We are all happy little Dr. Frankensteins these days, the climate our unruly monster. We burn as much fossilized organic matter as we can to keep our lively cities humming; it’s a pretty grand experiment. And it comes with a perfectly Shelley-ian warning about humanly hubris.Last year, for the first time, I found myself purchasing a stock of non-perishable foods, assembling a “go-bag,” and taping up the windows of my Brooklyn apartment. All in preparation of a hurricane that looked like it was going to smash directly into New York City. Irene ended up doing less smashing than blustering. But it sounded every bit the fearsome death machine the press had forewarned as I lay awake next to my girlfriend at 1 am, listening to rain thunder down on the roof and wondering if I really should have insisted we get the hell out of town.New York dodged the bullet, of course. But Vermont got swamped (so did New Jersey and North Carolina). The state was besieged by massive floods, which left its residents cut off from supply and transit routes and stuck, in the dark, for days. I traveled up to southern Vermont the next November; I saw houses overtaken by the flooding, bridges knocked out, and farmland ruined for years.Now, just one year later, we’re staring down the barrel of another region-shaking storm. Hurricane Sandy, which is now plowing through the Caribbean, is set to join forces with a storm system emerging from the Midwest. This could create a hybrid storm that could re-energize Sandy after it makes landfall, just when a typical hurricane would lose steam. Scientific American explains that it will also likely meet “a ridge of high pressure extending through the atmosphere above the northeastern Atlantic Ocean and Greenland.” And thus, the #FranckenStorm. Here’s Climate Central on how the beast rises:Some energy will still come from the ocean surface, but some will now come from the pole-to-equator temperature contrast. This new energy source will enable Sandy to maintain its intensity, or maybe even increase it. This process is called ‘extratropical transition.’ It poses a lot of problems for forecasters. In the first place, the computer models aren't that great at predicting exactly when it will happen. So predictions of intensity are uncertain, as the tropical cyclone may weaken before transition and then strengthen afterwards.The media is going nuts again, but so are the forecasters. The Capital Weather Gang at the Washington Post opens its take bluntly: “analyses suggest this storm may be unlike anything the region has ever experienced.”The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration explains that “MODELS SHOW PRESSURE WELL BEYOND WHAT HAS EVER BEEN OBSERVED NEAR THE NJ/NY COAST.” Yes, they go all-caps. It’s just what they do.For an idea of how some meteorologists feel about all of this, here’s direct quote from a National Weather Service forecaster: “I've never seen anything like this and I'm at a loss for expletives to describe what this storm could do.”So. A freak occurrence, two storm systems colliding, has thrown the East Cost into turmoil. And then the climate makes the ground for catastrophe much more fertile. The term “Francken-X” is now routinely deployed to denote anything that has been stitched together from a foreboding amalgam of parts. But this time the term rings truer than usual; indirectly, human ingenuity has done quite a bit to help build this storm. Our climate, which the physicist and climate writer Joe Romm has coincidentally called “an ornery beast,” is beginning to respond to humanity’s intense carbon-spewing habits. It’s getting warmer. Warmer temps mean more energy for storms. Warmer temps means air holds more moisture, and more intense rainfall. Climate change means stormier storms.Renowned meteorologist Jeff Masters says that “given that ocean temperatures along the Northeast U.S. coast are about 5°F above average, there will be an unusually large amount of water vapor available to make heavy rain.” Which means New England might get soaked.“If the trough of low pressure approaching the East Coast taps into the large reservoir of cold air over Canada and pulls down a significant amount of Arctic air,” Masters writes, “the potential exists for the unusually moist air from Sandy to collide with this cold air from Canada and unleash the heaviest October rains ever recorded in the Northeast U.S., Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. This Northeast U.S. scenario would probably cause damages near $100 million dollars.”Such apocalyptic forecasting is common with big storm talk; weathermen must over-predict rather than under-warn. And there is certainly uncertainty abound; there is reason to panic, there is reason to stay calm. Keep the radio on, keep updating your feed. We can’t know which direction and form the storm will ultimately take, which forecasts will prove prescient. But we can count on this: Climate change is an assembly line for storms similar to this one. This is another glimpse of the future for East Coast dwellers; rainer, more energetic storms and more surging seas. More uncertainty about how bad it will all be.
I live in Philadelphia now, which, according to some forecasters, is again directly in the path of the storm. Philly is far enough inland to be shielded from the worst of the storm, though, so no buying up emergency rations for me. Who knows? Maybe I should. Maybe I’m just worn out by all the disaster talk and last year’s exhausting cycle of prepare-and-relief. And maybe this is what climate change does to us, ultimately; it shrouds us in an exponentially more volatile, unknowable world, where the specter of stormy carnage is everywhere. Maybe we adapt our brains to the idea of more unpleasant and disaster-prone lives, maybe we get used to the apocalyptic imagery on the news, and maybe we go broke clearing the roads and patching up wrecked city blocks.Who knows? We refuse to stop playing the part of the uncurious Dr. F, we refuse to take much interest in our experiment at all. Frankenstein built a single monster, nasty as he was. In our experiment, we’ve built an entire factory for frankenstorms. Maybe we’ll just have to get used to living in a future where the monsters it churns out are perennially on the loose.
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