by Gar Smith
When the date rolled over from midnight 1999 to the first minutes of Year 2000, most computers continued to hum and the world's oil-electric-silicon-based societies breathed a sign of relief.
True, there were a few glitches. Some people received bills for books and videos marked 100 years "overdue." The National Clock in Arlington Virginia clicked off the first day of the new millennium as January 1, 19,000. But thanks to an unprecedented, three-year, $30 billion global fixit program, most banks remained open, most lightbulbs continued to glow and most fuel pumps delivered gasoline on demand.
The mainstream media, however, missed an important story. The fact was that almost every one of the dire Y2K predictions issued by the Infrastructure Doomsayers actually happened.
As the millennium dawned, millions of homes were plunged into darkness. In Europe, Africa and South America, water supplies failed, food and fuel deliveries stopped. Nuclear powerplants were dangerously disrupted. Airplanes even fell from the sky.
This global cataclysm was not caused by computer circuits misinterpreting a binary code: It was caused by a new kind of threat that climatologists are calling Extreme Weather Events. Unlike Y2K (which merely throws a monkey wrench into the power supplies of the Convenience Culture), W2K has the power to destroy bridges, bury roads, collapse buildings, obliterate forests and kill people by the thousands.
Linked to the destabilizing effects of global warming, Extreme Weather (EW) is characterized by higher (and lower) temperatures, fiercer winds, deadlier floods, longer droughts, and an increased frequency of dust storms, tsunamis, storm surges, tornadoes, hurricanes and cyclones.
WorldWatch magazine explained the problem clearly in July 1999. "By destroying forests, damming rivers, filling in wetland, and destabilizing the climate, human actions are unraveling the strands of a complex ecological safety net that protects against storms and other calamities.
At the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction in July 1999, World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Godwin O. P. Obasi stated that "natural disasters associated with meteorological and hydrological phenomena are costing the world economy about $50 billion per annum. These disasters have also caused suffering to more than two billion people since 1965 and three million have lost their lives."
In short, the real threat to civilization has turned out to be not Y2K but W2K - Weather in the Year 2000.
Superstorms Ravage Europe
W2K hit Europe like a bomb. In the last days of the 20th Century, a Pre-Millennium superstorm ripped off roofs and snuffed out lights from Italy to the Netherlands. Tree trunks and mudslides blocked roads. Falling trees, toppled chimneys and collapsing walls crushed more than 120 people.
In Italy, a light plane encountered monstrous winds over Torino province and, yes, fell from the sky.
In the south of France, the storm snapped electric lines powering three 900-Mw nuclear powerplants, disabling the emergency cooling systems and forcing Electricite de France to order an emergency shutdown. The storm also flooded two of the reactors, disabling the pumps used to send water through emergency cooling circuits.
The damage was worst in France where winds as high as 136 mph killed 79 people, uprooted 10,000 trees from the woodlands at Versailles Palace and caused $77 million in damage to French landmarks including Notre Dame Cathedral and Sainte-Chapelle. The French government declared a "natural catastrophe" over two-thirds of the country and mobilized 6,000 troops to clear roads, provide emergency food and water and search for survivors.
"In the meteorological records, there is no trace of a phenomenon as violent as this," marveled French weather service forecaster Hubert Brunet. Two million people lost power. More than 400,000 homes lost telephone service. Millions of homes were damaged. Many communities were without drinking water. Major airports were paralyzed.
"Tens of thousands of people living in areas difficult to access risk spending New Year's Eve in candlelight," proclaimed Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement.
W2K in the Summer: Blackouts
Floods and hurricanes are dramatic events that can knock out a country's electrical grid. But the slow, upward creep of temperatures also can cause blackouts as over-extended power grids try to feed air-conditioning demands of exploding urban and suburban populations.
On August 10, 1996, temperatures in California's Central Valley hit 110 F, punching electrical demands to an unprecedented 21,451 megawatts. As the mercury rose, powerlines began to stretch and sag. In Oregon, one of these sagging lines dropped onto a tree limb. The resulting short knocked out power to 4 million people from Canada to Mexico. Five of California's 11 powerplants were forced off-line - including both units of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power station.
Across the West, transformers exploded, gas pumps shut down. ATM machines went blank and power-surges-caused fires destroyed homes and garages. In eight states, people were trapped in elevators, stuck on buses and immobilized in subway trains stopped dead in tunnels. Airports, businesses, and supermarkets were disabled. Radar systems crashed, checkout counters went dead, frozen foods thawed and rotted. In Los Angeles, six million gallons of raw sewage was released into the Pacific Ocean, contaminating ten miles of coast.
Power was not fully restored for five days. This W2K catastrophe caused precisely the same dislocations that were feared from a Y2K glitch. Even before the Y2K bug surfaces, the lesson was clear: An economy that is dependent on fossil fuels and centralized power sources will remain fundamentally unstable.
Hot weather also causes human system to meltdown. The greatest number of weather-related deaths are caused by heatstroke. The record-breaking heat that struck the US in 1995 killed 1,000, more than half in Chicago alone.
W2K's Forest-Killing Winds
The winds that hit Europe and India were forest-killers. In France alone, the blasts flattened 160 square miles of forests and destroyed 400 million trees. The National Forest Office reported a loss equal to three years' worth of timber harvests and private owners estimated losses twice that.
Extreme weather clearcut France's commercial forest industry to the ground. One shaken commercial forester called the storm "the most disastrous event since WWII."
Since many of the trees were 100-400 years old, it will take centuries to replace what a single extreme weather storm destroyed. The storm also destroyed forests in Germany and Austria.
After an earlier storm had devastated the region, the government of Orissa, India began a major reforestation effort to replace the mangrove forests that had historically protected the region from tropical storms. The mangroves had been removed to make room for industrial prawn farming.
On October 29, 1999, a supercyclone struck Orissa, demolishing miles of these newly planted mangrove forests. It was an environmentalist's worst nightmare. One of the working assumptions of restorationists is that massive reforestation can help stabilize the atmosphere while protecting the land from storm damage.
What the recent Orissa and European disasters demonstrate is that we now face a new dilemma - superstorms so powerful that they can destroy hundreds of square miles of trees (old and new) within a matter of hours.
The Economic Impacts
On January 14, UN Environment Program predicted that W2K events "will cause major economic impacts for an insurance industry already burdened with a 14-fold increase in insured losses in the last four decades. The economic losses from the past 24 climate or weather-related catastrophes alone have exceeded $150 billion."
The Calgary Herald reports that "financial losses from severe weather events in Canada have increased at 10 times the rate of the country's economic growth since the mid-'80s." Citing a January study by Emergency Preparedness Canada (EPC), the Herald noted that "ice storms, windstorms, floods and droughts have skyrocketed during the past 15 years."
EPC predicted such an increase in severe floods and storms that 100-year floods "could become 50-year occurrences." With insured losses in 1998 hitting $1.45 billion, these rapidly rising disaster costs may soon outrun Canada's ability to finance recovery.
Hurricane Hugo pummeled South Carolina in 1989 causing 47 billion in damage. Three years later, Hurricane Andrew inflicted $30 billion in damage on Florida.
In 1998, Extreme Weather events cost insurers a record $92 billion. The $92 billion of insured losses does not begin to describe the full impact of these calamities on human society and on the environment. The floods, fires and storms of 1998 also caused 32,000 deaths and left 300 million homeless.
Untabulated Impacts
"When a community is hit by a major storm," Sheila D. David, Sarah Baish and Betty Hearn Morrow reported in the October 1999 issue of Environment, "the entire social fabric that defines a population as a community can be severely weakened. People relocate (some permanently), neighborhoods are destroyed, friendships are severed, support networks are broken, and domestic relationships are stressed. Schools, churches, social groups, and families are apt to never be the same."
Long-term studies show that communities struck by natural disasters suffer increased incidences of suicides, family violence, desertions, and alcohol and drug abuse.
The "insured losses" also ignore damaged ecosystems. According to the Environment investigation, Hugo damaged 37 percent (4.5 million acres) of Carolina's forests. In the Francis Marion National Forest, Hugo destroyed 87 percent of the habitat of the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker and caused the death or disappearance of 63 percent of the birds.
After Hugo hit, the white ibis population crashed from 10,000 pairs to zero. More than half of South Carolina's 54 bald eagle breeding sites were obliterated. Saltwater forced inland killed five million catfish, bream, largemouth bass and other fish. All of the unhatched eggs of Loggerhead and four other endangered sea turtle were destroyed along the South Carolina coast (first by the storm and then by subsequent efforts to restore the beach).
It's Already Happening
In 1988, Earth Island Journal ran a cover story on the threat of climate change entitled, "There is no advantage in waiting." Environmental Defense Fund Senior Scientist Michael Oppenheimer warned in that issue, "If we don't move fast, there will be so much climate warming that our policy options will be narrowed in the future."
On June 30, 1988, more than 300 scientists from 48 countries called for a 20 percent cut in world oil consumption and a "carbon tax" on fossil fuels. The Ecologist called for canceling Third World debt in exchange for "guaranteed protection of the world's remaining tropical forests."
The call went largely unheeded. A decade later, in 1998, natural disasters killed more than 50,000 people and caused $65 billion in property damage.
Global warming is real and it is out-of-control. On February 22, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) warned that the climate was warming at "an unprecedented rate" and registering changes that were not expected to occur until far into the 21st century. The Earth's temperature was expected to rise by 1 degree over the century. Between 1976 and 1999, however, the temperature shot up nearly 4 degrees.
"The next few years are going to be very interesting," NOAA Climatologist Tom Karl told the Los Angeles Times, "It could be the beginning of a new increase in temperatures." The polar ice sheets are already melting and rising seas are decimating low-lying islands. As University of Michigan Geologist Henry Pollack told the Times, "Even if we don't understand the details of what's causing [climate change], we still have to deal with the consequences."
A two-year computer modeling study conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Ecological Society of America foresees West Coast winters becoming 5 to 6 degrees warmer and summer temperatures rising 1 to 2 degrees over the next 30 to 50 years. The computer models predict that water shortages will devastate the farming economy of the Central Valley while warming ocean waters will deplete populations of plankton, eroding the basis of the marine food chain and triggering die-offs of fish, sea birds and marine mammals.
In regions where rainfall increases, flooding has begun to flush larger amounts of nitrogen into rivers, killing fish and eventually carrying deadly effluent into oceans. A report from the US Climate Forum notes that this "disruption of the global nitrogen cycle is happening even faster than the disruption of the global carbon cycle."
NOAA's Hurricane Research Division notes that hurricanes are already increasing in frequency and strength as they pick up energy from ever-warmer ocean surfaces. And each ten percent increase in strength brings a doubling of the damage when the stormwinds crash ashore.
On February 20, scientists with NOAA's Global Change Research Program (GCRP) informed delegates at the annual meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science in Washington, DC that "human-induced climate change has already started" and was, by now, most likely beyond human control. "You can't stop climate change, given what we're doing right now," said Michael MacCracken, director of the GCRP's National Assessment Coordination Office.
MacCracken's startling announcement was echoed by University of Maryland Scientist Donald Boesch, head of the US National Global Change Assessment. "Things ARE going to happen," Boesch warned. "We're going to have to deal with them."
The Cape Hatteras Solution
Last year, historic preservationists moved the Cape Hattaras Lighthouse 15,000 feet further inland to protect it from destruction by rising waves. This is the kind of thinking that needs to be undertaken. We need to be asking such questions as "How much would it cost to relocate Charleston, Virginia?"
Like Y2K, W2K threatens to disrupt the economies of even the most economically developed nations. The USA's "unprecedented economic boom" is not being felt in the still-devastated regions of tornado-damaged Oklahoma or along the hurricane-ravaged Southeast Coast. Short of an atomic blast, there is no military weapon that wreaks such massive devastation as Extreme Weather. After viewing the onslaught of Hurricane Floyd in 1999, Bill Massey of FEMA Regional Office IV in Atlanta remarked "Now, instead of worrying about the atom bomb, we're worried about bad weather."
In December 14, 1998 report, the British Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology agreed that: "Some degree of climate change is 'inevitable'." The report urged the UK to prepare for "more frequent and severe extreme weather-related events" that would cause trade disruptions, water shortages, and outbreaks of disease, heatstroke and food poisoning. The report strongly advised the government to "innovate in construction and urban design to minimize the effects of increased temperatures, higher wind speeds, flooding, etc."
In the new W2K world, the OST warned, "exceptional conditions are likely to become normal." The report noted that "climatic zones are likely to shift northwestwards by 50-80km per decade, so many species of plants and animals would have to migrate to remain in the conditions to which they are suited. Adaptive responses could include providing stepping stones and corridors of appropriate habitat along which mobile species could move." The old conservation strategy of maintaining fixed "sanctuaries" would doom many species to imprisonment and slow extinction.
In the US and elsewhere, houses must be removed from coasts and floodplains and rebuilt. Buildings will have to be redesigned to survive stronger winds. Brick apartment buildings with black tar roofs become solar ovens in the summertime: They will have to be torn down and replaced.
"Climate shocks to the world's most important cities - such as New York, Tokyo and London - could hake up economies worldwide," reports Scientific American writer Kathryn S. Brown. "By 2090, increasing storm surges could dunk lower Manhattan under water every few years, flooding the World Trade Center and other financial district skyscapers and threatening the water supply with salty sludge from the Hudson River."
Alaska's permafrost is already thawing, forcing local and state authorities to spend millions repairing buckled roads and cracking homes. Farmers will be faced with the choice of growing entirely new crops or abandoning their lands.
It's the Ecology, Stupid!
In the US, the W2K threat has yet to register with the presidential contenders. While the Bush and Gore campaigns looked toward California as a source of campaign funds electoral seats, scientists at Stanford University's Carnegie Institution were looking toward the state's climate future and predicting "profound ecological and economic consequences."
Instead of pouring billions of dollars into a costly and illusory Star Wars defense system, the White House needs to invest in building environmental bulwarks on the ground.
During the Cold War, the US built bomb shelters and stocked them with water and survival rations. Faced with a climate-wide Hot-and-Cold-War, government emergency planners should be building storm-shelters in tornado belts and hurricane zones and making sure that they are stocked with clean water, medicine and foodstuffs.
The US desperately needs a government whose policies are guided by biologists and independent scientists, not corporate welfare programs dictated by big business lobbyists.
It has been observed that, without the support of corporate donations, no presidential candidate can expect to be elected. There is a more fundamental truism: Without the support of a healthy ecosystem, there will be no one around to run for office.
Faced with the specter of the Y2K computer glitch, the world's leaders their ability to quickly marshal vast amounts of money and human energy to forestall a threat to banking and commercial interests.
A similar effort to re-engineer the world economy to run on renewable solar power (wind, sun and wave) is possible and long overdue. It is the only way that the world can hope to survive the W2K Century.
If we can avert a global Y2K meltdown, surely we can find the resources and the will to make amends to the Earth by closing the book on the dying carbon economies of the 20th century.
It can be done. It is being done in England. On March 9, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott unveiled a national plan to reduce UK greenhouse gas emissions by more than 21 percent by 2010. Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that this goal was "not negotiable."
Friends of the Earth hailed Britain's commitment as "the single most important green promise in Labor's manifesto." The plan commits the UK to producing ten percent of its power from the wind by 2010. The policies are already working. By years end, Britain's global warming emissions are expected to drop 15 percent their 1990 levels. "Developed countries have an obligation to take a lead," Prescott stated. "Climat4e change results from our actions in the past, and we must lead the way in dealing with the consequences."
As Earth Island's Climate Solutions Project wrote in 1999: "The global climate crisis, perhaps the greatest challenge in the history of civilization, calls upon us to act decisively and without delay. We must rapidly transition from fossil fuels to clean energy." This effort should be pursued "with the urgency of the Manhattan Project or the Apollo space program."
W2K: Regional Effects
Latin America - "The Climate Has Gone Mad"
In May 1999, five states in northwest Mexico were declared disaster zones after the longest drought in memory killed crops and cattle and emptied the reservoir that supplied the capital of Sinaloa State. Five months later torrential rains raked Mexico, unleashing floods that killed at least 400 and left 300,000 homeless.
According to InterPress Service, one phrase was heard more than any other in the aftermath of Mexico's drought/flood tribulations was: "The climate has gone mad!"
A study from the National Autonomous University of Mexico warns that "Mexico will be one of the countries hardest hit by global warming." In 25 years, Mexico will experience 54.5 C temperatures, floods will increase, beaches will erode, and desperate citizens will flee north to the US and Canada "in search of better climactic and environmental conditions."
Deadly floods engulfed Venezuela last December, leaving as many as 20,000 dead, 35,000 homes demolished and 150,000 homeless. According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) "Large swatches of Venezuela's northern coast were swept away." Venezuela's new President Hugo Chavez toured the area and lamented, "There are bodies in the sea, there are bodies under mud, there are bodies everywhere."
India - The Age of Supercyclones
On October 29, 1999, a "supercyclone" with winds topping 175 mph ravaged Orissa, India. Some 1.5 million were forced from their homes and as many as 15,000 may have died. Industrial chemicals washed into waters caused burns to thousands. The floods killed 8,238 buffaloes, 78,104 sheep, 78,728 goats, 10,381 calves and nearly one million chickens.
BBC reporter Mike Wooldridge visited Orissa three months after the disaster and was shocked to report that human corpses still littered the landscape - many of them apparently preserved by the combination of seawater and chemicals spilled from storm-damaged storage tanks.
W2K in Mozambique
In March, Mozambique became Africa's Honduras. After weeks of rain flooded the country, Hurricane Eline erased it. As one observer described the scene, "the Limpopo River stretched to the horizon."
At least 30,000 were left homeless. Economists noted that this marked the end of the "Mozambique Miracle." Since 1996, the economy had been growing at a phenomenal 10 percent per year and the fall harvest would have made the country self-sufficient in food for the first time in 20 years.
The record crops were washed away in record floods, along with one-third of the cattle. The rampaging Limpopo and Save rivers churned up and scattered many of the 5 million unexploded landmines planted during the civil war.
Eight years of steady progress were wiped out in a matter of days. Major roads and rail lines were destroyed. More than 3,000 miles of new roads will have to be rebuilt from scratch. Repairs could cost $65 million At the same time, Mozambique must pay interest on debts to Northern banks - a staggering $1.4 million each week.
In neighboring Zambia, dams built to prevent flooding filled to dangerous levels. The government was forced to open the floodgates on the Kariba Dam, displacing 15,000 people and sweeping away fields of maize and bananas.
At the same time, a tropical storm pummeled Madagascar, killing scores of people and displacing 600,000 - half of them children.
It's Worse than Y2K, It's ... W2K!