Head in the sand: coastal property prices and sea level rise

If you own property in vulnerable low-lying coastal areas and yet have been keeping your head in the sand about sea level rise, you probably deserve to face the crippling loss of value and insurance premium hikes coming your way. Moves like this from Gosford council are an attempt to delay the inevitable. For the record, I think the NSW government ought to give clear direction to councils on such matters, but radical shifts in property values are ultimately inevitable. Trying to keep this fact from potential buyers through lobbying councils or any other means is a form of fraud. The best thing that most owners concerned about loss of value can do is campaign hard for aggressive mitigation and so prolong the period before retreat becomes necessary. There will be social tipping points on this issue as more people wake up to the fact that certain locations are increasingly vulnerable to storm surges and salt water intrusion. At some point, these properties will become unsellable, uninsurable and then, ultimately, unliveable. Some areas may have sufficient resources to afford coastal defences, but this is never going to be feasible for every piece of coastline. And even with the most aggressive and effective emissions mitigation, we are still going to see multi-metre sea level rise over the next few centuries, including probably something like a metre this century. Without such mitigation, it will be many times worse and is likely to continue rising for millennia.

This is one of the "sunk costs" of our failure to act on the knowledge we've had for decades about the dangers of basing our lives on the accumulated solar energy of eons past.

Why has the Titanic become a myth?

"People say, why are you so fascinated by this wreck? And for me it's a study of human psychology and the way people deal with crises. And they dealt with it in different ways. Some were in denial. Some were in a trance. Some just took action, didn't think, just went, just did. And others were craven cowards who thought only of their own survival. We all know that we would fall somewhere on that spectrum but until our lives are really put at risk - you know, the moment of truth - we don't know what we would do. [...]

"Part of the Titanic parable is of arrogance, of hubris, of the sense that we’re too big to fail. Well, where have we heard that one before? There was this big machine, this human system, that was pushing forward with so much momentum that it couldn’t turn, it couldn’t stop in time to avert a disaster. And that’s what we have right now. Within that human system on board that ship, if you want to make it a microcosm of the world, you have different classes, you’ve got first class, second class, third class. In our world right now you’ve got developed nations, undeveloped nations. You’ve got the starving millions who are going to be the ones most affected by the next iceberg that we hit, which is going to be climate change. We can see that iceberg ahead of us right now, but we can’t turn. We can’t turn because of the momentum of the system, the political momentum, the business momentum. There too many people making money out of the system, the way the system works right now and those people frankly have their hands on the levers of power and aren’t ready to let ‘em go. Until they do we will not be able to turn to miss that iceberg and we’re going to hit it, and when we hit it, the rich are still going to be able to get their access to food, to arable land, to water and so on. It’s going to be poor, it’s going to be the steerage that are going to be impacted. It’s the same with Titanic. I think that’s why this story will always fascinate people."

- James Cameron, Director of Titanic (1997) and Titanic 3D (2012),
National Geographic: Titanic - the final word.

Today is the centenary of the sinking of the HMS Titanic. Some people have got excited at the fact that some young people took a while to discover that the 1997 James Cameron blockbuster film* was based (at least at the macro level) on actual events. But that is not what I mean by myth. The story itself has become a shared cultural reference point, a story picture of flexible but fairly-well defined meanings. Why has the story of this particular ship been so often invoked, when so many other (often numerically greater) maritime tragedies have been quickly forgotten? As Cameron points out, the narrative of these events is very easily turned into a parable, or a myth - as the ship itself was already mythic in name and epic in scope when it was launched. We want to make sense of tragedies, and this one, for all its mysteries, seems to offer some pretty clear morals. Pride goes before a fall. We're all in the same boat. The bigger they come, the harder they fall.

And watch out for icebergs.
*And its recent perfectly-timed-for-maximal-cash-in-from-free-media-publicity 3D re-release.
H/T Joe Romm for the reference and second quote.

Is catastrophe inevitable?

"[I]f we are to confront adequately the threat of (social or environmental) catastrophe, we need to break out of this "historical" notion of temporality: we have to introduce a new notion of time. Dupuy calls this the "time of a project", of a closed circuit between the past and the future: the future is causally produced by our acts in the past, while the way we act is determined by our anticipation of the future and our reaction to this anticipation:

The catastrophic event is inscribed into the future as destiny, for sure, but also as a contingent accident: it could not have taken place, even if, in futur antérieur [looking back from the future], it appears as necessary. ... if an outstanding event takes place, a catastrophe, for example, it could not not have taken place; nonetheless, insofar as it did not take place, it is not inevitable. It is thus the event's actualization - the fact that it takes place - which retroactively creates its necessity."

"If - accidentally - an event takes place, it creates the preceding chain which makes it appear inevitable: this, and not commonplaces on how underlying necessity expresses itself in and through the accidental play of appearances, is in nuce the Hegelian dialectic of contingency and necessity. In this sense, although we are determined by destiny, we are nonetheless free to choose our destiny. According to Dupuy, this is also how we should approach the ecological crisis: not to appraise "realistically" the possibilities of catastrophe, but to accept it as Destiny in the precise Hegelian sense - if the catastrophe happens, one can say that its occurrence was decided even before it took place. Destiny and free action (to block the "if") thus go hand in hand: at its most radical, freedom is the freedom to change one's Destiny.

"This, then, is how Dupuy proposes to confront the disaster: we should first perceive it as our fate, as unavoidable, and then, projecting ourselves into it, adopting its standpoint, we should retroactively insert into its past (the past of the future) counterfactual possibilities ("If we had done this and that, the calamity we are now experiencing would not have occurred!") upon which we then act today. We have to accept that, at the level of possibilities, our future is doomed, that the catastrophe will take place, that it is our destiny - and then, against the background of this acceptance, mobilize ourselves to perform the act which will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past. Paradoxically, the only way to prevent the disaster is to accept it as inevitable. For Badiou too, the time of the fidelity to an event is the futur antérieur: overtaking oneself vis-à-vis the future, one acts now as if the future one wants to bring about were already here.

"What this means is that one should fearlessly rehabilitate the idea of preventative action (the "pre-emptive strike"), much abused in the "war on terror": if we postpone our action until we have full knowledge of the catastrophe, we will have acquired that knowledge only when it is too late. That is to say, the certainty on which an act relies is not a matter of knowledge, but a matter of belief: a true act is never a strategic intervention in a transparent situation of which we have full knowledge; on the contrary, the true act fills in the gap in our knowledge."

- Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), 150-52.
Internal quote from Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Petite metaphysique des tsunami (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 19.

This somewhat dense passage is either nonsense, or very profound. It can be difficult to tell, and perhaps only hindsight will let us know for sure. But this is precisely Žižek's point: that we act (largely) in the dark, and certainly in the dark about whether future events are inevitable or not. A terminal diagnosis could prove to be wrong. But this doesn't mean we just write off such a diagnosis, no, we embrace it and feel the full weight of living under a death sentence, and then live as those who will be resurrected.
Images by HCS. The eagle-eyed may have notice that the young man attempting to prevent the apparently inevitable collapse in the second image is your truly, age 11.