بخش 2 فصل 5

کتاب: زمین غیر قابل سکونت / فصل 6

بخش 2 فصل 5

توضیح مختصر

  • زمان مطالعه 0 دقیقه
  • سطح خیلی سخت

دانلود اپلیکیشن «زیبوک»

این فصل را می‌توانید به بهترین شکل و با امکانات عالی در اپلیکیشن «زیبوک» بخوانید

دانلود اپلیکیشن «زیبوک»

فایل صوتی

برای دسترسی به این محتوا بایستی اپلیکیشن زبانشناس را نصب کنید.

متن انگلیسی فصل

Disasters No Longer Natural

Humans used to watch the weather to prophesy the future; going forward, we will see in its wrath the vengeance of the past. In a four-degree-warmer world, the earth’s ecosystem will boil with so many natural disasters that we will just start calling them “weather”: out-of-control typhoons and tornadoes and floods and droughts, the planet assaulted regularly with climate events that not so long ago destroyed whole civilizations. The strongest hurricanes will come more often, and we’ll have to invent new categories with which to describe them; tornadoes will strike much more frequently, and their trails of destruction could grow longer and wider. Hail rocks will quadruple in size.

Early naturalists talked often about “deep time”—the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature. But the perspective changes when history accelerates. What lies in store for us is more like what aboriginal Australians, talking with Victorian anthropologists, called “dreamtime,” or “everywhen”: the semi-mythical experience of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time past, when ancestors, heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage. You can find it already by watching footage of an iceberg collapsing into the sea—a feeling of history happening all at once.

It is. The summer of 2017, in the Northern Hemisphere, brought unprecedented extreme weather: three major hurricanes arising in quick succession in the Atlantic; the epic “500,000-year” rainfall of Hurricane Harvey, dropping on Houston a million gallons of water for nearly every single person in the entire state of Texas; the wildfires of California, nine thousand of them burning through more than a million acres, and those in icy Greenland, ten times bigger than those in 2014; the floods of South Asia, clearing 45 million from their homes.

Then the record-breaking summer of 2018 made 2017 seem positively idyllic. It brought an unheard-of global heat wave, with temperatures hitting 108 in Los Angeles, 122 in Pakistan, and 124 in Algeria. In the world’s oceans, six hurricanes and tropical storms appeared on the radars at once, including one, Typhoon Mangkhut, that hit the Philippines and then Hong Kong, killing nearly a hundred and wreaking a billion dollars in damages, and another, Hurricane Florence, which more than doubled the average annual rainfall in North Carolina, killing more than fifty and inflicting $17 billion worth of damage. There were wildfires in Sweden, all the way in the Arctic Circle, and across so much of the American West that half the continent was fighting through smoke, those fires ultimately burning close to 1.5 million acres. Parts of Yosemite National Park were closed, as were parts of Glacier National Park in Montana, where temperatures also topped 100. In 1850, the area had 150 glaciers; today, all but 26 are melted.

By 2040, the summer of 2018 will likely seem normal. But extreme weather is not a matter of “normal”; it is what roars back at us from the ever-worsening fringe of climate events. This is among the scariest features of rapid climate change: not that it changes the everyday experience of the world, though it does that, and dramatically; but that it makes once-unthinkable outlier events much more common, and ushers whole new categories of disaster into the realm of the possible. Already, storms have doubled since 1980, according to the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council; and it is now estimated that New York City will suffer “500-year” floods once every twenty-five years. But sea-level rise is more dramatic elsewhere, which means that storm surges will be distributed unequally; in some places, storms on that scale will hit even more frequently. The result is a radically accelerated experience of extreme weather—what was once centuries’ worth of natural disaster compressed into just a decade or two. In the case of Hawaii’s East Island, which disappeared underwater during a single hurricane, into a day or two.

The climate effects on extreme precipitation events—often called deluges or even “rain bombs”—are even clearer than those on hurricanes, since the mechanism is about as straightforward as it gets: warmer air can hold more moisture than cooler air. Already, there are 40 percent more intense rainstorms in the United States than in the middle of the last century. In the Northeast, the figure is 71 percent. The very heaviest downfalls are today three-quarters heavier than they were in 1958, and only getting more so. The island of Kauai, in Hawaii, is one of the wettest places on Earth, and has in recent decades endured both tsunamis and hurricanes; when a climate-change-driven rain event hit in April 2018, it literally broke the rain gauges, and the National Weather Service had to offer a best-guess estimate: fifty inches of water in twenty-four hours.

When it comes to extreme weather, we are already living in unprecedented times. In America, the damages from quotidian thunderstorms—the unexceptional kind—have increased more than sevenfold since the 1980s. Power outages from storms have doubled just since 2003. When Hurricane Irma first emerged, it was with such intensity that some meteorologists proposed creating an entirely new category of hurricane for it—a Category 6. And then came Maria, rolling through the Caribbean and devastating a string of islands for the second time in a single week—two storms of such intensity that the islands might be prepared to endure them once a generation, or perhaps even less often. In Puerto Rico, Maria wiped out power and running water for much of the island for months, flooding its agricultural lands so fully that one farmer predicted the island wouldn’t produce any food for the next year.

In its aftermath, Maria also showcased one of the uglier aspects of our climate blindness. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, and live not far from the mainland on an island millions of Americans have visited personally. And yet when climate disaster struck there, we processed their suffering, perhaps out of psychological self-interest, as foreign and far away. Trump barely mentioned Puerto Rico in the week after Maria, and while that may not surprise, neither did the Sunday talk shows. By the weekend, a few days after the hurricane traversed the island, it was off the front page of The New York Times as well. When Trump’s feud with the heroic mayor of San Juan and his problematic visit to the island—during which he tossed paper towels into a crowd without power or water like T-shirts at a Knicks game—made the hurricane a partisan issue, Americans did begin to focus on the destruction a bit more. But the attention paid remains trivial compared to the humanitarian toll—and when compared to the response to natural disasters that have recently hit the American mainland. “We’re getting some intimations of how the ruling class intends to handle the accumulating disasters of the Anthropocene,” as the cultural theorist McKenzie Wark, of the New School, wrote. “We’re on our own.” And in the future, all that was once unprecedented becomes quickly routine. Remember Hurricane Sandy? By 2100, floods of that scale are expected as many as seventeen times more often in New York. Katrina-level hurricanes are expected to double in frequency. Looking globally, researchers have found an increase of 25 to 30 percent in Category 4 and 5 hurricanes for just one degree Celsius of global warming. Between just 2006 and 2013, the Philippines were hit by seventy-five natural disasters; over the last four decades in Asia, typhoons have intensified by between 12 and 15 percent, and the proportion of Category 4 and 5 storms has doubled; in some areas, it has tripled. By 2070, Asian megacities could lose as much as $35 trillion in assets due to storms, up from just $3 trillion in 2005.

We are so far from investing in adequate defenses against these storms that we are still building out into their paths—as though we are homesteaders staking claim to land cleared each summer by tornadoes, committing ourselves blindly to generations being punished by natural disaster. In fact, it is worse than that, since paving over stretches of vulnerable coast, as we’ve done most conspicuously in Houston and New Orleans, stops up natural drainage systems with concrete that extends each epic flood. We tell ourselves we are “developing” the land—in some cases, fabricating it from marsh. What we are really building are bridges to our own suffering, since it’s not just those new concrete communities built right into the floodplain that are vulnerable, but all those communities behind them, built on the expectation that the old swampy coastline could protect them. Which does call into question just what we mean, in the age of the Anthropocene, by the phrase “natural disaster.” Dreamtime weather won’t stop at the shore, but will blanket the life of every human living on the planet, no matter how far from the coast. The warmer the Arctic, the more intense the blizzards in the northern latitudes—that’s what’s given the American Northeast 2010’s “Snowpocalypse,” 2014’s “Snowmageddon,” and 2016’s “Snowzilla.”

The inland effects of climate change are being felt in warmer seasons, too. In April 2011—just one month—758 tornadoes swept the American countryside. The previous April record had been 267, and the most for any previous month in recorded history was 542. The next month, there was another wave, including the tornado that killed 138 people in Joplin, Missouri. What’s called America’s “tornado alley” has moved five hundred miles in just thirty years, and while, technically, scientists aren’t sure that climate change increases tornado formation, the paths of destruction tornadoes leave are getting longer, and they are getting wider; they arise from thunderstorms, which are increasing—the number of days on which they are possible growing as much as 40 percent by 2100, according to one assessment. The United States Geological Survey—not a notably alarmist corner of even the temperamentally conservative federal bureaucracy—recently “war-gamed” an extreme weather scenario they called “ARkStorm”: winter storms strike California, producing flooding in the Central Valley three hundred miles long and twenty miles wide, and more destructive flooding in Los Angeles, Orange County, and the Bay Area up north, altogether forcing evacuation of more than a million Californians; wind speeds reach hurricane levels of 125 miles per hour in parts of the state, and at least 60 miles per hour throughout much of it; landslides cascade down from the Sierra Nevada mountains; and damage, all told, reaches $725 billion, nearly three times the estimate for a massive earthquake in the state, the much-feared “Big One.” In the past, even the recent past, disasters like these arrived with otherworldly force and incomprehensible moral logic. We could see them coming, on radar and by satellite, but could not interpret them—not legibly, not in ways that really made sense of them in relation to one another. Even atheists and agnostics might find themselves whispering the phrase “act of God” in the aftermath of a hurricane, or wildfire, or tornado, if only to express how inexplicable it felt to endure such suffering with no author behind it, no one to blame for it. Climate change will change this.

Even as we settle into thinking of natural disasters as a regular feature of our weather, the scope of devastation and horror they bring will not diminish. There are cascade effects here, too: ahead of Hurricane Harvey, the state of Texas cut off Houston’s air-quality monitors, fearing they’d be damaged; immediately afterward, a cloud of “unbearable” smells began drifting out of the city’s petrochemical plants. Ultimately, nearly half a billion gallons of industrial wastewater surged out of a single petrochemical plant into Galveston Bay. All told, that one storm produced more than a hundred “toxic releases,” including 460,000 gallons of gasoline, 52,000 pounds of crude oil, and a massive, quarter-mile-wide discharge of hydrogen chloride, which, when it mixes with moisture, becomes hydrochloric acid, “which can burn, suffocate, and kill.” Down the coast in New Orleans, the storm hit was less direct, but there the city had already been knocked offline—without a full complement of drain pumps after an August 5 storm. When Katrina had hit New Orleans in 2005, it was not walloping a thriving city—the 2000 population of 480,000 had declined from a peak of over 600,000 in 1960. After the storm, it was as low as 230,000. Houston is a different case. One of the fastest-growing cities in the country in 2017—greater Houston even included the fastest-growing suburb in the country that year—it has more than five times as many residents as New Orleans. It’s a tragic irony that many of those new arrivals who moved into the path of this storm over the last decades were brought there by the oil business, which has worked tirelessly to undermine public understanding of climate change and derail global attempts at reducing carbon emissions. One suspects this is not the last 500-year storm those workers will see before retirement—nor the last to be seen by the hundreds of oil rigs off the coast of Houston, or the thousand more bobbing now elsewhere off the Gulf Coast, until the toll of our emissions becomes so brutally clear that those rigs are finally retired.

The phrase “500-year storm” is also very helpful on the question of resilience. Even a devastated community, buckled in suffering, can endure a long period of recovery if it is wealthy and politically stable and needs to rebuild only once a century—perhaps even once every fifty years. But rebuilding for a decade in the wake of spectacular storms that hit once a decade, or once every two decades, is an entirely different matter, even for countries as rich as the United States and regions as well-off as greater Houston. New Orleans is still reeling from Katrina, a dozen years on, with the Lower Ninth Ward barely one-third as populated as it was before the storm. And it surely doesn’t help that the entire coastline of Louisiana is being swallowed by the sea, with 2,000 square miles already gone. The state loses a football field of land every single hour. In the Florida Keys, 150 miles of road need to be raised to stay ahead of sea level, costing as much as $7 million each mile, or up to $1 billion, total. The county’s 2018 road budget was $25 million.

For the world’s poor, recovery from storms like Katrina and Irma and Harvey, hitting more and more often, is almost impossible. The best choice is often simply to leave. In the months after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, thousands of islanders arrived in Florida, thinking it might be for good. Of course, that land is disappearing, too.

مشارکت کنندگان در این صفحه

تا کنون فردی در بازسازی این صفحه مشارکت نداشته است.

🖊 شما نیز می‌توانید برای مشارکت در ترجمه‌ی این صفحه یا اصلاح متن انگلیسی، به این لینک مراجعه بفرمایید.