Free The Attacking Ocean by Brian Fagan Page A

other option is carefully managed relocation at short notice. Katrina and other major storms teach us that the density of population in large twenty-first-century cities is such that our ability to relocate displacedresidents either temporarily or permanently is severely limited. Inevitably, situations arise where those who can, leave and those who cannot, stay, fueling already festering economic and social inequities within and between segments of society. The resulting economic and political tensions within communities, between source and host communities, and, in the case of Bangladesh, between nations, do not augur well for a warmer future of higher sea levels and a great incidence of storm surges nurtured by extreme weather events.

Epilogue
    The Attacking Ocean has taken us on a journey back to the Ice Age, to a time when sea levels were as much as 122 meters lower than today. We’ve traveled through the subsequent nine thousand years of warming that brought global shorelines to their near-modern configurations about a millennium before the first civilizations developed in Mesopotamia and along the Nile. For the next six millennia, the climb was effectively minimal, as the Egyptian pharaohs built the pyramids, complex states developed in South Asia and China, and Rome dominated much of the Western world. The geology may have been relatively quiescent, but human vulnerability to the attacking sea increased dramatically. Coastal populations in low-lying environments like the Nile delta and the great estuaries of what are now Bangladesh, China, and Vietnam rose dramatically from a few tens of thousands to millions. Mushrooming cities acquired a growing vulnerability to natural cataclysms and extreme weather events like tropical cyclones with their ferocious storm surges. The major threats from the ocean were not those of rising shorelines, but from earthquake-caused tsunamis and violent storms, phenomena whose potential for damage ashore increased significantly if local sea levels rose even slightly or subsidence allowed the ocean to surge inshore, contaminating water supplies and flooding agricultural land. There were certainly casualties and suffering, but nothing on the scale that lurks in the foreseeable future, thanks to the sustained warming that began during the height of the Industrial Revolution around 1860. Sincethen, sea levels have resumed an inexorable climb, which now seems to be accelerating, whence the thoughtless media hysteria that focuses, laser-like, on perceived imminent catastrophe, on a world of rapidly melting ice sheets smothered by seawater. Reality is, of course, much more complex.
    History allows us to take a more measured look at the intricate relationship between warming temperatures and rising sea levels. The rapid warm-up immediately after the Ice Age far exceeded the pace of today’s changes. But even then sea level rise, while faster than today, was cumulative , a matter of fractions of a centimeter, or at the most a centimeter or so a year, sometimes not even that. Sea level rise is a seemingly long-term problem, which is why many people discount the threat. One could do this with some impunity in earlier times, but not today, when tens of millions of us live a few meters above sea level, even below it. In the short term, the greatest threat comes not from cumulative sea level change but from extreme natural events, whether earthquakes, tsunamis, or tropical storms, which spread water horizontally over low-lying coastal landscapes and river deltas, some of the most densely inhabited environments on earth. Combine this with tiny annual sea level rises and you have a volatile and growing recipe for long- and short-term disaster; the former is global, the later predominantly local.
    MUCH OF THIS book is a litany of destruction wrought by what are, by historical standards, transitory events. But how do these past catastrophes stack up against the challenges of the longer-term future, the