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08/11/2004
Nightmares - Aqueous and Otherwise
Nightmares come in different flavors and degrees of seriousness.
Last Friday was a gorgeous day and I ventured out alone to enjoy
a round at a favorite golf course. There, I was teamed up with a
threesome consisting of Bob, his daughter Valerie and Joe, her
husband. It was an experienced golfer’s nightmare (note I said
experienced, not good). Although all three of my companions
were quite pleasant and sociable, it was Joe’s first time golfing –
EVER! And Valerie had not picked up a club in four years!
After only three holes we had fallen a hole behind the group
ahead and, on the 4th hole, a ranger told us that the group behind
us was unhappy with our pace of play. At that point, Bob made a
wise decision – they would play best ball and forget about
keeping score. Our play speeded up markedly and we soon
caught up with the group ahead.
Joe, it turned out, could hit the ball a mile and even had a
legitimate par on one hole (I had no pars!). Valerie’s game
improved steadily throughout the round but I was somewhat
disturbed when she would say, “Good shot!” even when I had
really muffed the shot. At the end of the round, I was shocked to
find that I had only had 29 putts, my best putting of the year by
far, and my score was the best I’ve had this year on that course.
I’m still trying to figure out what went right. I’d be happy to join
Bob, Valerie and Joe again.
A nightmare of distinctly more serious proportions would be an
asteroid plunging to Earth. In yesterday’s August 10 paper, The
Star Ledger, I saw a headline “Phew, the asteroid won’t hit!
Darn, the tsunami will”. The Reuters article quoted Bill
McGuire, a scientist at the Benfield Grieg Hazard Research
Center at University College in London, as saying that we should
be concerned about the collapse in the more immediate future of
a chunk of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma
in the Canary Islands.
Cumbre Vieja erupted in 1949 and again in 1971. In 1949, a
chunk the size of a small island began to slide into the ocean.
Some day this chunk is going to collapse and plunge into the
ocean, probably after another eruption, or maybe after several
eruptions. That’s when the fun begins. Steven Ward of the
University of California and Simon Day, a colleague of
McGuire’s in London are quoted in a BBC Online interview
dated August 29, 2001 as predicting the collapse will form a
dome of water some 3,000 feet high! The tsunami that spreads
out from the collapse will be the highest in recorded history.
From a parochial view, living in New Jersey, I’m most
concerned about what might happen in the metropolitan New
York area. About nine hours after the collapse, a wall of water
about 150 feet high would hit and wash inland several miles.
You may have seen the impressive footage on yesterday’s TV
news of a landslide in Japan with what looked like a whole
section of forest sliding down as a unit, trees standing upright.
Picture a huge chunk of an island sliding down into the ocean. If
the speed of the landslide into the ocean is 50 percent faster than
Ward and Day assumed in their calculations, the wall of water to
hit New York could be about 300 feet high! That’s a football
field standing on end, sports fans.
Ward and Day feel it’s unlikely that the collapse will occur this
century but, if it should, they think that scientists will see
warning signs of imminent collapse in the form of some sort of
underground movements. If so, we hopefully would have days
or perhaps weeks advance notice. Let’s hope so! Otherwise, the
loss of life will be truly monumental. In any event, property
damage will be in the trillions of dollars in Europe, Africa and
both North and South America.
The residents of Tuvalu face a less spectacular, but equally
disturbing flooding problem. I must admit that I hadn’t even
heard of Tuvalu until I read the article “Will Tuvalu Disappear
Beneath the Sea?” by Leslie Allen in the August issue of
Smithsonian magazine. The tiny nation of Tuvalu is a bunch of
very small islands scattered over 500,000 square miles in the
Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Australia. The problem is
that the maximum elevation is only 15 feet above sea level.
In the overall scheme of things, Tuvalu would not seem to matter
much – the population is only 10,000, about half of them living
on the island of Funafuti, which has the only airstrip. However,
this tiny nation could serve as the canary in the coal mine. One
predicted result of global warming is a rising level of our seas.
Obviously, any significant rise in sea level would threaten the
existence of such a low-lying nation as Tuvalu. Offhand, it
seems a simple thing to measure the increase in sea level over the
years.
It seems simple and Tuvalu was chosen as one of 12 monitoring
stations that the Australian government established around the
Pacific in 1992. Well, you can imagine the controversy and
chagrin that resulted when, in 2000, the Australians announced
that after seven years of monitoring there was no evidence of any
rise in sea level and in Funafuti the sea level fell by nearly 3 and
a half inches! This prompted headlines to the effect that rising
sea levels discredited the concept of global warming.
Not so fast. An oceanographer in Tasmania, John Hunter, took a
look at the sea level and other data and found the reason for the
Funafuti fall in sea level – a particularly strong period of El Nino
in 1997 and 1998. El Nino caused warm water to slosh to the
east. It was a major sloshing, lowering the sea level in Tuvalu
and surrounding territory. When all the data are considered, as
of last December, the sea level in Funafuti has risen an average
of almost a quarter of an inch a year over the past ten years.
It seems pretty clear that Tuvalu is doomed if global warming
continues. Or is it? As usual, there are those skeptics, such as
physical geographer Paul Kench, who says that islands aren’t
static but change. Sands move from one place to another, coral
reefs get broken up and deposited on shorelines, etc. But, even
without a major rise in sea level, global warming means more
extreme weather ranging from drier droughts to wetter flooding
and possibly stronger El Ninos. El Ninos push stronger cyclones
towards Tuvalu and the chance of being flooded out with storm
surges increases.
I also saw an AP dispatch on AOL News dated August 10 that
certainly doesn’t brighten the global warming picture. China has
evolved into a major user of fossil fuels and is making major
contributions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Now
scientists of the International Consortium for Atmospheric
Research on Transport and Transformation have found pollutants
generated in China in the skies over New Hampshire. They
know it’s from China because of the presence of certain chemical
compounds that are produced only in Chinese industry.
In Tuvalu, government officials have proposed suing the U.S.
and Australia in the International Court of Justice in the Hague
for producing excess greenhouse gases, thus threatening
Tuvalu’s existence. Of course, the U.S. won’t recognize the
court’s rulings so any such effort will be in vain unless it
mobilizes world opinion. Well, I’ve got enough nightmarish
stuff to worry about. Maybe a round of golf with Bob and his
crew will soothe my nerves.
NOTE: After finishing this column, I had a feeling that I had
possibly discussed the Canary Islands volcano before and
searched the stocksandnews.com Web site. Sure enough, there it
was, mentioned not in a Bortrum column but in the 9/7/2001 Bar
Chat! Oh well, it’s just as scary now as it was then and I imagine
that there are enough readers who either didn’t see it in Bar Chat
or who, like me, wouldn’t remember if they had seen it!
Allen F. Bortrum
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