Bishop Hill Book review: The Attacking Ocean
Aug 15, 2013 Books 
Brian Fagan is an American anthropologist who has written a series of books examining climate's effect on mankind in the past, including one on the Medieval Warm Period and one on the Little Ice Age. His new volume, The Attacking Ocean, looks at sea-level changes.
Like his earlier works, the new volume treads a careful line between the two sides of the climate wars. Global warming is mentioned from time to time, and is the focus of a short epilogue, but there is caution too, and criticism of media hysteria.
Most of the book is focused squarely on the past - the disappearance of Doggerland beneath the waves of the North Sea, life in the Nile Delta, tsunamis and floods and tides, the perennial attempts of man to prepare for them, and man's impotence before the forces of nature.
One theme reoccurs throughout - that we have always lived with the ocean and changes in its level. But Fagan also asks the question of whether the situation is different now, with countless millions living just above sea level. These are fair questions, and ones that might arise even if nobody had ever heard of global warming.
It's an interesting collection of tales, although one I didn't quite find myself engaging with for some reason. You might want to take a look.
Reader Comments (23)
Bjørn Lomborg gave a good talk a few years ago, which I saw on TV.
He postulated a person who's memory covered the entire 20th century and all the memorable things that happened to the human race. Through Einstein, Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Kennedy, the motor-car, electrification, TV, computers, the hydrogen bomb, penicillin, HIV, England winning the World Cup, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys. And sea level rose by less than twelve inches.
Would that person have even noticed the sea-level rise? No. But it happened, and may well happen again this century for the same reasons. Humans predominantly lived near the coast, and still do. Now there are just more of us, and the planet can sustain a lot more yet. We adapted, and will do so again.
I'm always cautious when someone says "things are different this time".
If as you say Michael we had nearly a foot of sea level rise in the 20th century, what were the actual consequences of that?
I live in Sweden and since I was a child in school we learned that our country is still raising up from the sea due to last ice age like all land that was buried under the ice. This land level rise must affect sea level rise in the rest of the world?
A while back, I spent a lot of effort trying to explain to a friend how Bangladesh co-exists with it's rivers and the ocean. She was convinced that mans emissions of CO₂ would lead to Bangladesh being inundated by sea level rise. I tried to explain that the country is there because it's where the river meets the sea and if you change the sea level you just change the place where the river deposits its silt load. Bangladesh is actually increasing in size, and because of the demand for land, there will always be settlers prepared to take the risk of living on the edge, who will want to farm the new land. The reason Bangladesh is vulnerable to storm surges, is not because of the evil West's sins of emission, but because unlike countries like the Netherlands, it does not have the financial resources to build defences to protect the vulnerable.
Bloke down the pub: I remember geography lesons at school (way back when) and being taught about river deltas and how and why they form. I guess that under our dumbed-down education system, such things are no longer taught.
I can also recommend Fagan's books. He provides an historical narrative without the hype and hysteria.
"the question of whether the situation is different now, with countless millions living just above sea level."
Tell that to the former residents of Doggerland.
Before the advent of cheap energy man's best form of transport was by water, if you look at all the old capitals around the world they are trading centres where rivers meet the sea or on major inland waterways like the Rhine or the Seine. With cheap energy and new forms of transport this link could be broken but at much expense, so we still have the same capitals next to the water.
Nothing has changed other than the possibility to move inland but this option has not been taken. Once we are back to relying on renewable s like the powers to be seem to think is a good idea then the option to move disappears again.
Good point, Breath of Fresh Air. Until the advent of cheap and accessible energy, geography was destiny for most people on the planet. The presence, or absence, of streams, rivers and canals was a primary driver of economic well-being. For example, no flowing water, no mill. No river or canal, no cheap and relatively quick transport. And seaports were the major hubs of trade. They probably still are, although airfreight and road/rail transport has taken a big chunk of their business.
"Fagan also asks the question of whether the situation is different now, with countless millions living just above sea level."
This is one of the reasons to take sea level rise seriously. A considerable portion of our infrasrructure is close enough to sea level to be under threat.
Consider New York. Sandy produced one-off flooding which disabled much of Manhatten and damaged other coastal areas. If the sea levelrose enough for this to become a regular occurence the people and infrastructure there would have to be relocated to higher ground.
Relocation sounds easy until you wonder who you will displace, what will replace the lost investment (you cant move a skyscraper) and where you will get the money to rebuild.
@Entropic. Sea level in NYC has been rising at a constant 2.8mm/yr since records began in 1850 and yet, over that same period the useful land area has actually been *doubled* by land reclaimation. So colour me unimpressed by sea level scaremongering.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/28/freaking-out-about-nyc-sea-level-rise-is-easy-to-do-when-you-dont-pay-attention-to-history/
Chilli
Unfortunately that reclaimed land is the most vulnerable to sea level rise enhanced storm surges.
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
It's probably wasted effort, but you might be interested in this.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/08/the-inevitability-of-sea-level-rise/comment-page-1/#comment-403969
@Entropic Man
Sea level rise enhanced storm surges? You need to look at what the Met Office say on this....
Oh, FFF - do get out and actually look at the "measured sea level rise" and observed sea level dynamics will you if you're going to pontificate on this?
I suppose you condone the sacking of hydrographic surveyors who know a thing or two about sea level rise/fall (like the poor sod in New South Wales) and having the temerity to report it isn't seen in actual water level measurements taken with mm accurate GPS.
Torturing a computer model to get the politically expedient result is OK though - guarantees more funding what? Even when that model consistently fails to accurately model observed reality?
I know who should be sacked - and put in the pillory.
Those Dutch types have robbed half their country from the North Sea.
In case anyone needs to revise their knowledge of Ice Sheets which covered Europe, as I did
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nercEUROPE.html
The weight of this ice would lead to depression of the land surface and the ice melting would allow the land to rise, one would suppose, so measuring sea levels by ancient beach lines will have to allow for both the rise of the land and the rise of the sea level.
In North America. there was an ice sheet at least a mile thick where New York is now, so land which was under it would still be rising.
It's a liitle more complex than that, and can be counter-intuitive dependent on time scale.
Ice sheets depress the crust, and causes mantle to be displaced laterally beyond the ice sheet margin. This causes crustal uplift beyond the margin and apparent sea level fall. When the ice sheets melt, a relatively fast process, the first response, measured everywhere, is sea level rise. Then as the depressed areas rise, they record an apparent fall in sea level (beyond emergence), whereas the "crustal bulge" areas continue to record an apparent continuation of sea level rise.
Last time I was taking notes, that was considered the case in the UK. North of a line roughly between Essex and the Severn, the UK is going up, and south of that line its going down. From memory, early 1980s, no brickbats please.
I ran a review of Brian Fagan's "Little Ice Age" a couple of years ago. Split into two Parts, it is worth reading.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/what-was-life-like-in-the-little-ice-agepart-ii/
Hector Pascal is correct about the North - South split.
I came across this map at the the "Adapt Yorkshire & Humberside for Climate Change" (or something similar!) (Some DEFRA quango, apparently)
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/image13.png
Unfortunately the original link to DEFRA no longer works. If anyone knows where the original source is, I would be grateful to know.
Thanks for the links, Paul. It looks as if I got the line in the wrong place: should have been Tyneside to Merseyside. Oops, I must have been thinking of an earlier glacial.
Another "Little Ice Age" title is by Jean Grove. Its a rigourous encyclopaedic academic study, not for the faint hearted. My 1st edition runs to nearly 400 pages. A second edition came out about 15 years ago.
'Those Dutch types have robbed half their country from the North Sea.'
Well the sea robbed it from them, a few thousand years ago, so they are just getting it back.
Up to about 5000 years ago, UK was connected to Holland/Germany/Denmark by 'Doggerland' which was well inhabited by palaeolithic hunter gatherers, ie our fairly recent ancestors.
It will be again, when the next ice age grinds around, in the next thousand years or do.
Jean Grove's Little Ice Ages: Ancient and Modern (the 2nd ed. of the earlier work, The Little Ice Age) came out in 2004. It's a considerable expansion of the first edition: there are two vols, weighing in at 896 pages. Although she's frequently listed as a sceptic in popular lists, and although she was always more than happy to disagree with other researchers when her interpretations of past climate data differed from theirs (notably in the mid- to late 1990s), her professional scepticism did not lead her to oppose the growing emphasis in the years following the publication of the first edition of her book on anthropogenic factors in recent climate history. She wasn't big on hockey sticks (given her interest in the medieval warm period) at all, but didn't discount greenhouses.