProject.com, and it includes a page where consensus graphics can be shared via social media or email. Skeptical Science also has a new page of consensus graphics.

Quite possibly the most important thing to communicate about climate change is that there is a 97% consensus amongst the scientific experts and scientific research that humans are causing global warming. Let’s spread the word and close the consensus gap.

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Chatham; William Sargent book signing today Yellow Umbrella 1-3PM.

coastlinesproject — Sat, 18 May 2013 09:58:35 +0000

Chatham; Book Signing today Yellow Umbrella Books 1-3PM.

coastlinesproject — Sat, 18 May 2013 09:54:05 +0000

NJ Christie says residents should support Sandy buyouts.

coastlinesproject — Sat, 18 May 2013 02:11:30 +0000

Christie says residents should ‘get together’ to decide on buyouts in Sandy-ravaged towns

Christie announces $300M to buy out flood-prone homesSpeaking to a packed town hall in Sayreville on Thursday, Gov. Chris Christie announced the state will start purchasing homes in flood-prone areas starting in July with $300 million in federal aid. The first round of buyouts will target about 1,000 homes affected by Sandy and another 350 in Sayreville, South River and Cumberland County’s Lawrence Township . (Video by Michael Monday/The Star-Ledger)

By Jenna Portnoy/The Star-Ledger
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on May 16, 2013 at 7:15 PM, updated May 17, 2013 at 7:09 AM

View full sizeGov. Chris Christie on Tuesday gave Prince Harry a tour of Sandy’s destruction and the state’s rebuilding efforts. Today, he held a town hall in Sayreville, another hard-hit community.Andrew Mills/The Star-Ledger

SAYREVILLE —Have a party. Pour some wine. Treat ‘em real nice.

That’s Gov. Chris Christie ‘s advice for residents trying to convince their neighbors to participate in a federal buyout of homes in areas swamped by Sandy and past storms.

“Invite those families over,” Christie said today at a town hall at Saint Stanislaus Kostka School. “Use the gentle persuasion that New Jerseyans are known for all across America.”

The governor said the first wave of $300 million will be used to purchase homes in Sayreville and South River in Middlesex County, Lawrence Township in Cumberland County as well as towns in Ocean and Monmouth counties and the Passaic River Basin. Another wave of money will follow, to include Woodbridge and other towns.

“You all need to get together as a neighborhood and say we’re ready to go,” Christie said.

However, the approach is complicated, especially for the 50 or so homes on Weber Avenue, which was devastated by the Oct. 29 hurricane.

“If we don’t bring everyone around, we’re going go to have a decision to make,” Christie said. “I can’t guarantee you what the tipping point is, but I don’t want you to walk away from here thinking that one or two people could screw it up.”

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The state Department of Environmental Protection will administer the federal dollars and assign special “buyout teams” to the project.

Christie set the following timetable for the program: Appraisals and title work will start in June. The state will make offers to willing homeowners in July. The first closings will happen by Labor Day, and all of the closings will be complete by next spring. Homes will be demolished with the land maintained as open space.

“So within a year of now, everything will be done,” Christie said.

The event tapped into the emotion people of Sayreville and other communities have felt over the past six months.

One woman cried as she admitted bankruptcy could be her only option, after the storm led the bank to foreclose on her second home.

Another asked Christie to expedite the process “because I can’t live with my mother anymore.”

And Christie said in the days after the storm when he visited Sayreville during a chopper tour of damage, people pleaded with him: “Get us out of here. We can’t take it anymore.”

New book. Global Crisis; Climate Change and Catastrophe in 1660′s.

coastlinesproject — Fri, 17 May 2013 01:35:33 +0000

Droughts, deluges and raging debates

Review by Lisa Jardine

A magisterial book argues that 17th-century climate change led to social unrest – and offers a timely 21st-century warning

Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, by Geoffrey Parker, Yale, RRP£29.99/$40, 904 pages

In 1647, at the height of the English civil war, King Charles I fled to the Isle of Wight, where he established a court in exile. Among the local gentry who attended him was Sir John Oglander, local landowner and member of parliament for Yarmouth. The weather was terrible. Oglander wrote in his diary: “This summer of the King’s being here was a very strange year in all His Majesty’s three kingdoms, if we duly consider the heavens, men and earth. I conceive the heavens were offended with us for our offence committed to one another for, from Mayday till the 15th of September, we had scarce three dry days together. His Majesty asked me whether that weather was usual in our Island. I told him that in this 40 years I never knew the like before.”

Oglander was convinced that the relentless rain, and the damage it was causing in terms of failed harvest and widespread flooding, were a mark of God’s displeasure with Englishmen for acts committed against nature: insurrection against their king, and citizens turning against one another in civil war.

In his monumental new book, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, distinguished historian Geoffrey Parker also investigates the idea that there might be a close relationship between global unrest and unusually inclement weather. But he poses his question the other way round. Might it be, he asks, that it was the “Little Ice Age” experienced around the world between the 1610s and the late 1680s, causing death, disease and depopulation, that produced the social, economic and political upheavals of the same period? Data from both northern and southern hemispheres studied by climatologists confirms that there was a drop in global temperature of one or two degrees Celsius over this period. Could this be directly linked to wars, invasions and government collapses?

Parker’s approach is systematic and painstaking. Scouring and correlating first-hand testimony drawn from sources chronicling 17th-century affairs from London to Beijing, he pieces together a global tale of worsening weather conditions leading to hardship, administrative chaos, war and widespread inhumanity. These accounts give us a rich and emotionally intense sense of how it felt to live through chaotic times.

Alongside this testimony he sets current expert views: not just experts in politics and warfare, but in climatology, anthropology, agriculture, nutrition and economics. Narrated with an easy authority, Parker melds these together into a convincing account of how a small drop in the earth’s temperature – which may have been a consequence of a smaller than usual amount of sun-spot activity in the 17th century, mapped by the contemporary astronomer Johannes Hevelius – can be considered to have contributed significantly to the disorder and disaster experienced on every continent.

At the end of all this, Parker reaches the conclusion that what he dubs a “fatal synergy” between human behaviour and the weather did indeed lead directly to the “global crisis”, which marks a transition from early modern to modern ways of life, structures of government and patterns of thought.

IN NON-FICTION

This is a thesis that Parker has been developing ever since he became involved, in the 1970s, in an intense and occasionally acrimonious debate among historians as to what caused the political catastrophes of the 17th century – whether, indeed, anything one could call a “general crisis” had actually taken place. This increasingly polarised debate started with a two-part article published by the formidable Eric Hobsbawm in the 1950s (attributing the “crisis” to economic turbulence), which was challenged by Hugh Trevor-Roper (who put the turmoil down to conflict between society and the state), and which continued to run at conferences and in journals for decades.

The debate resurfaced in 2008, when Parker contributed an important article. By now the claims of historians such as Parker who supported the general crisis thesis had become stronger: the 17th century had witnessed a “global crisis” – one that had extended from England to China and from Russia to sub-Saharan Africa, not forgetting the Americas.

One might argue that general readers need hardly concern themselves with sectarian differences of opinion between academic historians. But I think it matters that the purpose of the almost overwhelming bulk of evidence that Parker has assembled in this impressive new book is designed to be the last word in the “general crisis” debate. Parker’s 2008 version of his argument ran to 24 pages. It now extends to 900 pages, including one of the most formidable bibliographies of works consulted I have ever encountered.

We also need to understand how heavily Parker is invested in the argument that he develops with such thoroughness in this book if we are to take seriously his urgently argued conclusion. This human “crisis and catastrophe” of 350 years ago can act, he believes, as a model and a timely warning for the vicissitudes we face today.

We too, he argues, are living through a period of global climate change. Regardless of its causes, the experience of the 17th century shows that long-term turbulence and unreliability of the weather inevitably produces calamitous outcomes for humanity. Whole ways of life will disappear. Climate-related catastrophes such as drought and flooding, harvest failure and enforced migration will produce civil unrest, conflict, disease and destruction. Apparently stable governments will fall and commerce will be fatally disrupted.

According to Parker, these are issues that governments – and we as individuals – need to confront. We have already, he points out, experienced local catastrophe in the shape of the damage caused by hurricane Katrina, the earthquake that struck New Zealand, and the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Instead of arguing over whether or not and to what extent our climate is changing, and who is to blame, we should now turn our attention to anticipating and developing remedies for what, on the evidence of the earlier, comparable climate change in the 17th century, are likely to be recurring calamities of this kind with grave long-term consequences.

——————————————-

Lisa Jardine is professor of Renaissance Studies and director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities at University College London

Plum Island; State blocks rebuilding homes.

coastlinesproject — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:04:23 +0000

May 15, 2013

State blocks rebuilding of Plum Island home

BY DYKE HENDRICKSONSTAFF WRITER

NEWBURY — Officials of the state Department of Environmental Protection have filed a “notice of intervention” to temporarily block the building of a house on storm-ravaged Fordham Way on Plum Island.

Harry Trout, whose home had been at 36 Fordham Way, had filed tentative plans with the town’s Conservation Commission to build a house there to replace the structure that was demolished following recent storms.

But state DEP officials have availed themselves of a clause that permits the agency to intercede in the planning of construction on the vulnerable oceanside area.

Trout, reached yesterday, said, “I don’t want to comment because this is such a sensitive issue. But we will be meeting with the DEP next week, and we’ll find out if they are going to make it hard or easy to rebuild.”

The move marks what some islanders see as a change in the relations between the state agency and islanders.

This past winter, as erosion slowly ate away at the dunes along Annapolis Way, the agency came under fire from islanders who accused it of using delay tactics against homeowners who wanted to protect their beachfront houses. Then came the devastating March nor’easter, which destroyed six homes and left a half-mile stretch of beach heavily eroded and numerous homes imperiled.

After that storm, the accusations against the DEP became far more intense and heated, and drew statewide attention.

In response, the DEP allowed islanders to dump hundreds of large rocks and tons of sand along the dune with no interference. And at a public meeting that drew over 100 people, top DEP officials said they would work cooperatively with islanders to navigate the regulatory process of rebuilding homes. The meeting was held in an effort to broker a new era of closer cooperation between the state agency, town officials and islanders.

The state appears to be appealing the merits of the town’s tentative “order of conditions” of Trout’s building plans.

In a letter to Trout, state officials said, “Mass DEP shall assume jurisdiction over this project and will make a determination as to whether the area on which the proposed work is to be done is significant to the statutory interests identified” in state regulations.

The letter added, “It is the MassDEP’s opinion that this project proposal and the (town’s) Order of Conditions do not contribute to the protection of the interests identified (in legislation) and that the OOC is inconsistent with the regulations.”

DEP officials said they will be on site next Wednesday morning to issue a “superceding Order of Conditions.”

The letter to Trout was written by Heidi Davis, acting section chief, Wetlands and Waterways Program of the DEP.

Town officials had encouraged homeowners to seek help at Town Hall if they had concerns about approvals and/or permissions to rebuild.

The DEP’s letter to Trout suggests that state officials will be closely monitoring any applications to rebuild on dunes adjacent to the ocean.

Doug Packer, conservation agent for the town, yesterday said, “The DEP has intervened on the Trout filing. The subject is a new home on the lot that was the site of the original house torn down after the blizzard.”

No reconstruction has been yet done to replace the six structures that were removed in the wake of storms. One house has been raised on supports with the probable intent of being moved across the street and farther from the beach.

A moratorium on building is apparently what the DEP has in mind, at least in reference to the Trout property.

The Davis letter concluded, “No activity may commence on any portion of the project site … until MassDEP issues an SOC and all appeal periods have elapsed, or the MassDEP withdraws its appeal.”

The commissioner of the DEP, Kenneth Kimmell, appeared, at the public meeting here, to listen to Plum Island residents concerned about protecting their homes — and planning new ones if they had lost their property.

Kimmell subsequently said that residents could have limited permission to utilize sand “mining” to replenish dunes.

But in his letter granting permission, he stressed that town officials “must seek new methods” in dealing with the dunes and the structures that are built upon them.