Bill McKibben has written an article about hurricane Sandy otherwise known as “Frankenstorm.” Some years back I remember hearing a climate scientist give a warning. If I understood him, he was saying that, until the ice caps melt, global warming will produce convection currents producing monster storms. McKibben writes:
Watching Sandy on her careening path toward the Eastern Seaboard scares me more than it would have 15 months ago. That’s because my home state took the brunt of Irene, last year’s “sprawling,” “surly,” “record-breaking” Atlantic storm. I know now exactly how much power a warm sea can contain and how far that pain can spread.
You can’t, as the climate-change deniers love to say, blame any particular hurricane on global warming. They’re born, as they always have been, when a tropical wave launches off the African coast and heads out into the open ocean. But when that ocean is hot—and at the moment sea surface temperatures off the Northeast are five degrees higher than normal—a storm like Sandy can lurch north longer and stronger, drawing huge quantities of moisture into its clouds, and then dumping them ashore.
The super storms that appear to be a part of our children’s future will eclipse any profit we have made by not dealing with climate change. As they live into the fearful future selfishness helped produce, how can they look at climate change deniers any differently than we look at those who turned their heads to slavery or genocide? Will they not sing that Hitler killed his millions and climate change deniers killed untold millions?
“Our relationship to the world around us is shifting as fast as that world is shifting. “Frankenstorm” is the right name for Sandy, and indeed for many other storms and droughts and heat waves now. They’re stitched together from some spooky combination of the natural and the unnatural. Some state will doubtless bear the brunt of this particular monster, but it also will do its damage to everyone’s state of mind.” -Bill McKibben
Worth thinking about.