Twittering as the world melts

A map of malaysian coastal cities underwater caused a stir in the Twitterhood. but did people miss the urgent message about climate change while arguing over the details?

IT’S funny what sometimes catches the attention of social media users. Last week, there was a series of tweets featuring maps of Malaysia with large tracts underwater because of rising sea waters. Meanwhile, this week, Venice was hit by the worst flood they have seen in half a century. The mayor was very certain about why five of the 10 worst floods in Venice’s history have hit in the last 20 years, tweeting, “This a result of climate change”.

Unsurprisingly, it was the tweet that entertainingly blended a global problem with a local context that won over in Twitterjaya (the moniker used for Malaysians who use Twitter). Yes, it was quickly discredited by the National Hydraulic Research Institute of Malaysia (Nahrim) who said “the analysis method used in the study is only suitable for general assessment at the global level and does not reflect coastal flooding conditions in Malaysia.”

It continued, “The studies are based on static topographic models without taking into account dynamic factors such as existing coastal protection and flood mitigation structures that are available and others that will be carried out...”.

I’m not sure I fully understand the statement, but the gist seems to be that the research in question looks at the big picture rather than detailed level when looking at impact, and there are things that can be done to mitigate rising tidewaters, if need be.

Except I’m not 100% sure the former is true when reading the study. If you read the report (available at bit.ly/new_tides), it specifically cites the likely impact at both city and country level, illustrating rising water levels for places like Bangkok and Jakarta, while identifying “70% of the total number of people worldwide currently living on implicated land are in eight Asian countries: China, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Japan”.

The report also includes a world map that gives an estimate of how many people per country will be affected by the likely increase of water level by 2050. China is obviously on the top of the list, with more than 100 million likely affected. Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand are expected to have up to 10 million people affected each. For Malaysia, the estimate is somewhere in the hundreds of thousands.

Now, the report also makes that point that you can still live on land that’s under the Mean High Water Mark (basically, the high tide level), and gives examples like The Netherlands, Shanghai and New Orleans, as well as parts of Tokyo and Jakarta – although we all know what happened in New Orleans when the levees broke.

For me this report shouldn’t be seen as something we use to gain likes (or fan political rhetoric), as happened in Twitterjaya. Rather, it should be a sobering refinement about what we know so far about global warming.

I’ve written about this before in an earlier column, but I’ll bring things up to date here again. Observations and climate models predict the Earth’s average temperature will rise somewhere between 1.8°C and 4.0°C by 2050. Bear in mind that temperatures in Malaysia can range from 30°C to 34°C and you get the idea what a few degrees of difference makes.

The increasing temperatures will melt snow and ice, which contributes to the rising sea levels; the extra heat is also what increases the intensity of storms like hurricanes and typhoons.

The horrible truth (“inconvenient” if you like), is that we can’t stop this from happening. I appreciate the efforts at Earth Hour, and carbon debts, and eating fewer cows. But we need to brace ourselves for what climate change will mean on a societal level for the whole world: A disruption of agriculture

We need to brace ourselves for what climate change will mean on a societal level for the whole world: a disruption of agriculture practices and food supply, and mass migration.

practices and food supply, and mass migration.

Taken at face value, this seems to be very much at odds with Nahrim’s statement. I do agree that we could, through smart engineering, continue to allow Malaysians to live on the coast if seawaters rise. But it’s more than likely that this will be the least of the problems that we might face.

We haven’t even talked about the real possibility of “tipping points”, abrupt changes that cannot easily be managed.

For example, the Antarctic ice sheets might collapse in such a way that it encourages even more of the ice to drop off. This would raise sea levels dramatically.

Or perhaps there is a disruption of the thermohaline circulation, the large-scale ocean circulation currents like the Gulf Stream that mix together the ocean’s water. This would cause changes in the weather, and possibly could mean parts of the oceans become freshwater areas.

Or maybe the oceans take up so much carbon dioxide that they become acidic enough to kill the plankton. These microscopic algae scrub carbon dioxide from the environment and produce oxygen, so their death will have obvious consequences.

The Earth may have faced this sort of abrupt climate change before. For example, the Permiantriassic Extinction event that happened about 250 million years ago. (If you’re wondering how bad it was, the clue is in the word “extinction” – 96% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species died off.)

Then, a study in 2017 conjectured that about 17,000 years ago, an ozone hole in the Antarctic (similar to what we have today) resulted in accelerated deglaciation, which coincided with 192-year series of massive volcanic eruptions.

Try fitting all that in a 280character tweet.

Logic is the antithesis of emotion but mathematician-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi’s theory is that people need both to make sense of life’s vagaries and contradictions. Write to Dzof at lifestyle@thestar.com.my. The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.