The Endgame

Newsletter #10 - The Great Tide

This newsletter looks at issues and events from the endgame point of view. The endgame is a chess concept. In the endgame only a handful of pieces are left on the board. Few moves remain. Victory or defeat is close. Player options are limited and diminishing. Zugzwang is a particularly important aspect of the endgame. It is zugzwang when a player’s only available moves will worsen his position.

Toronto, February 5, 2023

The Great Tide

What do you do, how do you behave, if you think that at any moment the sea will turn against you and the tide sweep you away?

We have a house on the Atlantic Ocean. For a quarter of a century, I’ve looked out of the windows at the sea. At high tide the water is only about six or seven metres away, closer if there’s a storm surge, closer still if there’s a full moon. When does the sea, something you love and embrace, become something you fear and flee? How do you think about the possibility of that happening? What do you do if it does?

The night of January 31, 1953, was the night of the Great Tide of Europe. A ferocious gale swept across the North Sea. There was a full moon. Exceptionally high tides were funnelled southward toward the narrow and shallow English Channel.  With no warning, a storm surge quickly reached 5.6 metres. Hundreds of people died in England, Scotland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and at sea. There was vast property damage. There are many dramatic eye-witness accounts of the Great Tide. There is, for example, the story of Mrs. Rudge. “Mrs Rudge recalls waking up in the small hours of Sunday morning to find her bungalow in Newlands overwhelmed with water, after the tidal surge overcame the sea wall at Small Gains Creek. Nearly 80 at the time, she spent three days trapped on her dining table before being rescued, without being able to access even the ‘nice little bottle of whiskey’ in her dressing table drawer...”

Now things are much worse, largely due to global warming, and despite the picayune efforts of governments to do something about the threat from the sea. The most dramatic example of government action is the Thames Barrier, intended to protect London from high tides and storm surges coming from the North Sea, developed partly in response to the Great Tide of 1953, and highly effective. But, as a robust official response, the Thames Barrier is unique.

What’s the endgame when the sea threatens? Many people in the United States who live by the ocean have an answer. They have their houses raised or moved, sometimes doing it more than once. This is called “managed retreat.” In August 2022 The New York Times reported: “A 2018 study by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that more than 300,000 coastal homes, currently worth well over $100 billion, are at risk of ‘chronic inundation’ by 2045... The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration cited 20 different “billion-dollar weather and climate disasters” in 2021. The analytics firm CoreLogic counts more than 7.5 million homes with ‘direct or indirect coastal exposure and subsequent risk from coastal storm surge and damage from hurricanes.’”

When we bought our house on the ocean, the windows facing the sea were small and sparse. Why was that, we asked people in the village. “In those days folks weren’t much interested in looking at the sea,” we were told. “Most were fisherman, the sea was where they worked, it would be like a factory worker looking out at factory chimneys, no one wanted that view, and anyway, the sea is dangerous, working people die out there, it’s not just a factory, it’s also a graveyard.” But we were dreamers from the Canadian prairies. We replaced the existing small windows with a wall of big windows.

When I look out of those windows, at the beautiful view, I wonder, when will the tide make its move? And when it does, what will we do?

P.S. My latest book is Antisemitism: An ancient hatred in the age of identity politics. It will be published on March 7 in Canada and on April 4 in the United States and the United Kingdom. You can pre-order from the publisher, Sutherland House, or from Ben McNally Books. Visit my website. Thanks.