Klaus Jacob, a German professor affiliated with Columbia’s University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, is a geophysicist by profession and a doomsayer by disposition. I’ve gotten to know him over the past few years, as I’ve sought to understand the greatest threat to life in New York as we know it. Jacob has a white beard and a ponderous accent: Imagine if Werner Herzog happened to be a renowned expert on disaster risk. Jacob believes most people live in an irrational state of “risk denial,” and he takes delight in dispelling their blissful ignorance. “If you want to survive an earthquake, don’t buy a brownstone,” he once cautioned me, citing the catastrophic potential of a long-dormant fault line that runs under the city. When Mayor Bloomberg announced nine years ago an initiative to plant a million trees, Jacob thought, That’s nice — but what about tornadoes?
For the past 15 years or so, Jacob has been primarily preoccupied with a more existential danger: the rising sea. The latest scientific findings suggest that a child born today in this island metropolis may live to see the waters around it swell by six feet, as the previously hypothetical consequences of global warming take on an escalating — and unstoppable — force. “I have made it my mission,” Jacob says, “to think long term.” The life span of a city is measured in centuries, and New York, which is approaching its fifth, probably doesn’t have another five to go, at least in any presently recognizable form. Instead, Jacob has said, the city will become a “gradual Atlantis.”
The deluge will begin slowly, and irregularly, and so it will confound human perceptions of change. Areas that never had flash floods will start to experience them, in part because global warming will also increase precipitation. High tides will spill over old bulkheads when there is a full moon. People will start carrying galoshes to work. All the commercial skyscrapers, housing, cultural institutions that currently sit near the waterline will be forced to contend with routine inundation. And cataclysmic floods will become more common, because, to put it simply, if the baseline water level is higher, every storm surge will be that much stronger. Now, a surge of six feet has a one percent chance of happening each year — it’s what climatologists call a “100 year” storm. By 2050, if sea-level rise happens as rapidly as many scientists think it will, today’s hundred-year floods will become five times more likely, making mass destruction a once-a-generation occurrence. Like a stumbling boxer, the city will try to keep its guard up, but the sea will only gain strength.
No New Yorker, of course, needs to be reminded of the ocean’s fearsome power — not since Hurricane Sandy. But Jacob began trying to sound the alarm about the risk more than a decade ago. He sent students into the New York subways with barometers to measure their elevation, and produced a 2008 report for the MTA, warning that many lines would flood with a storm surge of between seven and 13 feet. He urged policymakers to “muster the courage to think the almost unthinkable” and install flood defenses while considering whether, over the long term, climate change might necessitate radical alterations to the transit system, like moving back to elevated tracks. In 2011, while working on a government panel, Jacob produced a study that mapped how subway tunnels would be inundated in the event of a hurricane. The next year, he was proved right. After Sandy, Jacob was hailed as a prophet.
Jeanne Hamel has been a member of the United Church since its formation in Toronto, 91 years ago.
Today, as a longtime member of the West Hill United Church congregation in Scarborough, Hamel, 96, knows where her loyalties lie.
Hamel is sticking with Gretta Vosper, the United Church minister who was told by church leaders that she is “not suitable” because she calls herself an atheist and preaches about love without referring to Jesus Christ.
“Wherever Gretta goes, I go,” said Hamel, after the Sunday morning service. “My heart left the United Church when I heard they had rejected Gretta. I was stunned.”
About 200 people attended the service at West Hill, at Morningside Rd. and Kingston Rd., on Sunday morning — the first service since the church’s Toronto Conference Review Committee released a 39-page report last Wednesday on the minister’s non-traditional views.
“In our opinion, she is not suitable to continue in ordained ministry because she does not believe in God, Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit,” the report stated.
What were the ingredients needed to produce a Labour Day weekend in Toronto 87 years ago? A visit to the CNE? Check. Tourists crowding local highways? Check. A day at a beach? Check. Union members proudly marching in a parade wearing white suits and straw hats? Check. Controversy in the sporting world? Check. Rumours of a provincial election in the offing? Check. Economic worries? Not yet (wait a few weeks). Thieves with a penchant for stealing trousers? Check…?!?
A flip through the local newspapers during the last long summer weekend of 1929 provides almost no hint of the economic darkness to come. From all appearances, the 1920s were still roaring and Torontonians could sit back, relax, and enjoy the holiday with few cares.
Headlines early in the weekend screamed in shocked tones over the poor sportsmanship shown by American swimmer Eddie Keating after his victory in the Wrigley swim marathon over German-Canadian Ernst Vierkoetter on Friday night. The trouble began when Keating was brought to the winner’s podium to speak to the crowd and a radio audience after the eight-hour, fifteen-mile race wrapped up.
Lennox Island, a small First Nations community on Prince Edward Island, is beginning to disappear amid the rising waters of the Atlantic Ocean, having already lost one square kilometre of land in a single generation.
Dave Haley, the property manager for Lennox Island, lives just six metres from the ocean but is losing about a metre of his backyard each year as water continues to creep closer. In a few years, his house could be gone.
"A lot of people don't realize the power of water," says Haley. "A lot of people want to turn a blind eye, but, look, it's happening."
On average, Lennox Island is just four metres above sea level and is eroding twice as fast as the rest of P.E.I., losing nearly one hectare every year, says Adam Fenech, a Nobel Prize-winning climate scientist and the director of the Climate Research Lab at the University of Prince Edward Island. He believes shorelines will continue to rise in the next 50 years.
"A lot of the most recent science is telling us it could rise as much as three metres during that time," says Fenech. "Probably in about 50 years, with the three-metre increase, we'd probably see half the island in the water completely."
It's an image that requires a double-take: a pristine Arctic landscape in Greenland, dotted with rusted debris from an abandoned World War II military base.
Bluie East II was a U.S. military base built in eastern Greenland in 1942. It was used to bring in supplies, refuel planes and manage flights in need of an emergency landing pad.
When the site, which housed 200 to 300 soldiers, was abandoned in 1947, everything was left behind to rust and break down.
"I was really just shocked at it, it was beyond belief," says Ken Bower, a graphic designer from New York City who stumbled across the site for the first time in 2012.
"You have this absolute pristine, picture-perfect landscape and then sitting in that landscape is all the hazardous materials."
On a meadowy spit of oceanfront land in southwestern Newfoundland, a team of scientists spent part of the summer of 2016 working to both uncover history and make it, modern explorers trying to track down ancient ones.
"This is not a bad place to spend a couple weeks outside, playing in the dirt. It's special here," said Sarah Parcak, the co-director of the midsummer dig at Point Rosee, in the Codroy Valley, about 50 km north of Channel-Port-aux-Basques.
It's a spot that could easily vie for the the title of most beautiful workplace in the world, but with cliffs that tumble into the sea, the only way in is a long hike or an ATV ride not designed for the faint of heart, or stomach.
Searching for the elusive Norse presence in North America isn't for the faint of heart either.
This is Parcak's second season at Point Rosee. Last June's dig, a cold and rainy affair, turned up enough tempting clues, such as nine kilograms of bog iron that looked to have been roasted in a hearth, to lure her back.
I went to a banana farm to learn about growing fruit in Hong Kong. Instead I learned about democracy.
It started with a visit to Hamilton Street in Hong Kong’s densely-packed Yau Ma Tei district, where a friend introduced me to Tam Chi-kit, who was selling bananas from a folding table on the street. “He grows them himself,” explained my friend.
These were not the ubiquitous Cavendish bananas you find with a Del Monte or Chiquita sticker on them. They were girthy, thick-skinned dai ziu—literally “big bananas”—native to this part of Asia. You can find them in markets all over Hong Kong, along with a few other native varieties. Like many local bananas, Tam’s dai ziu don’t lend themselves well to mass production, so they’re grown on a family farm that has somehow managed to survive in one of the most densely-populated cities in the world.
Though the city is most famous for its thicket of skyscrapers—it has more high-rises than any other place in the world—most of its land area is undeveloped. Much of it is reserved for country parks, but large portions are former agricultural land that has been illegally converted into junkyards and storage facilities. More than 2,000 acres are owned by property developers biding their time until they can build. Farming isn’t easy in Hong Kong.
“Can I come visit?” I asked Tam. “Okay,” he replied. “We’ll make lunch.”
Tam meets me next to a concrete pagoda. The air hums with the sound of cicadas and a chorus of songbirds. As we walk to the farm, Tam points at wild banana trees growing by the road. “Look—bananas everywhere,” he says.
The farm isn’t quite what I expected. It’s a muddy acre of land that spills down a hill to the Sheung Yue River. There are banana trees, but also papayas, soursop and an abundance of herbs. Walking down a concrete path, past two metal gates, we arrive at a cluster of tin-roofed structures. Three elderly people emerge to greet us. There’s Uncle Chan, a gangly, bespectacled man with a toothy grin. Auntie Wong, dressed in a floral print shirt. And Uncle Wong, a stout, bald man with a pugnacious demeanour and a t-shirt commemorating the Umbrella Revolution, the student-led pro-democracy movement that occupied Hong Kong’s streets for 79 days in 2014. It quickly becomes clear this is no ordinary banana farm.
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