2011 February 9 — EUROPE: Hurricane-force winds push the noxious waters of the North Sea into surrounding bodies of water, affecting several nearby nations. This phenomenon, known as the Black Tide, poisoned so much water that 500,000 people eventually died.

2004 June — UK: A disaster in Dungeness, England, shows what happens if nuclear power goes bad. A partial meltdown irradiates a section of Kent and kills 6,000 people, and for a time thereafter Europeans are somewhat more tolerant of proenvironmental restrictions.

Excerpts from Eyewitness Accounts of the Dungeness Meltdown
Elizabeth Franks, 57: God forgive me for saying so, but it was beautiful.
I’ve seen many colors of flames before, but never that deep, rich red.
I wanted to stare, but the light and the heat were so intense I had to
turn away. I slowly started to comprehend what was happening, what
I had seen. First, I realized that something terrible had happened at
the nuclear plant. Second, I understood that what I had seen had just
killed me.
Thomas Michaels, 19: We were annoyed at first, if you can
believe it. The ground shook, the whole convention room bucked
upward, and pieces scattered. If you know gamers, you know they don’t
like having their pieces scattered. So there were curses and mutterings,
as if the earth had conspired on purpose to disrupt their games. Then
the wave of heat arrived, and we started to understand that we were in
for more than just a little annoyance.
Matthew Chadwick, 45: I’ve been to metal foundries, where
you walk by all that liquid metal, and you inhale and you catch the
heat of it and the heavy scent. It’s very indistinct, but it’s there. When
you smell it, you can imagine these small particles of steel entering
your nose and settling into your lungs, and you feel heavier. Breathing
becomes more di cult, and I don’t know if that’s because of the heat
or just the mind playing tricks on you. But that’s what it was like. The
smell, the heat, and all. It was like that.
Meredith Adams, 39: How can you explain the decisions you
make after something like that? It’s new, so you can’t base your decisions
on any previous experiences. So you do something, and you may
not know why, and it’s very possible that it won’t take you long to
understand that what you’re doing is incredibly stupid, but you don’t
understand that at first because you don’t understand anything about
the situation at first. I know I should have left, I should have gotten far
away, and instead I went to the middle of town.
It was so quiet, like an invisible blanket of snow had fallen over
everything. There were no birds singing, no cars, no people talking,
nothing. It was like walking on a movie set once the filming has been
completed. It was completely eerie but oddly soothing. I felt calm and
unhurried. There was nowhere to go, nothing I had to do, because
nothing was happening anywhere.

Oh crap. We missed it. Come. On all of us Euro types, let's have a flashmob tomorrow at noon GMT and all hop around in various sections of the North Sea, to see if we can get some resonating going. Can someone bring the toxic sludge?