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Morocco in Switzerland
MOROCCO IN SWITZERLAND
Christiane Mercier is the longtime global-warming correspondent for the French newspaper Le Monde. In this interview, she speaks to me from several different locations in Europe. Our first conversation in the series took place at the former Swiss ski resort of Zermatt.
I am making this tour to take stock of what global warming has done to different locations in Europe. I’m standing at the heart of the former Swiss tourism industry, where skiing is no longer possible. Zermatt once had world-class ski slopes and a fabulous view of the Matterhorn. As I look around now, there is no snow to be seen anywhere, not even on the summit of the Matterhorn itself.
To prepare for this interview I did some research on the history of global warming in the Alps. Even fin de siècle, there were ominous signs. In those days the snow line extended down 9,940 feet [3,030 meters], but in the deadly hot summer of 2003, for example, it rose to 15,100 feet [4,600 meters], higher than the summit of the Matterhorn and almost as high as the summit of Mont Blanc, the highest peak west of the Caucasus. The permafrost that held the rock and soil on the Matterhorn melted, sending debris tumbling downhill. You can still see the debris piles resting against, and even inside, the shuttered ski lodges and restaurants.
I could give the same report from Davos, Gstaad, St. Moritz, or any of the once-famous ski resorts in Switzerland, France, and Italy. The Alps have not had permanent snow and ice since the 2040s. I understand that the Rocky Mountain ski slopes have met the same fate.
Meteorologists tell us that the climate of Southern Europe today is the same as it was in Algeria and Morocco when the century began. As measured by temperature and precipitation, Southern Europe is now a desert and the Alps are well on their way to resembling the Atlas Mountains of those days.
Several weeks later Ms. Mercier was in Nerja on Spain’s Sun Coast, once host to expatriates and seasonal visitors escaping the cold winters of Germany and the United Kingdom.
Looking south from the waterfront at Nerja, spread before me is the vast, blue Mediterranean. Looking north, stretching seemingly forever is a sea of abandoned buff and ocher condominiums, thousands, tens of thousands—an incomprehensible number, most of them decayed and crumbling. It is not hard to understand why: The countryside is parched and dead. At 2 P.M. in the afternoon in front of the ruins of the Hotel Balcón on the Nerja waterfront, the temperature in the shade is 124°F [51°C], and there is no sea breeze to be felt. I seem to be the only person about, and I do not plan to be about for long.
On the way to Nerja from Córdoba and Granada, I saw the charred remains of tens of thousands of olive trees, the monoculture that used to dominate southern Spain. As the region warmed, olive trees dried out, making them susceptible to fire and disease. Today, olive growing has shifted from Spain and Italy north to France and Germany and even England.
From Nerja, Ms. Mercier traveled to Gibraltar.
I had a great deal of trouble finding transportation to get down here and back. What used to take half a day’s drive took me four. Gibraltar used to be one of the British Empire’s crown jewels, guarding entrance to and exit from the Mediterranean. But only a few miles away by sea lay Morocco, a proximity that made Gibraltar a natural mecca for climate migrants.
In my research preparing for the trip, I found a report from the 2010s noting that migration to the EU had already risen due to increasing heat and drought and the social disorder that resulted. One study projected that the annual number of migrants would rise from the 350,000 of the tens to twice that by 2100. But this study, like so many from that period regardless of topic, projected the future based on the past and the past was not a good guide when there was a “new normal” every year or two. These projections almost never took into account global warming and its ancillary effects. Now, no one knows how many migrants have managed to arrive in Europe from Africa, the Middle East, and what we used to call Eastern Europe, but certainly the number is in the hundreds of millions, maybe half a billion. And still they come.
By 2050, so many migrants had swamped Gibraltar that England announced it was ceding the territory to the country that had long claimed it. Spain then made a half-hearted effort to govern Gibraltar. But when the desalination plants on which it had depended for water failed, Spain was in no position to replace them. In 2065 it gave up and declared Gibraltar an open city. Since then it has been known by its original name: Jabal ?ariq, Mountain of Tariq.
It was clear to me that Gibraltar is a hive of smuggling and other criminal activities and to go there is to take your life in your hands. I had to enter disguised as a man and accompanied by armed mercenaries. I did not stay long—but long enough to see that when some said global warming would bring hell and high water, they were not far off.
When next I speak with Ms. Mercier, she has moved up the Mediterranean coast to the Spanish province of Murcia.
From Jabal ?ariq I hired a boat to take me northeast to Murcia, stopping at places on the way that my captain said were likely to be safe. If you had visited Murcia in the early years of the century, you would have passed fields full of lettuce and hothouses of ripe tomatoes. You would have seen the new vacation homes and condos springing up everywhere. On the way to the beach, you would have found it hard to avoid passing a green golf course. In such a dry land, where did Spain get the water for all this?
As you know from my reports, before I visit an area, Je fais mon travail—I do my homework. I study the history of a city or country so I can understand what I am seeing. Murcia is a case study in how impotent people and governments were to prevent this tragedy of the commons from ruining their lives and their land.
Murcia was always dry, but a lack of rain did not prevent people from behaving as though there would always be plenty of water. If water did not fall from the sky, people found it underground or transferred it from distant snowfields. At the turn of the century, they refused to believe that the day might come when none of these strategies would work.
Until the latter part of the last century, Murcia’s farmers grew figs and date palms and, where they had enough water, lemons and other citrus. Then the government arranged to transfer water from less-dry provinces, which allowed the farmers to switch to thirsty crops like lettuce, tomatoes, and strawberries. Developers built as fast as they could, and every new building had to have its own swimming pool. Vacationers needed villas, condos, and enough golf courses so they did not have to wait to tee off. Keeping each of Murcia’s golf courses green took hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per day. Someone figured out that to allow a golfer to play one round took 3,000 gallons [11,356 liters] of water. Today, golf has gone the way of hockey and skiing and sports generally.
Had Spanish officials taken global warming seriously and studied Murcia’s temperature records, they might have been more cautious. During the twentieth century, Spain warmed twice as much as the Earth overall, and the amount of rainfall declined. Scientists projected that rainfall would drop a further 20 percent by 2020 and 40 percent by 2070. The forecasts turned out to be accurate, though at the time they were made no one had paid any attention. When northern provinces had to cut back their water transfers, Murcia’s farmers and towns had to turn to groundwater, causing the water table to drop sharply. A black market in water from illegal wells sprang up, and soon the water table was so deep that pumps could not lift the water to the surface. Scandals were uncovered, with corrupt officials caught taking payoffs in exchange for building permits in areas where there was no water. Unbelievably, gullible people in Britain and Germany continued to buy condos and villas in Spain. They would arrive at their new home or condo, turn on the tap, find that no water emerged, and then look for someone to sue. Then they found out that the fine print on their contract had given the builders and the government an escape clause if an act of God caused a water shortage. Global warming an act of God? Ne me fais pas rire; or, as you say, Don’t make me laugh.
As the water dried up, farmers switched back to figs and date palms. But as the century went on and the scientists’ forecasts proved correct or, more often, conservative, even those desert crops could not be grown economically in Spain. By the 2050s, agriculture in Murcia had essentially ended and the vacation homes and condos stood empty. Today, except for its derelict buildings, Murcia is indistinguishable from the North African desert of a century ago.
When next I talk with Ms. Mercier, she has reached her home in Paris.
On the way home, I passed through the Loire Valley, a region that used to produce some of the most outstanding wines in the world: Chinon, Muscadet, Pouilly-Fumé, Sancerre, Vouvray, and others. All are gone. The problem was that as temperatures rise, grapes mature earlier, raising their sugar content and lowering their acidity. Such grapes produce a coarser wine with a higher alcohol content. If temperatures had only risen a degree or two—had we stayed below the point de rupture of carbon dioxide levels—then, though Vouvray might not have tasted the same, it still would have been drinkable. Possibly an expert might even have recognized it as some variation on Vouvray. But the temperature has gone up by 9°F [5° C]. Wine grapes will not grow in the Loire Valley now and the industry here, as in the rest of France, is defunct. If you want wine today, go to the former UK or Scandinavia.
Right now I am standing in the shade of the Arc de Triomphe at midafternoon on July 1, 2084. It is a good thing I am in the shade, because the temperature is 115°F [46°C]. To stand in direct sunlight in this heat for more than a few minutes is to guarantee heatstroke. Looking around, I see only a handful of vehicles moving. Few people are on the street. Even at night it is too hot to sit outdoors, as the heat absorbed during the day by the steel and concrete of Paris is released. The City of Light has become, like so many, the City of Heat, and her sidewalk cafés are just a memory.
From Paris our reporter travels to Calais on the English Channel.
On the way here, travel was so difficult that I almost gave up and returned to Paris. Before long no one will be able to make a trip like this safely. Just as Gibraltar was the natural entry point to Europe for Africans trying to move north to escape the killing heat, so Calais, only 20 miles [32 km] across the channel from Dover, has been the natural exit point for those trying to reach the cooler climes of the former United Kingdom. In the 2020s, Britons wanted to reduce both legal and illegal immigration. For a while they got their wish, but by the late 2030s, the number of illegal immigrants arriving in the former UK began to rise and has kept on rising. Calais’s main function now is to serve that illegal migration. Just as I saw few Spaniards in southern Spain, most of the people I see and talk with in Calais are not French or British, but Arabs, Africans, Syrians, and Slavs. The only thing they have in common appears to be that they come from elsewhere and are determined to reach the White Cliffs of Dover. Some migrants try to swim the Channel, but few survive it. The tumult here reminds me of a scene I remember from old newsreels showing the chaos at the Fall of Paris as the Germans approached and Parisians scattered to the winds.
At the port of Calais, I see a reenactment of another scene from World War II: the escape of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in hundreds of watercraft of every description. Now the water is filled with another mélange of vessels, crowded to their railings with people headed for the promised land of England, where the smuggling operators wait to receive them—or so they hope.
I had thought I would get passage on one of those vessels and report from England, but I am utterly defeated and depressed at what I have seen. Je me rends.
