Jonah Raskin : In the Wake of Sandy

The Rag Blog's Jonah Raskin in post-Sandy Far Rockaway, New York.
In the wake of Sandy:
An interview with Far Rockaway
community organizer Ofelia Mangen

'I think Sandy is a human disaster. We’re the disaster, not nature. We created it. If you call it a natural disaster, that’s a way to deny responsibility. Experts on climate change have been predicting this kind of storm for at least a decade.'

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / January 9, 2013

FAR ROCKAWAY, New York -- She’s so thin she hardly casts a shadow on this cold blustery January afternoon. Ofelia Mangen is one of the fortunate ones. She has electricity and heat in her house in Far Rockaway, in a neighborhood hard hit by Superstorm Sandy.

Far too many of her neighbors -- hundreds if not thousands of families -- still don’t have light and heat as of January 2, 2013. Dozens of others have boarded up their homes and have evacuated the area hoping to return in spring and make repairs then. Many feel downright powerless to do anything to improve their living conditions, and it’s months after Sandy, the storm of the century, hit the East Coast.

Relief from the federal government hasn’t arrived in Far Rockaway and no one seems to know when and if it will arrive. (Two days after my conversation with Mangen, the U.S. House of Representatives approved $9.7 billion to pay flood insurance claims for the damage caused by Sandy. The Senate hadn't acted; it would be months at best before citizens received funds to rebuild.

Volunteers have helped immensely. For months, Mangen, who is 30, worked around the clock with all the grit and gumption she could muster. Now, not surprisingly she’s as exhausted as any activist and organizer would be after living through the storm itself and then battling the political storm that followed hard on its heels.

In Manhattan for the day, she’s in need of a little relief and recovery.

Community organizer is a term you won’t find on her hefty resume, though she might add it. She’s a graduate student at New York University (NYU), with heaps of fellowships, though over the past two months, nothing new has been added to her resume. Sandy put her Ph.D. on hold.

After years of seminars, Mangen has trouble thinking of herself as an organizer in a community that sorely needs organizing and organizers. But now that she is, in fact, Far Rockaway’s most visible community organizer she inhabits the role as though she’s spent a lifetime preparing for it.

Abbie Hoffman would embrace her; Tom Hayden would cheer her. Gloria Steinem would yell, “Go Girl, or maybe Go Woman!”

A native of Ohio, Mangen earned a B.S. in visual communication from Ohio University, and an M.A. in media ecology from NYU. As a graduate student working on her dissertation, she conducted research on topics such as the use of technology in crises and how to be a catalyst for positive social change. Indeed, “social catalyst” might define her more precisely than “community organizer.”

Fierce and outspoken, she has a way of reading troubled social situations quickly and knowing what needs to be done to improve them. I’ve known her for years. In November 2012, I visited her in Far Rockaway 10 days after the storm ripped her life apart much as it ripped up the fabric of the whole community. The house in which she was living had been flooded with water from the sea, and the drywall had to be ripped out, along with all the electrical wiring and all the appliances on the ground floor.

Like everyone else for miles around, Mangen was without cell phone service, and without the ability to send and receive emails. Almost immediately, she leapt into action and began to communicate with her neighbors face-to-face and without technology. Everything she studied at school, every paper she wrote, and every article and book she read, seemed to have prepared her for the fallout from Sandy.

When I met her in Manhattan at the start of January 2013, she was just beginning to pick up the scattered pieces of her life. She wore a black cap, a dark vest, and a dark sweater. Sitting opposite me at the kitchen table in a New York apartment owned by mutual friends, Mangen began by discussing communication theory -- encoding and decoding -- but she soon came down to earth and talked about her own experiences and about her neighbors in Far Rockaway.


Jonah Raskin: Why did you throw yourself into relief work and community organizing after Sandy?

Ofelia Mangen: Far Rockaway, which was very hard hit by the storm, is my home and my community. I care about it and the people who live and work there. They were in need and I wanted to help them. But perhaps most of all, I did the work for myself. I haven’t been selfless about it, but rather selfish. I became involved to get my community back. I felt as though I’d lost it. I need it and want it back.

For those who don’t know much if anything about Far Rockaway can you say something about the place?

It’s a peninsula eleven miles long and a part of New York City. The subway -- the "A" train -- runs to Far Rockaway. It has spectacular beaches and it has oceanfront property that has lured real estate developers there. For a long time it was an out-of-the-way place. If you said you were going to Far Rockaway people looked at you as though you were going to fall off the map. It has some very poor sections and some very well-off sections. I’m in the middle.

Do you think of Sandy as a natural disaster?

No not at all. I think Sandy is a human disaster. We’re the disaster, not nature. We created it. If you call it a natural disaster, that’s a way to deny responsibility. Experts on climate change have been predicting this kind of storm for at least a decade. People read the reports about climate change, but they did nothing, made no changes. Sandy was actually very close to the storm that scientists predicted.

The storm made it difficult for you and for others to communicate didn’t it?

Very much so. All the cell phone networks were down. When we were most in need of information, we had the least possible information. If we’re going to survive storms like Sandy we’re going to have to figure out how to communicate more effectively.

When you were able to get in touch with people who did you call?

My sister. I only had a minute. I wanted to let her know I was okay. After I called her, she called my mother and then my mother and sister phoned everyone else in the family and friends, too. They had a kind of phone tree. Now I have a zillion emails to answer.

How effectively did newspapers cover the storm and its aftermath?

The Wave, the local paper, isn’t very good. It hasn’t had a print edition since before the storm; it’s only online now and I don’t trust it. I never did. The information is often inaccurate.

What about The New York Times?

The reporters from the Times didn’t provide a sense of context for the stories they wrote. They didn’t understand that there’s a difference between the Rockaway Peninsula and Far Rockaway, for example, which is a specific community on the peninsula. The nomenclature was off. The Times reporters came and looked around and went home at the end of the day. They didn’t take the time to get to know the place.

Did you become a hub for communication?

I did on my block, Beach Ninety-Second Street. I went around and asked people if they needed anything. I didn’t tell anyone what to do, but if neighbors asked for assistance I provided it. Unlike many residents, I had access to a car and could drive to Manhattan where I could watch TV and read newspapers and find out what was going on. People in wheelchairs, for example, had little mobility and were often isolated. I was able to act as a go-between for them.

Are you able to gage the mood of the community?

What I’ve noticed is that, as the storm passed and receded in memory, people didn’t calm down. In fact, they felt an increasing sense of frustration and despair. When they took the time to reflect, they became more and more angry. Some people are also stuck in depression now.

I would think that in a storm like Sandy the social veneer is peeled away and you see the rifts in the community.

Yes, that’s especially true of the east end of the Rockaway Peninsula, which has been a violent place with poverty and gangs for years. There’s been more violence and more gang activity after the storm. The whole environment has been fractured. Some people probably won’t get their lives back together again; some people and some business will be permanently broken. Others are finding a sense of purpose. I know artists who have come out here and have become community organizers.

Can you stand back and reflect on your own personal experience?

My whole life was upended. I was a college student working on my Ph.D. Sandy wasn’t an intellectual experience. In many ways it was weird. I’m just beginning to understand it. I was at home and in my own house, but I felt that I was in a foreign country and a traveler for two months.

How did you cope?

Well, I have a great support group and a real network of friends. My brother, Andrew, came and he has been a help. I was trying to be Superwoman. I pushed myself to my outer limits. Now, I ‘m resting, eating well, and doing yoga again. I’m getting myself back again.

Did you feel that there was a storm inside you?

I was tossed and turned. All of my emotions were heightened. Everything I did I did intensely. I had moments of anger and I expressed my anger. I put it out there.

Do you think people in Far Rockaway are suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)?

Oh, absolutely! Some people are just now finding out that they have PTSD. Other might not find out for a month or even a year. Some people were on the periphery of the storm and not at the center, but they were still powerfully affected by it, though they’re just discovering how and in what ways.

Does it make sense to compare Sandy to Katrina?

No, I don’t think so. They’re radically different. Katrina affected all of New Orleans. Sandy only affected parts of New York. Katrina was in August, Sandy in November when it’s cold. Now, it’s below freezing; in New Orleans people didn’t have to deal with the cold. Katrina was officially designated a hurricane; Sandy was termed a “Superstorm.” The Gulf Coast is accustomed to hurricanes. New York wasn’t used to anything the likes of Sandy.

Was there disaster tourism in Far Rockaway?

Madonna came out with her entourage in black SUV’s and gave out copies of the Kabala. Some people drove around in their vans and never got out of their vehicles. They looked from behind closed windows.

What about New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg?

His convoy came through. He’s very unpopular now in Far Rockaway. He could do so much; he’s done so little.

I’m reminded of the lines from Roman Polanski’s movie, Chinatown, in which the top L.A. cop tells the detective played by Jack Nicholson, ”It’s Chinatown.” There always seems to be a “Chinatown” -- a place that’s written off, a place where the laws and the rules don’t apply, a place ignored and pushed off to the side.

That’s Far Rockaway. Actually, designating Sandy a "superstorm" prohibits insurance companies from charging a hurricane deductible. Some insurance companies have been documented trying to do so, even though they aren't permitted since Sandy wasn't technically a hurricane when it made landfall. This is a disaster in which ordinary people sorely need the government to help. The government isn’t doing nearly enough to help them. The crisis isn’t over yet.

[Jonah Raskin, a frequent contributor to The Rag Blog, is a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University. The editor of The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution and the author of James McGrath: In a Class By Himself, he has published interviews on The Rag Blog with Bernardine Dohrn, Eric Foner, Steve Halliwell, Michael Klare, Fred Klonsky, Gus Reichbach, and Allen Young. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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Bruce Melton : Extreme Weather like Sandy Caused by Arctic Warming

Seaside Heights Amusement Park, Jersey Shore. Image from underthemat.
Superstorm Sandy:
Research shows how Arctic warming
directly causes extreme weather

Climate change plain and simple: Arctic Sea ice melt caused Superstorm Sandy. And things are starting to get crazy with this ongoing string of extreme and unprecedented weather events.

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / November 5, 2012

I won’t bore you with more quotes from Governors Cuomo or Christie, or the latest “speculation” in the media about whether or not Superstorm Sandy was or was not “influenced” by climate change. I’ll not repeat the list of stunning storm facts that litter the broadcasts.

But I will lay out the latest science from our best academic institutions about why extreme weather events these days are not only influenced by climate change -- many of them are caused by climate change, including hurricane Sandy.

A paper from last March (2012) in the prestigious journal Geophysical Research Letters not only tells us about extreme weather events enhanced by warming, it tells us that the origins of many of these unprecedented events can specifically be blamed on climate change. The paper is about what is called Arctic Amplification and how it enhances and even creates extreme weather far south in the mid-latitudes.

This phenomenon is about how global warming in the far north is enhancing or directly causing extreme weather because of the “albedo feedback.” In Latin, albedo means the amount of light reflected by an object. In the Arctic, the albedo feedback operates via snow and ice and is the reason why the Arctic has warmed on average twice what the rest of the planet has warmed.

Snow and ice reflect up to 90 percent of the sun’s light harmlessly back into space, where it does not warm the planet. Tundra, rock, and ocean absorb up to 90 percent of sunlight, and in this process the light changes from light energy into heat and then largely stays here on the planet because of the greenhouse effect.

Snow and ice in high latitudes help keep the global refrigerator cold by not allowing sunlight to be changed into heat, but as the planet slowly warms, that reflective covering melts a little sooner every year. A little more bare tundra, rock, and ocean then allows for a little more heat to hang around every summer.

This causes freeze-up to happen a little later in the fall and melt to happen earlier in the spring. It’s a feedback loop like so many other things in climate change land. It feeds upon itself and grows stronger until all the snow and ice are gone.

This year’s massive sea ice melt record reveals the greatest amount of Arctic amplification that we have yet to see on this warming planet and things are starting to get crazy with this ongoing string of extreme and unprecedented weather events.

This is just the latest in a series of papers to evaluate the impacts of a warming Arctic on extreme weather in mid Northern Hemisphere latitudes and it is like all the rest. These authors from Rutgers and the University of Wisconsin have confirmed once again that a warming Arctic adds energy to the atmosphere and supercharges the jet stream kicking it further south.

As it does so the general eastward travel trend of loops in the jet stream (that are the primary drivers of big weather systems) slows down and in some cases allows the jet stream to become stationary for a much longer time than when Earth was not as warm as it is today.

This research looks at data since 1980 and finds the trend begins in earnest about the turn of the century to 2005 or 2007, depending on which season and which layer of the atmosphere they were looking at. Below are the important bits from this article’s summary:

Two effects are identified that each contribute to a slower eastward progression of Rossby waves [the jet stream] in the upper-level flow: 1) weakened zonal winds, and 2) increased wave amplitude [the great bends in the jet stream]. These effects are particularly evident in autumn and winter consistent with sea-ice loss, but are also apparent in summer, possibly related to earlier snow melt on high-latitude land. Slower progression of upper-level waves would cause associated weather patterns in mid-latitudes to be more persistent, which may lead to an increased probability of extreme weather events that result from prolonged conditions, such as drought, flooding, cold spells, and heat waves.

These researchers go on to basically describe why climate change-caused extreme weather events are not just normal weather events enhanced by climate change, but the weather events themselves -- from inception -- are caused by climate change:

Individual extreme weather events typically have a dynamical origin. Many of these events result from persistent weather patterns, which are typically associated with blocking and high amplitude waves in the upper-level flow [jet stream]. Examples include the 2010 European and Russian heat waves, the 1993 Mississippi River floods, and freezing conditions in Florida during winter 2010–11.

Sandy’s peculiar track and her hybridizing with a Nor’easter originated in the big blocking high pressure system that has been persistent over Greenland this autumn. You can see it in the red and blue pressure plot from about the time Sandy made landfall.(500 mb GFS ensemble for those of you who understand weather geek). The big red spot over Greenland is the blocking high. The little blue spot on the U.S. East Coast is the landfalling Superstorm Sandy.

This is what caused our little superstorm to take that unprecedented left turn over Jersey. If it were not for that blocking high, Sandy would have followed the traditional path that every single hurricane ever tracked in the region has followed -- it would have veered right, away from land out into the North Atlantic. NOAA’s hurricane paths are shown farther below to substantiate this large statement made by meteorologists.

For a hurricane to hybridize with a Nor’easter is not unheard of, although it is rare. When they do this, like the most recent deadly example, the 1991 “Perfect Storm,” they do it along the shoreline or out in the Atlantic, then they follow the traditional storm track recurving farther out into the Atlantic.

The big blocking high over Greenland, caused by the extra warmth in the Arctic created by the twice-record smashing low Arctic sea ice melt this year, was what forced Sandy to move inland as it mated with the Nor’easter spawning this climate change superstorm.

Its extremeness was enhanced by an Atlantic ocean that was two to three degrees warmer than normal. Warmer water has more heat energy and heat energy is what fuels hurricanes. It's true that not all warm seawater years can be associated with climate change, but to claim these recent warm sea water years as NOT caused by climate change -- when we have been warned for decades that this would happen and when we have been warned that if we did not reduce emissions (we did not) that warming would proceed faster -- is phenomenally irresponsible behavior.

Now there are a few myths out there that must be addressed for this discussion to succeed. It’s a travesty that this perceived debate exists. But it is what it is. To help you understand the problems with the talking points I need to discuss these things.

Some pretty smart fellers out there are telling us this storm was just another dangerous storm, that many, many storms have caused more damage. One of these also makes the observation that we have been in a hurricane drought for seven years as no Cat 3 hurricanes have hit the U.S. in this time. He said the last one was Wilma in 2005 and that this is the longest such span in a century.

What this small band of merry climate scientists misses entirely is that in this time period we have had some horrendously unprecedented Cat 1 and Cat 2 storms: Ike, Irene, and now Sandy. When climate scientists told us decades ago that hurricanes will become more powerful on a warmer planet, this is exactly what they meant.

We will not just see more powerful Category 5 hurricanes; all hurricanes will have the capacity to become more powerful because of warmer ocean water. Yeah, maybe we will see the Saffir-Simmpson scale that currently only goes to Cat 5 have a new extreme Category 6 added, but there are other meanings of “hurricanes will become more powerful.”

Hurricane intensity is directly proportional to temperature. The higher the temperature, the greater the strength of any given hurricane or tropical weather system. This is a very basic piece of storm physics that is not disputed, yet the perceived debate continues as to whether or not hurricanes will become more extreme on a warmer planet.

This debate point is that hurricanes have not become more intense yet, and it is valid globally but it is invalid in the Atlantic Basin. The Deniers and Delayers cite global research and ignore the Atlantic Basin where hurricane intensity has been proven to be increasing. It’s a very simple Conservative (capital “C”) ploy. The D&D gang can propel their agenda with valid climate science that completely ignores reality.

The Pacific and Indian Oceans are very large compared to the Atlantic. Averaging the changes in hurricane strength there with the much smaller Atlantic means that the statistics come out telling us that globally, there is no statistically significant trend. But when the Atlantic basin is looked at singularly, and there is no reason why it should not be because Atlantic based storms are completely separate from Pacific and Indian Ocean based storms, the Atlantic shows a valid increase in strength.

The perceived controversy aside, what these good folks simply miss or choose not to discuss is that we are now having Cat 1 and Cat 2 storms with storm surges and storm coverage that dwarfs “normal’ storms in these categories. Ike was a 600 mile wide Cat 2 storm with a Cat 4 storm surge and $27.8 billion in damages, the third most costly storm in U.S. history until now, and it was just a Cat 2 storm.

Irene made landfall on Coney Island as a 65 mph tropical storm just 13 months ago, but this 700 mile wide storm was ticketed with $15.8 billion in damages, and was the seventh most costly storm in U.S. history before Superstorm Sandy. Sandy was a Cat 1 with a Cat 3 storm surge and at an astounding 1,000 miles wide is projected to have caused between $20 and $50 billion in damages.

On Halloween an Accuweather meteorologist went as far as saying the storm could top Katrina’s $108 billion. Katrina is a special case in that much of her damage was done inside the levee barrier of New Orleans. Any old Cat 3 storm would have broached these levees as Katrina did, but there is another side to the Katrina climate change connection. In Mississippi, on the powerful side of Katrina’s eye, an all-time U.S. record storm surge was set at 27.8 feet -- with a Cat 3 storm, not a Cat 5. These kinds of records are almost always set by the most powerful storms -- not the storms in the middle of the measurement scale.

This small and uncommonly vocal minority of weather and climate authorities telling us that climate change is not really to blame is loudly echoed by a very large and prosperous vested interest propaganda machine. Their story also includes reasoning that the increasing storm damage is caused by our rapidly increasing population.

Maybe this is true in many places, but New Jersey’s population has only increased 16 percent in the last 32 years. New York’s population has only increased 16 percent since 1930! And Galveston’s population (where Ike hit) was no more during that landfall than it was in 1930!! Sure, damages were much more widespread, but the vast majority of the money is lost in relatively small areas near the epicenter of these events.

This is easy to understand when we look at entire neighborhoods having to have trees removed and some roofs replaced vs. entire neighborhoods being completely wiped off the map. The costs between these two examples is several hundred times more (or greater) for the map-wiping areas vs. the roof-replacement areas.

I can’t explain why these supposedly learned individuals continue their attacks. A little deep thought (which I am certainly no master of) and some simple Googling replaces their “facts” with the truth in most cases. There are also more trustworthy ways to check the assumptions that extreme weather damages are increasing. All we have to do is read a few reports from the insurance people. Swiss Re and Munich Re, the world’s top two reinsurers, both tell us that weather disaster damages are increasing significantly and they say that the reason is not population.

The National Climatic Data Center also tells us that the number of inflation adjusted $1 billion or more weather events stayed relatively the same in the 1990s but has increased significantly since the turn of the century. Our 1990 to 2000 population grew 13 percent while the 2000 to 2010 population only grew 10 percent. Why did a faster population growth result in relatively little increase in extreme weather event damages while a slower population growth since 2000 has seen extreme weather event damages soar?

It’s climate change plain and simple. When climate scientists tell us for decades that hurricanes will certainly be more powerful on a warmer planet, and we get these little storms making such big records -- what in the world are we supposed to do: believe the D&Ders when they tell us it’s all maniacal climate change hand-wringing hysteria?

Absolutely not, and we need to tell our friends and neighbors and write the editors and station managers in the innocently unbiased broadcast media. What they are doing is trying to be fair the only way they know how by giving equal time to what they perceive as “both sides of the story.” What they are doing instead is giving air time to the viewpoint of a very small fraction of climate scientists who are supported by a very large propaganda industry. To the media, and most of the rest of us who are not climate geek inclined, it seems fair. The answer seems to be somewhere in the middle.

The authors of this paper, which by the way is titled “Evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in mid-latitudes,” conclude their research with not only a warning, but a statement that is quite contrary to what we hear so widely in the media about “not being able to link any one extreme weather event with climate change”:

Can the persistent weather conditions associated with recent severe events such as the snowy winters of 2009/2010 and 2010/2011 in the eastern U.S. and Europe, the historic drought and heat-wave in Texas during summer 2011, or record-breaking rains in the northeast U.S. of summer 2011 be attributed to enhanced high-latitude warming? Particular causes are difficult to implicate, but these sorts of occurrences are consistent with the analysis and mechanism presented in this study.

As the Arctic sea-ice cover continues to disappear and the snow cover melts ever earlier over vast regions of Eurasia and North America, it is expected that large-scale circulation patterns throughout the northern hemisphere will become increasingly influenced by Arctic Amplification. Gradual warming of the globe may not be noticed by most, but everyone -- either directly or indirectly -- will be affected to some degree by changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events as greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere.

And to be thorough, this paper was published before the great fire season in the West this year and failed to mention the fires in Texas associated with the drought of 2011. The Bastrop Complex Fire near Austin alone burned 1,700 homes.

In summary, this is not what our climate-changed weather will be like in the future. It will be worse, likely much worse, much faster than has been previously anticipated. The reason? We did not do as some of the smartest people in the world suggested prudent with our emissions nearly two decades ago.

Our climate is now on the worst-case scenario as imagined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and we have yet to act to reduce emissions. In 2010, even with the Great Recession fully suited out, emissions worldwide grew by a margin not seen in 40 years at nearly 6 percent. Don’t stop reading now however, even though the outlook is horrendously bleak.

Authoritative voices tell us climate change is not real, that it is a scientific conspiracy, that it is a natural cycle soon to end and that it will be good for society. These same confused voices, that are telling us all of these things at the same time; are also the voices that tell us that the solutions to climate change will ruin our economies...

The vast majority of credentialed climate specialists say nothing of the sort. Richard Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at Penn State University, one of the lead authors of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC Reports, member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and one of the pivotal international researchers in climate science, tells us in his book Earth: the Operators' Manual, that about 100 reports have been published concerning the economic impacts of the solutions to climate change and they are focusing in on one thing.

The solutions to cleaning up climate pollution, using existing technologies, will cost about 1 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) per year for 100 years. The astonishing thing to understand about this 1 percent of global GDP -- this $540 billion a year -- is that it is little different from what we have spent on our efforts to provide safe drinking water across the planet every year for the last 100 years. It is little different from what we spend on the U.S. military every year not counting wars, or what we spend on adverting every year across the planet.

It is little different than the normal economic costs to our nation every year because of normal inclement weather -- rain, snow, heat cold, wind, flooding, and drought. It is more than four times less than what we spend every year in the United States alone relative to annual average 2000 to 2010 health care spending. And remember, this is using existing technologies. New technologies will significantly reduce or even change these costs into profits.

It’s only pollution. Please take a vocal stand. It will get worse before it gets better and the longer we wait, the more extreme these weather events will become. It will not be long before it personally impacts you or your loved ones. My turn was last year with the fires in Austin. I only hope my personal impacts will grow no worse. We have done so many things on this planet that can be said to be similar to fixing climate pollution. We can certainly control this beast if we act now and if we act strongly.

[Bruce Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, and author in Austin, Texas. Information on Melton’s new book, Climate Discovery Chronicles, as well as more climate change writing, climate science outreach, critical environmental issue documentary films, and information about his Climate Change Now Initiative (and Climate Change Now t-shirts) can be found on his website. Read more articles by Bruce Melton on The Rag Blog.

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