Frankenweather

Cuba has prided itself on its ability to weather storms. When Hurricane Katrina lashed the Caribbean in 2005, whereas the damage to the United States of America was considerable - with 1, 836 dead - the island’s efficient emergency response system meant only two died.

Yet advanced preparation and prompt evacuation was not enough when Hurricane Sandy struck the island on Thursday. The ‘Granma’ newspaper reported ‘severe damage to housing, economic activity, fundamental public services and institutions of education, health and culture.’ Eleven people were killed and 130,000 homes were affected.

Neighbouring Haiti, with none of the same disaster preparedness, suffered at least 50 deaths, the whole of the South of the country being flooded. Sandy then barrelled Northwards parallel to the US East coast, sinking the iconic replica sailing ship ‘HMS Bounty’, star of the epic films ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ and ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, on the way.

Named for a Caribbean storm god (incidentally, also probably the origin of the Sinhala term ‘waarakanne’), hurricanes are tropical cyclones originating in the seas off Southern North America. They are characterised by upward convection of hot air and strong horizontal winds circulating (anti-clockwise in the Northern hemisphere) around a warm ‘eye’ of relative calm.

Industrial Revolution

Sandy, veering towards mainland on Monday, merged with winter storms to form a hybrid. It lost its warm centre and its upward convection, leading to the stripping of its ‘Hurricane’ appellation, and its official downgrading to ‘post-tropical cyclone’ status.

However, when it hit the New Jersey coast about midnight Greenwich Mean Time on Monday, what it had lost in nomenclature it had gained in girth; it was now 1,600 km across, stretching from Atlantic City on the coast to Chicago in the Mid-West.

The super-storm raged ashore with 130 kilometres per hour winds and 4 metre high sea surges, flooding roads and tunnels and outing electrical power to about six million homes within hours of its onset. On the Great Lakes surges of 6-8 metres were reported.

The economic cost is being projected at US $ 10-20 billion. About Friday, mindful of the looming Halloween festival (in which people dress up as monsters), the US media began to apply the label ‘Frankenstorm’ to the ‘monster storm’. This is a play on the title of Mary Shelley’s futurist novel ‘Frankenstein’- about the creation of a monster by the book’s eponymous protagonist.

Greenhouse gas emissions

Although abjured by the CNN media organisation as ‘insensitive’, the tag is appropriate. Mary Shelley used Frankenstein’s artificial monster as an allegory on the immiserating and alienating economic and social effects of the Industrial Revolution.

The incidence of more storms of increasing severity, exemplified by Sandy, is due to global warming, which scientific opinion squarely blames on artificial pollution. So the ‘Frankenstorm’ is indeed a creation of humankind, turning like Frankenstein’s monster, against its creator.

It is also fitting that it is turning against the United States of America, the country primarily responsible for Climate Change, because of its high use of energy and its huge level of pollution.

The sad part is that, with the great ingenuity of the Americans, they could easily have avoided the problem.

In the United States of America cars and light lorries alone burn eight million barrels of petroleum every day, and the rest of the transportation sector a further five million barrels. By way of contrast, Sri Lanka imports a total of 18 million barrels every year, for all uses.

To the credit of the Obama administration, it has introduced stringent new fuel economy standards, which require the average fuel economy of each manufacturer’s range to be raised from the current 25 miles per US gallon (10.7 kilometres per litre) to 35.5miles per US gallon (15 km/l) by 2016.

It also came to an agreement with manufacturers and unions to increase the average of cars and light lorries to 54.5 miles per US gallon (23 km/l) by 2025, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by half. However, this may be too little, too late. One problem was that American vehicles have actually been growing in power and size over the last three decades, a problem exacerbated by the engineered shift of motorists from regular passenger cars to heavier light lorries - sales of which rose from 20 percent to 51 percent of passenger vehicles. A 10 percent reduction in weight of an American car reduces fuel consumption by 7 percent. Hence, if the average US car was reduced in weight from the current 2000 kg to the 1,175 kg of the average European car, a fuel saving of nearly 30 percent could be achieved.

A far deeper problem is the heavy dependence of American commuters and travellers on private cars, rather than public transport. In the post-Second World War years, government policy was to expand the road network for use by private cars, while reducing railways and public transport generally. The result was that the number of vehicles peaked at 250 million in 2008, in a population of about 310 million! Urban personal vehicles increased their share of total passenger kilometres from 64.9 percent in 1945 to 98.1 percent in 2000; the public transport share declined correspondingly.

Climate Change

Cars consume, on average about 3.4 times the fuel used by public transport per passenger kilometre. The amount of fuel consumed now is thus 30 percent more than if the 1945 share of public transport had been preserved.

The Climate Change we are experience now is the cumulative result of humankind’s pollution of the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, but especially since the end of the Second World War.

Since 1950, global fossil carbon emissions have grown five-fold. We now spew out greenhouse gases equivalent to 40 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide every year. The entire climate is slowly turning against us as a result of global warming. There will be more Hurricane Sandies, more Cyclone Nilams. We have created Frankenweather.