The real message of Frankenstein’s monster for humanity
We are experiencing funny weather, and all kinds of explanations are being put forward. As a historian I am sceptical of all of them, unless supported by direct empirical evidence. We have had funny weather before, many times. For instance, there was 1816, the year after Waterloo, described at the time as ‘the year without a summer’. In London it was cold and wet throughout June and July. The artist Joseph Farington RA, who kept a daily diary and always noted unusual weather, wrote repeatedly: ‘a dull day with a cold, northerly wind ... a fire in the front room and very cold the weather .... A continuation of dull, cold, moist weather — fires are continued in most houses .... Weather dull, hazy, cold: a continuation of an uncommon, ungenial season.’ On 19 July he recorded ‘Another wet morning: the season very remarkable. A foolish prediction has prevailed on the Continent & with some in England that spots in the sun indicated that the world would be at an end yesterday. A poor woman mentally affected by this impression hung herself last week.’ In Switzerland, Shelley, writing fearfully on 24 July, noted desolation in the valleys where the glaciers ‘were advancing three feet each year’. He foresaw a new Ice Age and ‘the degradation of the human species’ amid ‘avalanches, torrents, rocks and thunders, and above all these deadly glaciers’. Another poet, Lord Byron, writing to a third, Samuel Rogers on 29 July, complained, ‘Really, we have had lately such stupid mists, fogs, rains and perpetual density, that one would think Castlereagh [then foreign secretary and leader of the Commons] had the foreign affairs of the kingdom of heaven also upon his hands.’ It was in such circumstances that Byron, Shelley, his wife Mary and Dr Polidori, Byron’s physician, staying at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, held a competition to write tales of horror, while the bad weather lasted. ‘An almost perpetual rain confines us principally to the house,’ Mary Shelley wrote. ‘We watch [the thunder storms] as they approach from the opposite side of the lake, observing the lightning play among the clouds in various parts of the heavens, and dart in jagged figures upon the piny heights of Jura.. .. One night we enjoyed a finer storm than I had ever before beheld. The lake was lit up — the pines on Jura made visible, and all the scene illumi nated for an instant, when a pitchy blackness succeeded, and the thunder came in frightful bursts over our heads amid the darkness.’ This inspired her to write her novel about Frankenstein’s monster who is vivified by bolts of lightning, a book which has had an amazing afterlife in horror movies.
At the time, coming catastrophe was widely predicted. In Paris a pamphlet circulated with the alarming title Détails sur la fin du monde. The failed harvest led to widespread suffering, and serious famine was averted only by food imports from Russia, which somehow seems to have been unaffected. Further details can be found in John Clubbe’s fine essay, ‘The Tempest-toss’d Summer of 1816: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’. Clubbe, of the University of Kentucky, adds that in 1913 William J. Humphreys, a US weather bureau expert, first documented a relationship between volcanoes and low temperatures. Henry and Elizabeth Stommel, in Scientific American June 1979, wrote: ‘The chain of events began in 1815 with an immense volcanic eruption in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) when Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa threw an immense amount of fine dust into the atmosphere.’ This followed the major dust-producing eruptions in 1812 and 1814, and the combined dust ‘circled the earth in the high stratosphere for several years, reflecting sunlight back into space and thereby reducing the amount of it reaching the ground’.
In a startling little book called Global Catastrophes (Oxford 2002) Bill McGuire, who is Benfield professor of geophysical hazards at University College London, examines a number of such untoward events and their consequences. What emerges from his accounts is the overwhelming power of nature compared with what puny humanity can do. He says the Tambora eruption was perhaps the largest since the Ice Age, 10,000 years ago, and its effects lasted 34 days in the area and killed 12,000 people. But impacts of large bodies from space are far more dangerous. About 65 million years ago, a comet or asteroid 10 kilometres across crashed into the sea off Yucatan in Mexico. It produced a fireball hotter than the sun and released energy equal to billions of Hiroshima bombs. It finished off the dinosaurs, which had survived for 150 million years or more.
If that unusual event were repeated, the human race would be extinguished beyond all doubt. But much smaller disasters, by threatening the photosynthesis which enables life to continue, might end human life on earth. Professor McGuire calculates that an earthimpact by a fast one-and-a-half-kilometre comet or a slow two-kilometre asteroid would create a blast equal to 100,000 million tonnes of TNT, destroy an area as big as England and kill tens of millions. A two-kilometre comet would produce a dramatic climate change and kill a quarter of the world’s population. When light drops below a certain level, photosynthesis stops completely, and life must end. McGuire calculates that this would occur if the crashing object was four or more kilometres across.
How much warning we would get is not clear but should lengthen as our astronomical vigilance improves. The last big object to hit the earth landed at Tunguska in Siberia in 1908. It was 50 metres across and exploded 10 kilometres above the surface. Its blast was equal to 8,000 Hiroshimas and flattened 2,000 square kilometres of forest. It produced, says McGuire, such bright night skies in Europe that cricket was played in London at midnight. Such was the size and inertia of Russia that it took the authorities a quarter-century to send an official expedition to discover what had happened. Today, it seems to me, we put too much stress on man-made activities, which can have only a tiny, marginal effect on our future, and too little on preparing ways to avoid, circumvent or survive a really big natural catastrophe. Far from damaging our economies by limitations such as those foreseen by the absurd Kyoto accords (which remain a dead letter anyway), we should be boosting our ability to produce wealth and technology. Only thus can we cease to be earthbound and so sitting ducks. Once we can colonise the universe some of us at least will survive anything nature can throw at us.
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