December 24, 2005
Oakland Ross, Feature Writer
Toronto Star - Canada
Was this the year when the good Earth finally sold us out?
Or was it the other way around?
Through a combination of lousy planetary hygiene and misguided economic development, have we betrayed this wobbly old rock that is — for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer — our sole ride through space and time, our one and only home?
Many experts firmly believe that our species, and not just the planet, is at least partly to blame for the lethal succession of disasters that have struck the globe during the past dozen months or so, beginning with the devastating Asian tsunami at the tail end of 2004, continuing with the deadly whirlwind of tropical storms that churned through the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico this past fall, and culminating in October's bone-crushing earthquake on the Indo-Pakistani border.
Not to mention the hundreds of other unsung disasters — the droughts and heat spells, the torrential downpours and flash floods — that also imperilled lives, tested spirits and cost money during the torturous course of 2005.
Some experts see the soiled hand of humankind on nearly every side.
"We've been beating up on nature," says Anthony Oliver-Smith, a University of Florida anthropologist.
And nature has been fighting back.
Take tropical storms.
It isn't just our imagination: This year's season of tempests in the Atlantic Ocean was the worst on record by far. There were more big storms, and those storms were bigger than ever before.
During the year now approaching its end, a total of 26 tropical storms in the Atlantic were severe enough for meteorologists to identify them with human-sounding monikers, breaking the previous record of 21 set way back in 1933. Of this year's lineup, 14 swelled into outright hurricanes — double the previous record of seven, set in 1969.
Some were killers.
Katrina, which crashed across the coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi in late August, claimed some 1,300 lives, flattened whole communities and depopulated an entire city — New Orleans — leaving the French Quarter silent and immersing the Big Easy in a huge, toxic swill.
A few weeks later, Hurricane Wilma swirled north across the gulf, causing fewer deaths but packing an even more enormous punch — the most potent single storm ever registered in the region.
Meanwhile, Hurricane Stan lumbered over Guatemala and El Salvador, causing countless mudslides, burying whole villages and destroying crops, while interring more than 1,000 people in untimely graves.
In October, a storm called Vince was the first hurricane ever to hit Spain.
"It was a watershed year," says Mark Pelling, a geographer at King's College in London and author of The Vulnerability of Cities. "Certainly, in terms of the scale of the loss and the media attention, especially in the richer countries, it was a watershed year."
The numbers have yet to be fully tabulated, but 2005 is shaping up to be the second hottest annum experienced on the planet Earth since our species began keeping records of such things in 1861. The single hottest year so far was 1998.
"Certainly, the climate is warming," says meteorologist Gordon McBean of the University of Western Ontario. "I think we do need to be concerned about climate change. It is real. It is happening."
Disaster-wise, the numbers are stupefying.
During the 1960s, says McBean, the planet suffered through an average of 60 disasters a year, or about 650 for the entire decade. He defines a disaster as an occurrence that overwhelms a community's ability to cope.
By the 1980s, this figure had increased by more than three-fold — yielding a total of about 2,000 earthly disasters for the decade. During the 1990s, there was another big increase — 2,800 disasters.
If we continue to lurch ahead at our current calamity-prone pace, our species is on track to endure 4,500 disasters by the end of the current decade.
"Most of that increase," says McBean, "is due to weather-related events."
He means storms, droughts, heat waves.
Like many other authorities, McBean is convinced that human activity is causing the Earth's climate to change in complicated and possibly irreversible ways and that the results include tropical behemoths such as Katrina or Wilma.
Because they require warm water to provide the energy for their meteorological turbines, hurricanes form only in tropical regions and only over the sea. The warmer the water, the faster those turbines spin — and the water, in many parts of the world, is heating up.
"We don't necessarily expect to see more hurricanes," says McBean, "but the ones we see will be more intense."
Nor is that all. A warming climate does not express itself in tropical storms alone.
Many parts of the world were stricken in 2005 by extreme heat or drought or both — Pakistan, Bangladesh, the southwest U.S., central Canada, the Horn of Africa, southern Africa and Brazil, among other regions.
There were heavy rains and widespread flooding in India, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, Colombia and Venezuela.
In the Arctic, the sea ice continued to melt.
That's the weather, and it seems to be getting more severe and more deadly.
But other sorts of disasters — earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis — are also becoming more destructive, even if they are not increasing in frequency.
Caused by a thudding undersea earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, the huge tsunami that raced across the Indian Ocean last December was a disaster on an epic scale, claiming more than 200,000 lives. It likely would have been a wholesale killer in any case, but its effects were certainly aggravated by human activity.
Around the rim of the Indian Ocean, an ever-increasing number of human settlements are crammed in ever-increasing size along coasts that have been steadily deforested, all factors that added to the colossal economic and human cost exacted by last year's sudden seismic wave.
The Kashmir earthquake in October also claimed a woeful quantity of lives — more than 75,000. In this case as well, a variety of human factors undoubtedly played an exacerbating role — inadequate houses, poorly built schools, too many communities crowded onto unstable geography, such as steep hillsides.
In other respects, it was business as usual this year in the realm of shifting tectonic plates. During 2005, the Earth endured about 13,000 temblors, much as it does every year.
"It really wasn't particularly unusual," says Andrew Miall, a geologist at the University of Toronto. "But we noticed the disasters because there was such serious property damage and loss of life."
That's where the human factor comes in.
As urban settlements continue to burgeon, especially in vulnerable areas where they really don't belong — on hillsides, by river banks, along seacoasts — the destructive impact of so-called "natural" disasters is bound to go on mounting.
The problem is particularly acute in parts of the developing world that have high population density and vast legions of impoverished people who have few choices about where or how they live.
But, even in wealthy countries, the natural environment is being degraded in ways that can only compound the destructive effects of natural calamities, as was certainly the case in New Orleans, bereft of the sprawling marshlands and barrier islands that once would have provided some defence against a raging tropical storm.
"We've got more people," says McBean. "More people. More clusters. More expensive infrastructure. Things that wouldn't have overwhelmed us before do so now. If you look back, 2005 was an anomaly. If you look ahead, it may become the standard."
Fasten your seatbelts.
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