Our study ranked nineteen thousand objects at risk from a warming climate. Venice came nineteenth. The board came first.
A four-year study of nineteen thousand objects finds the piece of cultural heritage most at risk from climate change is a village bin-day noticeboard. Venice, which will flood, ranked nineteenth and was not flagged. The control board is in a fridge in Leeds.
The board is oak. Somebody varnished it in 1987 and nobody has touched it since. It stands outside a village hall in Norfolk and tells people which Monday the bins go out.
Last week my team finished the largest study yet of what a warming climate will do to the things people made. We looked at nineteen thousand objects across nineteen countries. The board came first. Venice came nineteenth.
A ranking means we put things in order. We put them in order of how much a person would notice once they were gone. That is the whole method. It took four years.
Venice will flood. The reader should know this. We did not flag it. Cities are large and people can see them coming. My co-author, Dr. Halvard Brisk, put it plainly at our Monday meeting. "Nobody in the history of the world has been surprised by Venice," he said. "It has been sinking since it was built. We moved on."
The board is different. Damp air loosens the pins. Hotter summers curl the paper. Our model gives it until 2031. The model is a spreadsheet. It has one column.
We used a control. A control is the same thing kept somewhere nothing happens to it. We built a second board and stored it in a fridge in the department. It is fine. It also tells nobody when the bins go out, because the fridge is in Leeds.
The chance our result is a fluke is below one in twenty. That is the line scientists agreed on. Nobody remembers who drew it. We are past it, so the board is doomed and this is proven.
What is lost
When the board goes, the village will not know which Monday. Half will put the bins out one week and half the next. Bags will sit. Foxes will come. Someone will write to the council and the council will say the information is online. It is not online. We checked. Civilisation is mostly people knowing which Monday, and after that it is mostly foxes.
A heritage trust that looks after old things gave the finding a careful welcome. "We have long known that climate change threatens the built environment," said a spokeswoman, Marguerite Fell. "We had not ranked the built environment below a noticeboard. We are reviewing our list. The list is quite long and we may not get to the bottom of it before 2031."
"Nobody in the history of the world has been surprised by Venice. It has been sinking since it was built."
Our paper hedges where it should. The board might last longer if it rains less, and it might not. The village might buy a new board, though our funding did not stretch to asking. Cathedrals, libraries and the Acropolis remain at risk from heat and flood, and others have written that up at length. We note it on page nineteen.
Dr. Brisk has asked me to record that the fridge is now full. We will be moving the control board to his garage on Monday. He says the garage is warm. We are treating this as a limitation.
