For example, in the film The Day After Tomorrow a huge ship comes trawling by in a flooded NYC boulevard as the city gets overwhelmed by a massive tsunami just before it gets buried under several layers of snow that come in the wake of an unexpected mini Ice Age of sorts.

Faced with the ‘Frankenstorm,’ one of the largest superstorms to have ravaged the east coast of America, what got much talked about was the resilient spirit of New York. Herein lies the problem. We end up, inevitably, talking about the resilience, the spirit, the bravery, but never bother to dig deeper and inter the cause. When Mumbai gets flooded, we speak of how Mumbaikars spring back to their feet in no time, but we do not waste our time understanding the flawed drainage systems and the city’s unpreparedness to face increased precipitation while other parts of India wither under drought conditions.

However, we are talking about New York, and by extension, the rest of America, particularly the east coast. Sandy leaves a massive trail of destruction and ten states effectively are now disaster zones. CNN and other US news channels turned disaster reporting into a work of art, a matter of sheer genius, by managing to dodge the ‘C’ word completely. Following the same skewed logic, in which one is not supposed to talk about American gun laws in the aftermath of a shootout massacre, climate change on CNN, at least on TV, became a forbidden word, well until Wednesday night. While the print and online media spilled over with climate facts, fictions, speculations and predictions as well as with further prognostications, all dire, the news anchors on the American news channels decided to respect the national sentiment and not mention global warming or climate change at all.

Superstorm Sandy had been brewing for over ten days before it made the landfall on US east coast on Monday. Devastation in the Caribbean islands had already been wreaked, and over 69 lives had been claimed. When Sandy struck, New York came to a standstill, with no transport, power outage, streets and subways flooded, debris everywhere, houses burnt down by transformer fires, resulting in a record two-day weather-related closure of even the Wall Street. Other than New York, states that have been in the line of Sandy’s fire include New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia. Together, these states have seen 65 million people left without electricity, while some like Virginia and West Virginia have received unprecedented snowfall in October, thanks to Sandy, which is now closing in on Canada, dispatching gale-force gusts across the Great Lakes.

The impact of Sandy, and previous climate catastrophes to hit America, has been, at a poetic level, to immerse the American soul in a soup of sublime. Sublime guilt at not doing anything about climate change, which has now been demonstrated to be a fact by several scientists working their years off, and sublime love of the dystopic, egged on by their own vulnerability in the wake of nature’s wrath. It’s almost as if a procrastinating America has sentenced itself to a chain of calamities as a punishment for its prolonged fence-sitting on this more than urgent issue staring every earthling in the face.

If USA could look into the climate crystal ball, it would writhe in its own shame-induced pain as to how much of a stumbling block it has been to achieve any lasting and impactful climate treaty. The last big climate change conference in Copenhagen in 2009 was a failure. While there have been a spate of conferences in 2012, in Bonn (May), in Bangkok (August) and another scheduled for November in Doha, their outcomes have been practically nothing. While President Barack Obama does make investing in green technology a campaign issue, all he did was ‘express surprise’ as to how the issue of climate change had gone unnoticed until Sandy struck. Governor Romney is of a different mettle altogether: he pretty much believed in disbanding, or at least privatising, FEMA, or the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is basically doing a warzone work now, answering all the rescue and rehabilitation needs of all the calamity-inflicted states, many of which, notably Ohio, had, in fact, hitherto expressed support for Romney’s agenda of cutting to size the “nanny state.”

Superevents of a negative nature, such as Sandy, need a supervisor, a big government, to run to in the wake of trouble. No amount of private tax cuts and public spending cuts can build infrastructure needed to withstand the onslaught of the now recurrent climate catastrophes. Investments in public research and expertise are needed to help combat global warming and enforce carbon emission laws globally. The developed countries, such USA and the European Union, have to bear the brunt and channel their funds towards green technology, while the developing countries such a China and India, must consider the issue of development from a more holistic point of view because the cost of global warming will be faced by everyone together.

The global financial crisis should have taught a thing or two to the decision-makers in the White House, Wall Street and the state senates, that playing the ostrich in the face of the storm, hoping that it will pass, is only going to immerse the world in still greater and deeper mess. Scientists, researchers, teachers, students, political and environment activists all over the world have been screaming on top of their voices that this would happen for a long time now. When will they be heard?

Finally, as if the environment-hatred on the part of money-grabbing global know-it-alls weren’t enough, there’s a curious misogyny linked to the naming of hurricanes and cyclones and all of nature’s revolt against endless human greed. Nomenclature of these storms and hurricanes is picked by the World Meteorological Organization, randomly from a computer-generated gargantuan list. In case the wind speeds increase 39 mph, the National Hurricane Center in the US comes forward to put its stamp on the cyclone or storm or tornedo. Why do these hurricanes and cyclones bear only female names? All the devastation unleashed by a reactionary nature, however, has a subtle empowering aspect. Female power, in Hinduism, is both generative and destructive. She’s Shakti and Durga and Kali and Lakshmi. In other words, nature’s fury bearing a female name isn’t that bad after all, as the feminists all over have bonded inextricably with the nature campaigners to oust the profit-making mega-polluters of the world. It’s time for everyone to join hands with this band of nature lovers. (IPA Service)