BENGALURU: An academician from New York’s Columbia University credits Indian author Amitav Ghosh as an inspiration for him to write a research paper on the possibility of a cyclone in Mumbai. Adam H Sobel, professor of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics and Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, said Ghosh plays a crucial role behind him getting the idea on writing the paper on ‘Tropical Cyclone Hazard to Mumbai in the Recent Historical Climate’’, whose final version was published in April this year.
“It was in summer of 2015 that Ghosh wrote an email about possibilities of a cyclone in the Indian Ocean, and the possibility of its landfall on Mumbai,” Sobel told TNIE. This, he said, was following the publication of his book, Storm Surge: Hurricane Sandy, Our Changing Climate, and Extreme Weather of the Past and Future, which was based on the disaster that caused large scale devastation to New York City.
Sobel was speaking on the sidelines of Jeremy Grantham lecture at Divecha Centre for Climate Change (DCCC) at Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru on Tuesday. He is of the opinion that both NYC and Mumbai had much in common, and the latter had much to learn from NYC’s experience with Hurricane Sandy. “There is a need for an emergency plan for the city... although it need not top the list of things to do, but there needs to be a good plan,” said Sobel, pointing out at the fraction of a possibility of a landfall of a major cyclone in India’s financial capital.
‘Encounter with fake news in 1800s’
Going forth from the first communication with Ghosh, Sobel looked through the internet and archives and found that there was an occurrence of a major landfall in the 1800s, only later to find it was fake news even before the advent of internet. “The authors first determine, based on a review of primary sources, that the Bombay Cyclone of 1882, documented in a number of print and Internet sources and claimed to have caused 100 000 or more deaths, did not occur,” he writes in his research.
Speaking to TNIE, Sobel said the “fact” was cited in Wikipedia as well, and referred to in various research books, however there was no primary source, no description of the massive loss of live in this part of the world and the two did not add up. “Parthasarthy Mukhyopadhyay, who accessed some archives first, confirmed to me it was a hoax, and I thought this was well before the internet – in the 1940. A book even had a paragraph on it. Perhaps its what is called an academic urban myth,” he said.