Guest Essay by Kip Hansen
The New York Times seems to be running short of environmental journalists. Its latest salvo in the attempt to keep climate change at the forefront of American minds was written by Michael Kimmelman. “Who?” you ask. Micheal Kimmelman, the current architecture critic of The New York Times. (But, rest assured, we are told by his NY Times’ CV page, he was the paper’s chief art critic.) Kidding about his actual experience and job title aside, it is all true, the Times tells us that Kimmelman’s reporting “has often focused on urban affairs, public space, infrastructure and social equity as well as on new buildings and design.”
Kimmelman’s piece appears on April 7, 2017 in the WORLD section, under the heading Changing Climate, Changing Cities and bears the title “Rising Waters Threaten China’s Rising Cities” and is sub-titled “In the Pearl River Delta, breakneck development is colliding with the effects of climate change.”
The piece starts with the news:
“The rains brought torrents, pouring into basements and malls, the water swiftly rising a foot and a half.
The city of Dongguan, a manufacturing center here in the world’s most dynamic industrial region, was hit especially hard by the downpour in May 2014. More than 100 factories and shops were inundated. Water climbed knee-high in 20 minutes, wiping out inventory for dozens of businesses.
Next door in Guangzhou, an ancient, mammoth port city of 13 million, helicopters and a fleet of 80 boats had to be sent to rescue trapped residents. Tens of thousands lost their homes, and 53 square miles of nearby farmland were ruined. The cost of repairs topped $100 million.”
followed by a sad, but unlikely, anecdote:
“Chen Rongbo, who lived in the city, saw the flood coming. He tried to scramble to safety on the second floor of his house, carrying his 6-year-old granddaughter. He slipped. The flood swept both of them away.”
(the news report indicates a water rise of 1.5 feet over 20 minutes….not exactly a flash flood.)
The story is about a springtime flood that happened three years ago. Oh, you thought “rising waters” was going to reference the breakneck speed of rising sea level in Guangzhou, but no, this is a story about river flooding.
And Guangzhou? Where is that when it gets up in the morning? Well, like Istanbul is Constantinople and Constantinople is Istanbul, Guangzhou is the city-formerly-known-as-Canton. The wiki tells us “Canton, is the capital and most populous city of the province of Guangdong in southern China. Located on the Pearl River about 120 km (75 mi) north-northwest of Hong Kong and 145 km (90 mi) north of Macau, Guangzhou was a major terminus of the maritime Silk Road and continues to serve as a major port and transportation hub.” Further illuminating. Guangzhou has a “a population of 13 million and forms part of one of the most populous metropolitan agglomerations on Earth. Some estimates place the population of the built-up area of the Pearl River Delta Mega City as high as 44 million without Hong Kong and 54 million including it.”
Describing Guangzhou as being “on the Pearl River” can be misleading — like saying NY City is “on the Hudson River”. More pertinent is this picture:
A small part of Guangzhou from the air. (photo credit: believed to be by Josh Haner)
The Pearl River is in the foreground, on the left. To the left are rice paddies. In the background is the Shizi Ocean, a long arm of tidal estuary extending north and a bit west from the Zhujiang River Estuary, which is the main body of water west of Hong Kong, which feeds into the South China Sea.
This is the Pearl River Delta area — to understand this, we need another map:
Almost virtually every river in south China ends at Guangzhou.
Kimmelman tells us:
“Flooding has been a plague for centuries in southern China’s Pearl River Delta. So even the rains that May, the worst in the area in years, soon drifted from the headlines. People complained and made jokes on social media about wading through streets that had become canals and riding on half-submerged buses through lakes that used to be streets. But there was no official hand-wringing about what caused the floods or how climate change might bring more extreme storms and make the problems worse.”
Apparently, Kimmelman is not required to actually research his “infrastructure and social equity” pieces or he would already know these two things which are common knowledge and which explain why “there was no official hand-wringing”:
- Canton/Guangzhou historically was a city of canals — almost a Venice — on the Pearl River flood plain. Modern Guangzhou is built over the top of the old canals, but only by 3 feet (1 meter) or so.
Canals and waterways that once helped to drain Guangzhou have been paved over. (Library of Congress, via Getty Images).
Like Miami Beach, Florida, Guangzhou has been built less than a meter above “The rising South China Sea and the overstressed Pearl River network lie just a meter or so below much of this new multitrillion-dollar development.” (quoting Kimmelman).
Like Miami Beach, much of the infrastructure of the city has been built below known historic water levels and in many areas, lower than normally expected high high tides.
- The South China Sea is one of the areas of the Earth’s oceans that don’t seem to be experiencing even the general planet-wide mean sea level rise of approximate 8 inches of the last century.
This map shows the geographical relationship of Guangzhou/Canton to Hong Kong, which is the site of the three closest tides stations of the Global Sea Level Observing System with current data. The link is to Quarry Bay, at Hong Kong, GLOSS station #77 (bottom right). [To see plots, scroll down to “Data in PSMSL” and click on the two little icons.] Two of the stations show that sea level is currently approximately at the same level as in the 1950s — units are millimeters. Only Quarry Bay shows any relative sea level rise at all — and that only 3 inches since 1980, most of which occurred 1980-2000 and sea level appears flat since then. In short, the South China Sea is not rising, at least not in this area. The journalistic alarm seems based on recent papers such as this in which concern for the future is based on projected models of sea level rise in the South China Sea, rise, which according to local tides gauges, is not currently happening.
Tides, of course, play a big role in flooding — as in storm surge and during heavy spring rains (historically monstrous in the region) — the state of the tide directly determines or adds to local flooding — particularly Spring Tides and King Tides, which are the highest tides of the year.
So, for Canton/Guangzhou, what are the tides like? The range of tides for Dongzhou International Terminal in Dongguan (see map above – about 20 miles southeast of Guangzhou on the Shizi Ocean) and for all other Dongzhou terminals is 0.3 to 3 meters. That means that today, under normal circumstances, there are tides that alone regularly flood much of the lowest lying parts of the city.
In 2015, The Economist calmly explained: “Why are so many Chinese cities flooded? The short answer is that the country’s urban sprawl has been expanding much faster than its drainage infrastructure could catch up.“
Guangzhou sits at the head of a long estuary, the Shizi Ocean, and at the terminus of the Pearl River and its multiple tributaries. When storms push water up the estuary and slow or even reverse the release of rising, flood-stage river water to the Shizi Ocean, serious flooding occurs. And, as we know “Flooding has been a plague for centuries in southern China’s Pearl River Delta”
How serious is the flooding risk? Here’s what a single meter of rising water causes for Guangzhou:
The blue is flood water — covering a high percentage of the megalopolis that includes Guangzhou and its 13 million people and its manufacturing centers. [Hong Kong, however, is almost virtually unaffected, as it sits up high and dry, only Shenzhen’s lowest lying coastal/delta area see any effect of a 1 meter rise.]
The Bottom Line:
China’s new capitalism has been spurring unbridled growth of new population centers and manufacturing centers — seeming unthinking growth. Like much of the growth around the world, massive amounts of infrastructure — worth billions of dollars — are being built directly in harm’s way — built on known flood plains, built on land below known historic high tide levels and Nature’s previously existing safety-valves for excess flood waters have been closed off — like the Meadowlands of New Jersey — and the natural runoff canals of Guangzhou.
There is little or no evidence that “climate change” has affected this area of China — where there has been little relative sea level rise, far less than the planetary average, and no data has been provided (nor could I find any in a serious search online) for historic rainfall amounts. We do know, however, that “has been a plague for centuries in southern China’s Pearl River Delta” and nothing particularly odd is happening there in the present.
There is something new happening here though. Predictable periodic widespread floods, for which this river delta is famous, no longer are flooding sleepy fishing villages and far-flung rice paddies. Instead, these all-too-common events are flooding modern high-tech factories, high-rise apartment building basements and first floors, high-speed highways and the rail system that moves tremendous quantities of raw materials, manufactured goods and the workers that make them, costing China’s economy (and its insurers) hundreds of millions of dollars.
Human folly and greed have been proven, once again, to far outweigh common sense in the rush to modernize and create wealth.
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Author’s Comment Policy:
Despite the rising evidence that there is something terribly wrong with the ever-changing/never-changing Climate Change Consensus (CO2/GHG driven global warming) hypothesis, journalists around the world struggle to turn every story into a Climate Change story — apparently there is a still a strong market for any story that can find something to blame on the Climate Change boogeyman. Like this NY Times story, the “evidence” for the posited cause ranges from non-existent to very weak association, nearly always being based solely on predictions [unproven, not yet seen in the wild] future effects. Fact-less journalism seems to be becoming the new normal.
Please share your experience and views on fact-less journalism in the Comments. If you have lived in the Hong Kong — Guangzhou area of southern China in the last 50 years or so, I’d love to hear your experiences with rainfall and river flooding there.
As always, I’ll try to answer any sensible questions (I don’t respond to trolls).
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No need to ask tourists or other jetsetters for information about ‘Guangzhou flooding in 2014’ – here’s
https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=%23h2o14
Thanks Lip for another excellent post and for reminding us to dig in a little when these kinds of stories come out. I read this when it was first published. Since I’ve seen AGW blamed so many times before in cases like this, I immediately googled “Canton Subsidence”, (easier to spell). :). Of course, the real story became evident after reading studies and analyses of the local geomorphology.
It is always the same, and not just SLR. Doing some research turns up plausible alternatives to what is habitually and reflexively blamed on global warming. Every time I have one of these experiences it becomes easier to be a skeptic.
Sorry Kip. Do I proofread much? Geez.
No worries….
And now it’s up to you for never ending ‘meta studies’.
Great story. Another case of people unwisely building on the flood plains and then blaming climate change when the inevitable flooding exposes their folly
Gee, I wonder why alarmist scum always use subsiding deltas (Bangladesh, New Orleans, Guangzhou) as proof of sea level peril.
Journalism is sure easy nowadays. No research, no effort, just recycle some talking points and always support the “narrative.”
How is it wrong for the journalist to misrepresent the city and the flooding as having a climate change signal when millions of readers want him to do so?
Is this not the new normal for journalistic standards?
He provides a desired and useful narrative that millions of people believe is vital to advancing the cause of saving the planet from CO2 emissions.
With so much at stake any means that may also be full of crap is entirely acceptable.
There is little doubt the journalist felt proud and was lauded by peers, friends and family.
With this kind of twisted reward and comfort in lying there can be no deterrent to making things up.
Enjoyed your article Kip! Nice geography lesson here too.
The NY Times writer accomplished his mission to sensationalize. Lots of anecdotal, subjective reporting. With regards to facts, he provides one at the end.
“The government estimated regional losses from last summer’s floods alone at $10 billion. For all of 2016, rainfall in China was 16 percent above average.”
“That was the highest level in recorded history.”
Let’s put on our scientist hats and look at this objectively.
1. 2016 was one year……..of weather. So I went back to look at the data for Hong Kong, going back to 1885:
http://www.hko.gov.hk/cis/statistic/erank13.htm#table6
2. Regarding the heaviest 1 day rain totals: There were none since 2000 in the top 12 yet 4 in the 1880’s in the top 12. No evidence that record daily rainfall totals have increased.
3. Regarding record rain events for 1 hour: There were 5 since 2000 in the top 20 and the highest, in 2008 was 145.5 mm. This is evidence that extreme downpours HAVE increased in Hong Kong.
4. Annual rainfall: There were 6 years since 2000 in the top 20. This is evidence that years with rainfall in the top 20% of all years have increased, though 2016, was 9th(the author states that 2016 was the wettest ever for CHINA). There was no increase or decrease in driest years.
5. We can also look at the heaviest 10 day rain events for each 10 day period from January 1 to December 31st going back to 1886(that exceed 400 mm):
http://www.hko.gov.hk/cis/extreme/10day_extreme_e.htm
6. Turns out that the decades with the greatest 10 day total precip records of 400 mm+, were the 1990’s-5 and the 2000’s-3.
The 1910’s/1920’s had 2 each. The rest had 1 or 0. This is evidence that synoptic scale, long lasting, high end rain events(related to the monsoon) have increased since 1990.
Of course more rain and heavier rain makes meteorological sense. The slight beneficial warming of the atmosphere, allows it to hold more moisture and slightly warmer oceans help to provide more precipitable water. The greening planet also provides positive feedback in many regions, with increasing transpiration but this would be a minimal contribution for extreme events, more likely to assist drier areas to resist drying out.
Global warming, having decreased the meridional temperature gradient has also decreased other extreme weather measures, like tornadoes, severe storms and extreme cold.
The massive benefits of increasing CO2 to the biosphere and agricultural production far outweigh the negatives.
Humans living along the coasts and in flood prone areas will suffer more negative consequences but much of humanity and almost all of life on this greening planet like it warmer and with more CO2.
Scroll up or down from the first link to find the rest of the Hong Kong records.
Mike ==> You were much more patient with this site than I was….nice work.
For rainfall, the list is not in order “highest to lowest” or any other discernible order (top to bottom)…1889, far down the list, has a ten day total exceeding 1000 mm! [nearly 400 inches!)
Another oddity is that 2014, the year of the flooding event on which the Times story is based doesn’t even make the list at all.
Of course, this is the Hong Kong record — on the coast subject to all those coastal storms, typhoons, etc.
I was trying to find the records for the larger Pearl River Watershed (South China would have done) but couldn’t seem to get anything definitive.
Thanks for providing the link for the readers!
YW Kip,
The Hong Kong records that were used are just 1 point and should be used with that in mind and we can often find stations that are outliers and don’t represent a region or periods that were misleading.
For instance, daily rainfall records in Hong Kong featured 4 out of the top 12 in the 1880’s, but 2 of those events were from the same event, May 29, 1889 at #12 and May 30, 1889 at #2.
Without a doubt, this would be the record for a 2 day rain total by a wide margin.
1000 mm! [nearly 400 inches!)
I guess you’re not used to these new-fangled millimetre things, are you?
As far as the original article is concerned – ‘Canton’ is the pronunciation of those 2 Chinese Characters using the Cantonese language, which is spoken in Hong Kong, and the adjacent province. In the good old days of the British Empire, they used the Cantonese version to impose Chinese names on the world for general use. Hence also ‘Peking” for the capital.
Nowadays, the convention is to use the Mandarin pronunciations – hence ‘Guangzhou’, and also Peking is normally referred to as ‘Beijing”.
The characters are the same – just expressed in a different language, so it’s not exactly a name-change.
I also lived in Hong Kong in the 90s, and survived a day of 345mm rain, 180mm of which fell in 2 hours, and that wasn’t even associated with a typhoon – just a stationary trough. A rain-gauge on nearby Lantau Island recorded over 700 mm the same day, thanks to orographic uplift. Mudslides were the big danger, rather than deep flooding, because the islands are relatively small, but quite steep.
Richard ==> Typo — sorry — 40 inches. (well, 39.37 inches)
Kip – yes I realise – just being rude! It’s still pretty spectacular to see it coming down like that
Cheers
Richard
In that Kip Hansen asks for other similar fact-less journalism examples consider this one:
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39347620 by David Shukman, who at least is considered a Science editor by the BBC.
Shukman is all agog at the moral conundrum of how a British research team has discovered a single deep-sea seamount with a tantalum resource equivalent to 1/12 of the global inventory. Shukman goes on to list all the contributions Ta makes to renewable energy, how high-grade the resource is and how preliminary mining tests can not be detected more than 1km away, but hand-wrings about single-celled organisms threaten if the resource was developed. Has Shukman never heard of agriculture? How does he handle the morality of sipping cultivated Chardonnay and nibbling Brie. How does he imagine the world manages to feed 7+ billion people without farm land? Is he unable to comprehend that the area in question is <0.001% of the ocean area? Is he unaware of the species uninvited to live in a modern wheat field?
This I cite as yet another example of the disconnect of the liberal media towards any ability to comprehend scientific reality. Fake news indeed.
Is he aware of the billions of single-celled organisms his immune system destroys on a daily basis, to keep him not-sick?
In late 1970 I was Ch. Mate of a ship tied to a mooring buoy in the river in the middle of Bankok loading rice from barges. My wife and I went ashore one day at lunch time, (wearing wellington boots having been briefed by the Agent,) to find the city was calf deep in water. All the secretary/dolly birds were going to lunch in bare feet with their high heels in one hand and their handbags in the other. The city was working fine. We asked if it was like this often and were told that it was almost always like this at that time of year.
No-one had a problem, the houses didn’t fall down and the taxis were running normally.
An excellent article spoiled somewhat by this last line: “Human folly and greed have been proven, once again, to far outweigh common sense in the rush to modernize and create wealth.” Certainly, development in China has gone ahead at breakneck speed, and mistakes have been made, but to dismiss it as folly and greed is going too far. Hundreds of millions of people have benefited from the Chinese embrace of economic development and free markets. Probably the single biggest uplifting of people out of poverty ever.
Stan ==> There is no doubt about this part ““Human folly and greed have been proven, once again, to far outweigh common sense in the rush to modernize and create wealth.” Note that I do not say that the creating of millions of jobs, and billions of dollars worth of consumer goods, is bad — only that they allowed themselves, in their folly and, yes, greed [ see untold stories of Chinese billionaires ] to outweigh common sense.
Common sense would have dictated regrading building sites to be above normal high high tides, for instance, or creating ground level parking with offices and factory floors raised by one level. All these are common work-arounds for areas prone to flooding.
Remember, they created this vast area of factories and worker housing — they could have built in anywhere (more or less) and built it to weather the known historic flooding without damage — that would be common sense. It has been flooding there for centuries, so they required no prediction, only hindsight — which should have been 20-20.
“And Guangzhou? Where is that when it gets up in the morning?”
How sad that you feel the need to ask.
RoHa ==> Huh?
That aerial photo in the article is amazing. I was in Canton/Guangzhou in 1983. The tallest building was a 5 story tall temple. It is hard to believe the extent of the change in just 33 1/2 years. The weight of all the concrete and steel in those skyscrapers has to have an impact on the level of the ground.
You have to see it to believe it. Crazy!
I was back there in 2000. I took my (then) teenage daughter on the high speed rail from Hong Kong to Guangzhou and I was blown away by the extent of the changes. It seems to have grown some since 2000. The pace of development in China is staggering, what we used to see in the U.S. I think the U.S. owns the past, but China owns the future. Too bad.
How is it that the “climate science” community will disparage and vilify any article / comment from someone who hasn’t got “climate scientist” credentials, but this article can be written by an architecture editor / art critic and, presumably, be well received. Oh, the double standard.
OMG please do not tell me Tequila Coyote’s Cantina in Shenzhen will be under water 200 years after we die. How can we handle this? Grief counseling maybe?
“If you have lived in the Hong Kong — Guangzhou area of southern China in the last 50 years or so, I’d love to hear your experiences with rainfall and river flooding there.”
We had worries about flooding when we were in Normandy, Shreveport, La; and the desert Southwest. In that part of China we worried about riding out three typhoons in our high rise apartment.
Retired ==> Thanks!
If you can not see the forest for the trees, around the Pear River Delta you can not see the floodplain for the high rise apartment buildings.
We lived in a 11 story apartment building in a company compound along the ocean near a new nuke plant under construction.
The Tiashan nuclear site is not on the Pearl River Delta but down the coast. Taishan is about an hour by car. Macau is two hours, Guangzhou is three, Hong Kong 6 hours by car. There are lots of ferries to help get around. Since we worked according to Chinese holidays, we were told not to even think about taking a train on a long weekend.
The best analog I can come up with is San Francisco Bay area from San Jose up to the delta city of Sacramento. Replace all the single family homes with apartment buildings ranging from 4 to 80 stories. Add a hot humid climate with frequent typhoons. Add 50 million people.
So what was the plan during a typhoon. Ride it out in our ocean facing apartment until it got really bad. Then we would get on buses, travel a mountainous road along the ocean, past rice paddies.
I did question this plan. Apparently our apartments are designed for a certain level of typhoon. In one typhoon, before it got really bad, I saw a bus stop shelter fly past our 4th balcony. So apparently when it is not safe to go outside, we will go outside and get on a bus.
We did not our motor home before we lived in China. I will not drive a high profile vehicle in gale force winds. Would I get on bus and take a scenic drive along the mountainous ocean like Big Sur or the Oregon coast. Hell No!!!
About 65 people died in that typhoon but not where we were.
The problem is not melting glaciers.
Excellent article. I don’t suppose Mr Michael Kimmelman will have the gumption to respond.
/Mr Lynn
L.E. ==> Kimmelman was assigned to write about the World Bank report and Guangzhou….by his editors….probably. The World Bank report is a Climate Alarm document based on “projected” sea level rise of un-physical (impossible) amounts.
Modern journalists seldom ask “The Questions” — they just write from what they have in front of them, look in the morgue files, or call someone on their “expert opinion list” in their electronic (now) Rolodex. Since the World Bank report is three years old, he has lots of other MSM press to borrow from and he has his own background about urban development (his own current field) . Guangzhou is in trouble and in danger of flooding. He just gets the reasons — the causes — wrong and does the easy thing of falling back on a popular (and editor-approved) boogeyman.
The NY Times has a specific, all-in-on-the-Consensus editorial position on Climate Change — thus Kimmelman can write nothing else.
It’s a citizen of Guangzhou here. The old canals, flooded land and marshes around Guangzhou not only create a dangerous circumstance, but also affected the construction of subways. You can hardly find a place in Guangzhou based on very firm ground, and the drainage system even worsen this situation. A renewal is highly needed for the whole drainage and forecasting system.
Yorkson Xu ==> Thank you for weighting in with the “ground truth” about Guangzhou. This reality is what I have tried to present in my essay — delta land, an old city of canals and marshes, unstable ground — with a modern city build over the top, but not raised above the danger levels which are obvious to any geology professor, farmer, or fisherman from the area.
Mexico City is an example of a non-coastal city with a similar problem. Build on a marsh, on an old city that was basically a lake — now sinking into that lake. “During the Aztec period, Mexico City was initially built over a lake, the Lago de Texcoco. Aztecs built an artificial island by dumping soil into the lagoon. Later, the Spaniards erected a second Mexico City atop the ruins of Tenochtitlán. Teotihuacán was founded in 1325 A.D. by the Mexicas.” The current “story” from the MSM is that the climate change boogeyman is sinking the city due to its need for water — they have been pumping drinking water from the aquifer.
The Old Testament and Confucius (all ancient wisdom) had a lot to say about building on a firm foundation and what happens when that principle is violated.