Our Communities Are Scaled and Built for a Climate That No Longer Exists

"Landslides forced the closure of Kuhio Highway from the area north of Hanalei known as Waikoko to the end of the road at Haena. That left residents and tourists stranded with no way in or out... This home was in the path of one of those slides in Wainiha" (source).

by Gaius Publius

This is your periodic reminder that:

• The global warming wolf is already at the door, and

• The people who rule this world will never drive him away.

Which means:

• People who want to fix this problem will have to use force. That's just a fact.

If you remember nothing else from this piece, remember this. Force them to fix it or remove their control — those are the only choices for strong, effective climate action, and given the state of our government, wholly captured by wealth and its interests, those two options are the same.

We can despair or take control. Those are the choices. It's going to take force to fix this.

The Global Warming Wolf Is at the Door

Kauai is one of the wettest islands in the Hawaiian Island chain. Its residents have experienced devastating hurricanes, but nothing like the torrent of rain that fell last April 14 and 15.

From the LA Times (emphasis added):

Since the 1940s, the Hawaiian island of Kauai has endured two tsunamis and two hurricanes, but locals say they have never experienced anything like the thunderstorm that drenched the island this month.

"The rain gauge in Hanalei broke at 28 inches within 24 hours," said state Rep. Nadine Nakamura of the North Shore community. "In a neighboring valley, their rain gauge showed 44 inches within 24 hours. It's off the charts."

Actually, it was even worse. This week the National Weather Service said nearly 50 inches of rain fell in 24 hours.

Now, as Kauai continues to recover, scientists warn that this deluge on April 14 and 15 was something new — the first major storm in Hawaii linked to climate change.

"The flooding on Kauai is consistent with an extreme rainfall that comes with a warmer atmosphere," said Chip Fletcher, a leading expert on the impact of climate change on Pacific island communities.

According to Kawika Winter, a natural resource manager, "This is the most severe rain event [in Hawaii] that we know about since records started being kept in 1905.... Climate change is affecting us, and has been for some time. There are striking similarities with the flooding that we experienced on Kauai and the recent flooding in California. The warmer atmosphere is holding more moisture and that builds up until it meets with cold dry air, creating this massive unstable system, which causes what some meteorologists are now referring to as a 'rain bomb.'"

As Chip Fletcher, a professor at the University of Hawaii, put it, "Just recognize that we're moving into a new climate, and our communities are scaled and built for a climate that no longer exists."

Meanwhile, Atmospheric CO2 Is Now Above 410 ppm

The climate organization 350.org was founded in 2007, when the goal was to reduce atmospheric CO2 from 385 ppm to 350 ppm, a target already well above the range of atmospheric CO2 for the last 5 million years.

Since the founding of 350org, atmospheric CO2 touched 400 ppm in 2013 and breached it solidly in 2014. Last year, atmospheric CO2 touched 410 ppm and this year will breach it solidly. Note in the animation below, CO2 reaches its peak in May. This year, CO2 reached 410 ppm in March, with May still two months ahead.

Note also that this is average monthly data. The weekly averages are much worse. According to NOAA, in the week beginning April 22 the weekly average was 411.68, with one daily average spiking above 412.

The increase is relentless, and if you do the math, it appears to be accelerating. In 2015, the Scripps Institute at UCSD wrote (emphasis mine):

The rate of growth in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere has accelerated since the beginnings of the Keeling Curve. The rate has gone from about 0.75 parts per million (ppm)/yr in 1959 to about 2.25ppm/yr today.

That was written in 2015. The recent increase in CO2 from 400 ppm to 410 ppm, which occurred between 2014 and 2018, took just 4 years, at a rate of 2.50 ppm/year. This is already significantly higher than the rate of 2.25 ppm/year noted by the Scripps Institute in 2015. For comparison, consider that the rate of increase in 1959 was just 0.75 ppm/year.

It's Going to Take Force

If there's any hope at all, it's going to take force to fix this problem. Mayer Hillman, an 86-year-old fellow emeritus of the Policy Studies Institute, and a man renowned for his forward-looking prescriptions, has famously said, in effect, it's over.

Why does he say that? “Standing in the way is capitalism. Can you imagine the global airline industry being dismantled when hundreds of new runways are being built right now all over the world? It’s almost as if we’re deliberately attempting to defy nature. We’re doing the reverse of what we should be doing, with everybody’s silent acquiescence, and nobody’s batting an eyelid.”

It's true that many are complacent, and true as well that a strong structural force stands in the way (in my view, the pathological greed of the very very rich). But unlike Hillman, I see a clash of forces on the horizon, not no action at all.

Today, people are either complacent ("We have time; the next generation will help out") or resigned ("It's not bad now, so nobody's doing anything"). What happens when it gets "bad now"? What happens when this generation realizes it's paying the price today, with this generation's money and this generation's lives? What happens when this war "comes home," as the other one will as well?

What happens when, in Vietnam Era terms, the whole of a generation is directly affected by the self-serving policy of its elites, and the bodies of the victims pile higher and higher? As that era taught us, complacency turns quickly to anger and conflict.

Now consider what happens when the generation affected is global, encompassing everyone alive? Expect a battle that will enter the books as the greatest global war ever fought.

Now Is the Time. Non-Violence Is the Way.

As we move forward, my suggestion is this. If you're among those who haven't given up, start that battle now, and wage it non violently. Let the violence of the wealthy and their governments remove the last veil of legitimacy from their actions, and let your non-violence entice their enemies to join you. If both sides' combatants are violent, the ensuing chaos will make any further solution completely impossible. In this conflict, when violence erupts on all sides, it truly is Game Over.

Some global warming cannot now be prevented; too much is "baked in" already for a return to Holocene days, when a predictable human-friendly climate arrived, after hundreds of thousands of years, to give us agriculture and the iPhone. Much of the gift of that climate is going to be lost forever.

But not all of it. With effective applications of force, global warming can be made to stop at a far friendlier place than it otherwise would if carbon emissions are allowed to continue unchecked.

After all, we'll either stop or be stopped. The natural stopping place for human-caused global warming, sans deliberate intervention, is after our species is either pre-industrial ... or extinct. That's not a friendly place at all.

GP
 

"Managed Retreat" — Obama's Climate Plan to Move Whole Towns

Bob Dylan wants shelter from the storm. Don't we all. (Recorded Roseland, October 19, 1994.) 

by Gaius Publius

I'm offering this news to you not because of its news value — the initiative is certain to fail, given the incoming Trump and the imminently outgoing Obama. Nor am I presenting it because Obama, he of the conflicted climate motivations, is acting like his noblest self. After all, if he cared about this stuff, he'd have been doing things like this all along, instead of failing to do in deeds what his "securing my legacy" words appear to promise.

No, I'm presenting this because it actually is a practical program that must be undertaken, and will be undertaken in the U.S. at some point in the lifetime of most readers of this piece.

Are you young enough to live another, say, 10–20 years? This is in your future, unless something forces a national emergency around climate and a WWII-style mobilization. Yes, it's going to take force; it was always going to take force. Absent that force, non-violent of course, prepare for more like this.

From Bloomberg, of all places (h/t Facebook friend Alanna Trebond; my emphasis throughout):

Obama's Final Push to Adapt to Climate Change

With little more than a month left in office, the Barack Obama administration is quietly trying to accomplish one last big thing on climate change: creating a policy for relocating entire towns threatened by extreme weather and rising seas.

The White House has asked 11 federal agencies to sign a memorandum of understanding establishing what it calls "an interagency working group on community-led managed retreat and voluntary relocation." The group's goal would be to "develop a framework for managed retreat" -- including deciding which agency should be in charge, identifying obstacles to relocation and how to remove them, and coordinating with communities that already want to move. The group is supposed to develop an "action plan" within nine months of the agencies signing on.

From Obama's memo itself as quoted in the article (no link; memo was leaked):

As more communities consider managed retreat and relocation as options of last resort to protect human life and avoid future property damage, there is a critical need to better define the Federal role in these efforts and to coordinate Federal assistance for managed retreat and relocation at the national level.

I hope the phrase "managed retreat and relocation" hit you in the face. It did me. Because, of course, "managed retreat" applies to more than just the short-term future of many of our towns, especially along the shorelines. It applies to the long-term future of our species. (Unless, of course, we opt for the always available, always effective "Easter Island solution," which we may well do. After all, there may be a "rolling civil war" in the offing.)

"Voluntary"

One more section from the article, and I'll stop quoting it. Do read though; it's good.

Lest the image of Americans leaving their homes en masse seem like a downer, the White House frames the idea in upbeat terms, calling retreat and relocation "proactive hazard risk reduction strategies for communities threatened by repeated natural disasters." Well, sort of upbeat: It defines retreat as moving infrastructure or homes, and relocation as a form of retreat that entails "a complete abandonment of that community."

The memo's authors were apparently alert to the risk of alarming people. The document stresses that relocation will only happen when "all or part of a community chooses to move"; in the version I looked at, the word "voluntary" appears 26 times.

Naturally, Obama doesn't want to be a "downer," so he sprinkles the word "voluntary" through the memo 26 times. In reality, only preëmptive relocation will be voluntary. When the storm is raging, or has been raging again and again and again, the police or military will take over, and "retreat" will be known by its other name, "evacuation."

Obama's Legacy

A final note about Obama. This "gesture," despite its hollowness, shows that he actually does get it about climate, as I've noted any number of times. He just never wanted to step up to the plate and do the job his understanding required. This is a legacy act in a second sense as well, in the sense that you can brand yourself with deeds as well as with words.

I used to think Ms. Clinton would, in theory at least, be the president with the last clear shot at a solution. Turns out it was Obama after all (unless Trump is struck off his golden horse on the way to Damascus).

Legacy.

GP
 

Atmospheric CO2 Is Rising Off the Chart — Spikes Above 409 ppm on April 10

Preliminary weekly (red line), monthly (blue line) and daily (black points) atmospheric CO2 averages at Mauna Loa for the last year (my annotation; source; click to enlarge)

by Gaius Publius

I've likely said too many times to count that (1) the degradation in our climate won't be either linear or gradual; and (2) most estimates of the rate of decay are wrong to the slow side, too conservative. The rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 is turning into a prime example.

This is what decadal changes in atmospheric CO2 has looked like through the last half-century (source):

Decade	Atmospheric CO2 Growth Rate
2005 - 2014	2.11 ppm per year
1995 - 2004	1.87 ppm per year
1985 - 1994	1.42 ppm per year
1975 - 1984	1.44 ppm per year
1965 - 1974	1.06 ppm per year
1959 - 1964 (6 years only)	0.73 ppm per year

For quite a while, climate scientists have been comforted (if that's the world for a very jittery bunch) by the stability of the CO2 growth rate — "only" 2.11 ppm per year. There is some acceleration, obviously. But for the most part that acceleration hasn't been dramatic, aside from the large one-year spike in 1998 (chart here).

We now have another large one-year spike (see chart at the top of this piece; also here), and we're not done yet. The actual yearly peak in atmospheric CO2 is reached in May, a number not yet available, so the April peak (so far) is still shy of the actual number for 2016. (Note that both 1998 and 2016 are El Niño years, but as you'll read, that should not be comforting.)

Keep in mind, CO2 readings barely touched 400 ppm very recently — as a the daily average, in 2013; as a monthly average, in 2014 — and the monthly readings solidly breached 400 ppm only in 2015 (per-month data table here). The May 2014 highest weekly mean was 401.88 ppm. The May 2015 highest weekly mean was 403.94, for a rise of a little over 2 ppm, the average over the last 10 years. The May 2016 weekly average could peak near 410 ppm, and one of the daily averages could exceed it. (If you look at this chart, you'll see the hourly average has already breached 410 ppm. In the hourly measurements, we're already there.)

This is a problem, this spike in atmospheric CO2, and a more immediate one than this generation is prepared to acknowledge. Robert Scribbler comments (my emphasis):

Hothouse Gas Spikes to Extreme 409.3 Parts Per Million on April 10 — Record Rate of Atmospheric CO2 Increase Likely for 2016

Simply put, a rapid atmospheric accumulation of greenhouse gasses is swiftly pushing the Earth well outside of any climate context that human beings are used to. The influence of an extreme El Nino on the world ocean system’s ability to take down a massive human carbon emission together with signs of what appears to be a significantly smaller but growing emission from global carbon stores looks to be setting the world up for another record jump in atmospheric CO2 levels during 2016.

Already, as we near the annual peak during late April through early May, major CO2 spikes are starting to show up. On Sunday, April 10 the Mauna Loa Observatory recorded a daily CO2 reading in the extraordinary range of 409.3 parts per million. These readings follow March monthly averages near 405 parts per million and precede an annual monthly peak in May that’s likely to hit above 407 parts per million and may strike as high as 409 parts per million. These are levels about 135 to 235 parts per million above the average interglacial to ice age range for CO2 levels during the relatively stable climate period of the last 2 million years.

Consider this trajectory of highest daily means from the chart above:

• 2014 – 2015 = ~3 ppm (402 ppm – 405 ppm)
• 2015 – 2016 = ~4 ppm (405 ppm – 409 ppm)

Even if we average "just" a steady +4 ppm/year for 10 years (with no more acceleration), we'll be at 450 ppm in the mid 2020s, not the mid-2050s. That spells trouble for this generation, not just the next.

About El Niño...

There's a lot of cheerleading for the end of El Niño, so that the ocean can again take up more of the excess heat. That's not a good thing. Consider that if the sun's excess heat ends up in the ocean, the slower acceleration in atmospheric heat is only temporary, only delayed, since every El Niño year the ocean "burps" its heat back out again. The more heat the ocean stores, the more it has to spit back out. Increasing the rate of emissions increase the total heat retained in the system. It's a literal lose-lose situation.

Look again at this chart and tell me why this train isn't headed for disaster.

Is This an Emergency Yet?

... or can we afford to wait even longer? If this isn't the cusp of a possible near-term species emergency, I don't know what is. Keep in mind, the social chaos could easily precede the full climate chaos, as people see what's coming. Social chaos will make organizing a solution much harder.

If this were a giant asteroid 10 years away with just a 30% chance of hitting the earth, we'd be scrambling every dollar we had to build something to prevent it. I personally think we need that kind of effort now, and arguing for it now is our one best hope.

It isn't over yet though, and there are things you can do now:

• Sign on the one of the "emergency mobilization" petitions and join their actions. One of those petitions is here.

• Bernie Sanders has been talking about an emergency — which seems to be born out by data, and not just the data above — one that may require a WWII-style mobilization to prevent. Consider voting for him as the only Democratic candidate not in thrall to the carbon industry and the bankers who have major money tied up in it.
  

Blue America has endorsed Bernie Sanders for president. If you'd like to help out, go here. If you'd like to "phone-bank for Bernie," go here. You can volunteer in other ways by going here. And thanks!

GP
 

Will the Climate Come Apart Too Fast for the Current Generation's Comfort?

Monthly mean global surface temperature since 1996 (source; my annotation; click to enlarge)

by Gaius Publius

I know most of us in the current generation of Americans expect the climate to deteriorate, from a livability standpoint, at some reasonably slow rate over the next century or more. In other words, most people in the U.S. now feel some urgency about climate change (that ship, at least, has left dock), but not so much urgency that they're willing to mobilize the country's resources against it.

Which exposes, I think, an argument that comes from a position of privilege, perhaps the ultimate privilege — the privilege of age. The privilege, in other words, of expecting to die before it's really "my" problem after all. Which allows us, at least in the United States, the option of comfortably keeping our oil- and gas-fired iPhone and happy-motoring lifestyles while pretending there's still time to fix things.

Stop global warming at 2°C above pre-industrial? No problem. That won't happen until the 2030s at the earliest. Stop at 1½°C, as the Paris Climate Conference "wants" to do? No problem. We're not there yet.

What we're really pretending, of course, is that we're not cannibalizing the lives of our grandchildren in order not to be put out too much. But what if we really are cannibalizing our own lives as well? What if the tidal wave will hit before we can leave the beach? Oops.

February 2016 Was the Warmest Month in Recorded History

Scientists are noticing that we're piling record-setting month on top of record-setting month, record year on top of record year, in an explosion of warming that seems to be accelerating.

The Guardian (my emphasis throughout):

February was the warmest month in recorded history, climate experts say

From Alaska to Australia, an unprecedented heating of planet Earth is underway with rising temperatures across huge swathes of land mass and oceans

Our planet went through a dramatic change last month. Climate experts revealed that February was the warmest month in recorded history, surpassing the previous global monthly record – set in December. An unprecedented heating of our world is now under way.

With the current El Niño weather event only now beginning to tail off, meteorologists believe that this year is destined to be the hottest on record, warmer even than 2015.

Nor is this jump in global temperature a freak triggered by an unusually severe El Niño, say researchers. “It is the opposite,” said Professor David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey. “This is a catch-up of a recent hiatus that has occurred in rising global temperatures. We are returning to normality: rising temperatures. This is an absolute warning of the dangers that lie ahead.”

Those dangers are now being dramatically demonstrated around the globe: drought in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, which has forced the government there to issue a state of emergency warning; France observed its warmest winter since records began; while the sea ice that has formed in the Arctic this winter is about a million square kilometres less than its average for this time of year. ...

Which leads to this comment about the Paris "aspirational" target of keeping global warming below 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. We've passed that target, at least for now:

Last month’s jump in global temperatures represents an increase of 1.35C above the average temperature level for the period 1951-80 and 1.63C above pre-industrial levels, taking global temperature for the month above the 1.5C rise that last year’s Paris climate was supposed to prevent.

Temperatures may drop back, though it looks like they won't this year. Look at that graph at the top again (h/t Michael Tobis for bringing it to our attention). The arrow before "you are here" was January. The one before that was December. They are all high.

Are things starting to accelerate out of control? Can we afford to act as if they were not?

A Tipping Point for Sea Level Rise?

When seas permanently rise, it's not enough to remain on shore but higher, on a cliff looking down, for example. A higher sea erodes the cliff you're standing on, and if you've built your house near the edge, that edge will start to move back. If seas rise, steadily and quickly, for a century or more, where do you rebuild the city or town you're going to have to move? And if you don't plan to move the city, what happens, at some point to real estate prices?

It's not just that the seas are going to rise by some date. It's that before they do, property values will price in the future collapsed value of that city as well as its present uncollapsed value. Once that process starts, pricing in the future collapse in value, it rarely stops, and as you have probably observed, market collapses can happen very quickly. Again, collapsing property values could be a big potential problem for the current generation of Americans.

The Greenland glacier, for example, holds more than 20 feet of sea level frozen in its ice. The Guardian, but a different article:

Greenland's ice melt accelerating as surface darkens, raising sea levels

Winnowing away of the ice, exacerbated by soot blown on to the ice from wildfires, means Greenland’s ice sheet is stuck in a ‘feedback loop’

Greenland’s vast ice sheet is in the grip of a dramatic “feedback loop” where the surface has been getting darker and less reflective of the sun, helping accelerate the melting of ice and fuelling sea level rises, new research has found.

The snowy surface of Greenland started becoming significantly less reflective of solar radiation from around 1996, the analysis found, with the ice absorbing 2% more solar energy per decade from this point. At the same time, summer near-surface temperatures in Greenland have increased at a rate of around 0.74C per decade, causing the ice to melt.

This winnowing away of the ice, exacerbated by soot blown on to the ice from wildfires, means that Greenland’s ice is stuck in what is known as a “feedback loop” that will make it ever more vulnerable to warming global temperatures. The study predicts that the ice surface reflectivity, or albedo, will drop by 10% or more by the end of the century, which will trigger further melting.

“It’s melting cannibalism, basically – it’s melting that’s feeding itself,” said lead author Marco Tedesco, of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “Rising temperatures are promoting more melting, and that melting is reducing albedo, which in turn is increasing melting.

Again, the rates are all accelerating. At some point, people alive today will have to worry ... for themselves.

The Arctic Is Rapidly Changing...

About the Arctic generally, here's the excellent Chris Mooney on the large and rapid changes happening there:

Scientists are floored by what’s happening in the Arctic right now

New data from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suggest that January of 2016 was, for the globe, a truly extraordinary month. Coming off the hottest year ever recorded (2015), January saw the greatest departure from average of any month on record, according to data provided by NASA.

But as you can see in the NASA figure above, the record breaking heat wasn’t uniformly distributed — it was particularly pronounced at the top of the world, showing temperature anomalies above 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the 1951 to 1980 average in this region. ...

This unusual Arctic heat has been accompanied by a new record low level for Arctic sea ice extent during the normally ice-packed month of January, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center — over 400,000 square miles below average for the month. And of course, that is closely tied to warm Arctic air temperatures.

“We’ve looked at the average January temperatures, and we look at what we call the 925 millibar level, about 3,000 feet up in the atmosphere,” says Mark Serreze, the center’s director. “And it was, I would say, absurdly warm across the entire Arctic Ocean.” The center reports temperature anomalies at this altitude of “more than 6 degrees Celsius (13 degrees Fahrenheit) above average” for the month.

The low sea ice situation has now continued into February. Current ice extent is well below levels at the same point in 2012, which went on to set the current record for the lowest sea ice minimum extent[.]

“We’re way down, we’re at a record low for this time of year right now,” says Serreze. When it comes to the rest of 2016 and the coming summer and fall season when ice melts across the Arctic and reaches its lowest extent, he says, “we are starting out in a deep hole.”

The Arctic is heating a lot faster relative to the rest of the globe because the northern hemisphere is where most of the industrialization — the burning of fossil fuels — is occurring. The Arctic, including Greenland and its glaciers, is changing rapidly, and it won't be changing back for a long long time.

What You Can Do

I have two suggestions, and only two. One, it's absolutely essential that people know that there's a solution, and that's to engage on a WWII-style emergency mobilization. We have the resources, and we have the need. We just need the will, and you can help with that. Click here for more information, and here to sign the pledge. Then tell your friends, all of them.

Two, elect Bernie Sanders. I can't be more clear. We need someone in the White House who will move with all speed, not all "campaign finance supporter-approved" speed. That's Bernie Sanders, and only he.

Blue America has endorsed Bernie Sanders for president.

• Time to contribute?
• Time to phone-bank for Bernie?
• Time to make sure all of your friends come out to vote?

Seems so to me. And thanks!

GP
  

Earthquakes, the "Big One" & the Pacific Northwest

An earthquake preparedness film produced in Victoria, British Columbia (source)

by Gaius Publius

This is not quite a political story, but it's an important one. Most people west of the Mississippi and many people east of it assume that the so-called "Big One," the mother of all American earthquakes, will occur in southern California along the San Andreas fault.

Shaded relief map of California showing the location of SAFOD [San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth]. Major historical earthquakes along the San Andreas Fault are shown, with the creeping section of the fault in blue. (© USGS, click to enlarge) [source]

But scientists who study plate tectonics have come to a surprising, and relatively recent, conclusion — the "big one" is more likely to come in the Pacific Northwest, and it's likely to be the "really big one."

I can only give you a small part of this excellent recent article in the New Yorker by Kathryn Schultz, but if this interests you at all, the piece is worth reading through. There's both good science and important warning here. And if you're a resident of the region, it may qualify as a must-read.

The problem in a nutshell, from just after the start of the article (my emphasis):

Most people in the United States know just one fault line by name: the San Andreas, which runs nearly the length of California and is perpetually rumored to be on the verge of unleashing “the big one.” That rumor is misleading, no matter what the San Andreas ever does. Every fault line has an upper limit to its potency, determined by its length and width, and by how far it can slip. For the San Andreas, one of the most extensively studied and best understood fault lines in the world, that upper limit is roughly an 8.2—a powerful earthquake, but, because the Richter scale is logarithmic, only six per cent as strong as the 2011 event in Japan.

Just north of the San Andreas, however, lies another fault line. Known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino, California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating around Vancouver Island, Canada. The “Cascadia” part of its name comes from the Cascade Range, a chain of volcanic mountains that follow the same course a hundred or so miles inland. The “subduction zone” part refers to a region of the planet where one tectonic plate is sliding underneath (subducting) another. Tectonic plates are those slabs of mantle and crust that, in their epochs-long drift, rearrange the earth’s continents and oceans. Most of the time, their movement is slow, harmless, and all but undetectable. Occasionally, at the borders where they meet, it is not.

Take your hands and hold them palms down, middle fingertips touching. Your right hand represents the North American tectonic plate, which bears on its back, among other things, our entire continent, from One World Trade Center to the Space Needle, in Seattle. Your left hand represents an oceanic plate called Juan de Fuca, ninety thousand square miles in size. The place where they meet is the Cascadia subduction zone. Now slide your left hand under your right one. That is what the Juan de Fuca plate is doing: slipping steadily beneath North America. When you try it, your right hand will slide up your left arm, as if you were pushing up your sleeve. That is what North America is not doing. It is stuck, wedged tight against the surface of the other plate.

Without moving your hands, curl your right knuckles up, so that they point toward the ceiling. Under pressure from Juan de Fuca, the stuck edge of North America is bulging upward and compressing eastward, at the rate of, respectively, three to four millimetres and thirty to forty millimetres a year. It can do so for quite some time, because, as continent stuff goes, it is young, made of rock that is still relatively elastic. (Rocks, like us, get stiffer as they age.) But it cannot do so indefinitely. There is a backstop—the craton, that ancient unbudgeable mass at the center of the continent—and, sooner or later, North America will rebound like a spring. If, on that occasion, only the southern part of the Cascadia subduction zone gives way—your first two fingers, say—the magnitude of the resulting quake will be somewhere between 8.0 and 8.6. That’s the big one. If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one.

Flick your right fingers outward, forcefully, so that your hand flattens back down again. When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. (Watch what your fingertips do when you flatten your hand.) The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”.

I've bolded the parts that describe the geologic stress and what's likely to happen to the land when it releases. The upward bulge of the land includes the Cascades mountain region and land west to the sea (Mount Hood, in the Cascades Mountains, is only 80 miles east of Portland). A six-foot drop in elevation of land within "a few minutes" would destroy everything built on top of it. A similar drop beneath the ocean would create a tsunami that would wipe out everything living along the coast.

Here's a picture:

The northern part of the Cascadia Subduction Zone (click to enlarge; source)

Here's another, showing the extent of the affected area:

As the source states, "Subdiction of the Juan de Fuca plate beneath the North American plate results in the formation of the Cascade Range." Click to enlarge.

And another showing the elevations:

Portland sits between the Oregon Coast Range and the Cascade Range (click to enlarge; source).

If a full rupture occurs, the impact will be devastating: "that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America," writes Schultz.

Roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million. “This is one time that I’m hoping all the science is wrong, and it won’t happen for another thousand years,” Murphy says.

Devastation aside, the science on this is fascinating. Schultz writes, "Thirty years ago, no one knew that the Cascadia subduction zone had ever produced a major earthquake. Forty-five years ago, no one even knew it existed." If you want to skip to that part, find the sentence that starts, "Almost all of the world’s most powerful earthquakes occur in the Ring of Fire" and continue from there. The study of the "ghost forest" on the banks of the Copalis River and the tale it told to alert researchers makes terrific reading.

There's much more here than I can quote comfortably — the detective work that revealed the date of the last "really big one" ("approximately nine o’ clock at night on January 26, 1700"); the lack of preparation, and the cost of preparing properly to respond to an emergency of this scale.

FEMA, Disaster Preparation and Our Billionaires

Which is where I want to add a word of my own. Funding FEMA, of course, to an adequate level is a first priority. Yet we live in a time of pathological billionaires, rulers of both parties, who don't want to spend the first spare dime on any class of people but their own. The arrogance of this class, from Donald Trump to Sheldon Adelson to Jamie Dimon, is astounding — I may have some comparison video shortly. Left or right, they're mainly all the same. If you watched the Trump vs. Ramos video, you watched them all in action.

As with their arrogance, so their self-dealing. Americans are forced to use increasingly service-cutting, space-cutting airlines for long-distance travel because "our betters" say they can't afford to raise Amtrak to anything close to European standards. (Have you ridden an American passenger train lately along any but the DC–New England corridor?) Yet here's how the very very rich take to the air, financed, if they can get it, by corporate tax loopholes and compensation extras.

If they "can't afford" to give us good trains, bridges, or roadways, how will this class ever allow us to prepare for an emergency on the scale described here?

We seem to be stuck, until we don't want to be. Talk about a tectonic subduction zone — that we continue to be ruled by the global rich is a "sticking point" of monstrous proportions. The pressure, on them and on us, to keep things as they are is enormous. I'm afraid the consequences — political, social, environmental, climatological — of coming "unstuck" from our own ruling class will be monstrous as well.

I guess this was a political story after all.

GP

No, you still don't want to be anywhere near Chernobyl

"There was something serene, yet highly disturbing about this place," writes Danny Cooke in describing this drone-shot video he posted of the mostly abandoned city of Pripyat, which is closer to the crippled Chernobyl nuclear power plant than the mostly abandoned city of Chernobyl is.

by Ken

The date was April 26, 1986, and the event we know as "the Chernobyl disaster" remains, as Wikipedia puts it, "the worst nuclear power plant accident in history in terms of cost and casualties." (The closest challenger to date is the Fukushima disaster of 2011.)

The above video was posted by British freelance filmmaker, director, and editor Danny Cooke, who explains, "Earlier this year I had the opportunity to visit Chernobyl whilst working for CBS News on a 60 Minutes episode which aired on Nov. 23, 2014," with correspondent Bob Simon, produced by Michael Gavshon and David Levine. (The full report, he notes, can be viewed on the CBS News webstie.)

Cooke goes on to write:

Chernobyl is one of the most interesting and dangerous places I've been. The nuclear disaster, which happened in 1986; the year after I was born, had an effect on so many people, including my family when we lived in Italy. The nuclear dust clouds swept westward towards us. The Italian police went round and threw away all the local produce and my mother rushed out to purchase as much tinned milk as possible to feed me, her infant son.

It caused so much distress hundreds of miles away, so I can't imagine how terrifying it would have been for the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens who were forced to evacuate.

During my stay, I met so many amazing people, one of whom was my guide Yevgen, also known as a 'Stalker'. We spent the week together exploring Chernobyl and the nearby abandoned city of Pripyat. There was something serene, yet highly disturbing about this place. Time has stood still and there are memories of past happenings floating around us.

Armed with a camera and a dosimeter geiger counter I explored...

www.dannycooke.co.uk
Follow me on twitter @dannycooke

Soundtrack 'Promise land' by Hannah Miller - licensed on themusicbed.com

Shot using DJI Phantom 2 GoPro3+ and Canon 7D

THE 60 MINUTES REPORT


CBS News's Bob Simon reports "Chernobyl: The Disaster That Never Ended," produced by Michael Gavshon and David Levine, on the November 23 edition of 60 Minutes.

Here's the introduction to the report from the complete script posted on the linked CBS News webpage:

Some tragedies never end. Ask people to name a nuclear disaster and most will probably point to Fukushima in Japan three years ago. The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl in Ukraine was 30 years ago, but the crisis is still with us today. That's because radiation virtually never dies. After the explosion in 1986, the Soviets built a primitive sarcophagus, a tomb to cover the stricken reactor. But it wasn't meant to last very long and it hasn't. Engineers say there is still enough radioactive material in there to cause widespread contamination. For the last five years a massive project has been underway to seal the reactor permanently. But the undertaking is three quarters of a billion dollars short and the completion date has been delayed repeatedly. Thirty years later, Chernobyl's crippled reactor still has the power to kill.

It's called the Zone and getting into it is crossing a border into one of the most contaminated places on Earth. The 20-mile no man's land was evacuated nearly 30 years ago. Drive to the center of the Zone today and you'll see a massive structure that appears to rise out of nowhere. It's an engineering effort the likes of which the world has never seen. With funds from over 40 different countries, 1,400 workers are building a giant arch to cover the damaged reactor like a casserole. It will be taller than the Statue of Liberty and wider than Yankee Stadium -- the largest movable structure on Earth. Nicholas Caille is overseeing the arch's construction. . . .

YOU CAN BUY A PHANTOM 2 ON AMAZON


DJI describes its Phantom 2 "Quadcopter" drone as "lightweight, easy to carry" -- it measures roughly 11.4 x 11.4 x 7.1 inches and weighs a kilogram (a little under 2¼ pounds, presumably not including its assorted accessories).

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TV Watch: Notes from a season from hell (being slightly more like a post than that thing that appeared last night)

Mad About You's Murray remains TV's all-time greatest dog, but he faced a late-in-the-series nudge from Gilmore Girls' Paul Anka. (It's worth remembering that Murray in his time had to go snout to snout against Frasier's Eddie.)

by Ken

When the then-new TV season had reached pretty much "full swing," I let out a cry of desperation. The depth of the horror exceeded anything I could conjure from either memory or imagination. Since then, it has merely seemed to me that I was understating the dimension of the catastrophe.

(1) IT BEATS GOING OUT AND GETTING WASTED
(DOESN'T IT?)

So here I was last night, struggling to finish knocking out my evening post, having gotten as far as finding and uploading a picture to go with my admittedly not very jolly pass-along of the question made relevant now that we may be within reach of a readily available test for Alzheimer's: Will people who may have it want to know they have it?

I could have posted the post without any artwork just to make sure it would go up on time at 9pm ET, then add some kind of art as soon as I had it ready. Goodness knows, I've dont that before. But I got cocky. Once I had the idea to illustrate the post with a photo of the New York Rangers clinching a spot in hockey's Stanley Cup finals, I figured that, despite the tightness of the time, it could be done. And I was making satisfactory progress -- getting a photo downloaded, then sized and prepped for uploading to our blog host site. Then potential disaster struck. When I went to try to choose the file for uploading, my computer played dumb, or maybe it wasn't playing.

Maybe it was about to look for the file in question, maybe it wasn't; either way, while I awaited further developments, there was nothing else I could do in the designated browser, Safari. I could have just shut Safari down and reopened it; the only thing was, I didn't know how advanced a stage of the blogpost had been saved, and while the browser was in, er, action mode, therre was no way of finding out -- unless I opened a different browser, and opened the blog software in it, and saw what there was to see for the post in question. Assuming it was a reasonably late version of the post, at least I could go ahead and post it without art, then proceed with the job.

The only problem is that I don't think of my other available browsers, Firefox and Google Chrome, as speedy loaders, and I was already down to my final minute or so. Nevertheless, with the "action" on Safari still at a standstill, there didn't seem much else to do. I went with Chrome, and as it proceeded to make approximately zero progress toward loading, I became confident that Chrome would be open and ready for business in under an hour.

About this point, the surveillance tapes will show, I was uttering frequent gentle exhortations that were roughly equivalent -- assuming there's only surveillance video, and not audio -- to "Consarn it all." (That's my story, and, again assuming there's no audio record, I'm sticking to it.) While we're on the subject, I realize I have been remiss lately in pointing out to the Great Google frequently enough that it sucks, but now, in honor of Chrome's stellar performance, it seems only fair to point out to the boys and girls at Google: You suck!!!

Eventually, after what seemed like an hour or two but was probably only a minute or two, or maybe three or four, I was able to access the "draft" post, and found it apparently close to posting condition. You'd have thought I'd have the sense to go ahead and follow the old Plan B of posting it as is, then fill in some art. But it must already have been a minute or two past post time, and I decided what the heck, since the artwork was ready to upload, why not just go ahead and upload it, so the post would be complete, and I could get on with my life?

As soon as I issued the command to upload a photo, I realized that this was exactly what had landed me in computer quicksand on Safari! What is that thing about humans supposedly learning from history? You couldn't prove it by me.

But after a not excruciatingly unreasonable while, probably punctuated with additional colorful expostulations, I was able to load the picture, add the captioni about the Rangers' onward march toward the Stanley Cup, and post the whole shebang -- maybe a few minutes past post time! I called that a pretty darned fine save: "Do you want to know if you have Alzheimer's?" Looking at it now, I think I would probably have centered the picture and caption, but I'm not going to nitpick. In a word, whew!


(2) ACTS OF GOD AREN'T USUALLY GODSENDS

But wait just a second. Before heading back to Real Life, I noticed that I already had a 9pm ET post up! Which kind of impressed me, except for what I'd put myself through the preceding quarter-hour.

On closer inspection, the phantom post turned out to be not a post at all, but the shell of a post I had in fact made reference to just last week, a "draft" that had been parked for months under the working title "A love letter to Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino." It was a collection of potential "post elements" that had been sitting there in storage, which I don't think I'd even looked at in a month. As it happened, by now I had decided that if and when I got around to doing that first Gilmore Girls post, I would be approaching from quite a different angle. Nevertheless, I thought I might still want to use that stuff that was sitting under the tarp for a later post.

Think of it like you're planning to build or rehab a special new room, and by luck you have a handy storage space where you can dump lovingly deposit stuff that you meanwhile build or acquire for eventual use in the new room, in the event that it ever actually gets built. Of course the stuff lying under the tarp was still kind of missing -- well, everything that might show what the new room was supposed to be about. My gut reaction upon realizing that this random batch of artifacts had leapt, apparently via an act of God, into full-fledged post status was, approximately, "Golly."

I rebounded quickly, though, and mixed in there somewhere felt an unmistakable feeling of relief: Now I no longer had to worry about writing the so-far-unwritable post! And it wasn't as if anybody was going to read it anyway. When you get right down to it, who cares?

And after all, "acts of God," which always sound to me as if they're the sort of thing where we get to experience our shared humanity in the face of a hostile universe, are actually almost the opposite. It's the weasel term by which insurance companies get to tell you, when you come to them for help following the act or acts in question, "Sorry, ducks, you're on your own. Didn't you read your policy?"


(3) IS THERE LIFE AFTER GILMORE GIRLS?


In the X Files Season 6 two-parter "Dreamland," the great Michael McKean guest-starred as a Reaganite black-ops spook who took maximum advantage of his accidental identity switch with Mulder (David Duchovny).

In a sense, yes. As I mentioned in that post last week, finishing my second traversal of "the Gilmore Girls 153" freed me to return to my rewatching of the first six seasons of Mad Men, which had stalled in Season 6 when the GG mania overtook me, and to complete Season 6 and knock back the six episodes from Season 7 my DVR- had been carefully storing in time to watch Episode 7, the "midseason finale" in real time last Sunday night!

I was also able to figure out where I'd paused in Season 5 of The X Files, complete that season, and even advance to Season 6. Of course once I started up Episode 1, I understood why I should have watched the first of the two X Files movies, Fight for the Future, before dipping into Season 6. I had actually remembered that the movie was designed to fall between Seasons 5 and 6, but even when people in Episode 1 of Season 6 kept referring to all sorts of events I had no recollection of, I didn't make the connection. I thought maybe I should go back and rewatch the end of the Season 5 finale to see if I'd snoozed through the mystery events that were puzzling me.

Oh, after a while it dawned on me that no, I couldn't watch an episode or two of Season 6 and then go back and tackle the first movie. So I shut the episode down and went to dig out the movie. Happily, both movies had been included in my X Files Amazon Gold Box Deal. I tried to make sure I was pulling out the correct X Files but satisfied myself (on what basis I no longer recall) that I Want to Believe was the movie I wanted, and I watched it. It didn't plug my Season 5-to-6 gaps, and actually raised more questions, like why did Gillian Anderson look so funny? In fairness to me, let me say that I was probably half-sleeping (it was getting late) through, shall we say, the "middle" of the picture. All the same, I didn't grasp my fundamental error until I began rewatching the movie with the Chris Carter-Frank Spotnitz audio commentary. Finally it sank in. Oops!

None of which prevented me from eventually watching the correct movie, this time spread over two nights, and proceeding to Season 6, and encountering such notable events as a guest-starring shot by Bryan Cranston in an episode that turned out to have been written by X-Files co-executive producer Vince Gilligan. (Hmm, "When Vince met Bryan?") And then wonderful guest shots by such wonderful actors as Michael McKean, Ed Asner, and Lily Tomlin. Eventually it dawned on me that these, rather than any change in the look of the show, were hallmarks of the show's Season 6 change of production venue from Vancouver to Los Angeles.

In my post-Gilmore Girls period I was also able to finish up my nearly completed Season 1 of the spectacular Paul Reiser-Helen Hunt comedy Mad About You. Just to be safe I went back and rewatched a couple of episodes it turned out I had in fact watched, but they were so incredible, I was delighted to watch them again. And I've zipped ahead into Season 2 (happily noting a run of episodes directed by that great director Thomas Schlamme), not only chronicling all sorts of firsts for the show, but more importantly being staggered by the quality of the show. I understood now why, when Mad About You and Seinfeld were NBC stable mates, I went back and forth as to which was the better show.


(4) AND THE DEPRESSING TAKEAWAY IS . . .

Well, the obvious: how nearly non-existent shows are now that show even awareness of, let alone any aspiration to, the level of quality represented by Mad About You and Gilmore Girls.

I don't know yet whether the 2014-15 TV season will represent any upgrade from the catastrophe of 2013-14. I'm not optimistic, but far be it from me to prejudge. However, the vast stockpile of DVDs and Blu-rays I've built up will keep me going.

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The hold of the demise of RMS Titanic on the imagination a century later

by Ken

With the timely rerelease of James Cameron's Titanic I'm finding myself tempted finally to see it, maybe even in 3D. (I haven't seen any of the new generation of 3D flicks. I only remember the cheesy efforts of my youth.) In itself the fact that I've never seen the film interests me, because the subject of the sinking of the "unsinkable" superliner on its maiden voyage has long held as strong a fascination for me as for anyone.

I'm thinking my muted interest has to do with the fact that, for all Cameron and company's attempt at historical accuracy, the film is still a work of fiction, and fiction is the exact opposite of what interests me about Titanic. Isn't what's of interest about it the fact that it happened? That this mammoth steamship was built using every state-of-the-art technology, and was claimed and widely believed to be unsinkable, and yet in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic it was crumpled by an iceberg?

This doesn't mean that I'm entirely resistant to fictional piggybacking. I can still shudder remembering the moment in Upstairs Downstairs (do I have to issue a "spoiler alert" all these decades later?) when the formerly superciliious lady's maid Roberts (Patsy Smart, seen at right in drier times) showed up at the servants' entrance of Eaton Place, as drenched as if she had just been fished out of the water, following the death of her mistress, Lady Marjorie Bellamy (the lovely Rachel Gurney), and Lady Marjorie's brother Hugo, the earl of Southwold, on the great ship -- one of the more dramatic ways of writing a character out of an ongoing story. (Of course the Downton Abbey team poached to plot device, but without any of the dramatic effect. A still of the waterlogged Miss Roberts, as it were returned from the dead, must surely exist online, but I didn't turn it up in a quick search.)

And while it's been ages since I saw A Night to Remember, the 1958 film (with Kenneth More as, um, somebody or other -- the ship's captain? I remember him being very grave, which I guess isn't hard to understand), I remember seeing it on television several times and being gripped by it each time. The fact that the result is preordained somehow didn't detract from this, and must in fact have been part of the fascination. How could such a thing have happened?

Interestingly, though, I see that IMDb's one-sentence summary reads: "The Titanic disaster is depicted in straightforward fashion without the addition of fictional subplots."

It seems worth noting that some eight years more have passed since the making of A Night to Remember than had passed between the actual event and the release of the film. Over the years researchers and historians have continued to sift through the surviving evidence of what happened on board the great ship, going back to its construction (and before) and continuing on to its disappearance below those icy waves, leaving at once: (a) an enormous toll in lost lives, and yet (b) more survivors than one might expect under the circumstances.

And of course since the making of A Night to Remember an entire new field of Titanic study opened up with the discovery of the wreckage lying on that inhospitable floor of the North Atlantic some 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland. Once upon a time I doubt that most of us imagined the actual ship would ever return to our consciousness. And yet there it is, and despite the ferocious difficulty of access to it, it has, as I said, opened an entire new field of Titanic study and of course speculation.

For a long while as observers began to close in on the wreckage, there was enormous fascination in the pieces of the story it could finally fill in as to what actually happened to cause its demise and -- filling in the massive jumble of survivor accounts -- how that demise unfolded.

But I realized as I finally sat down and started to watch my DVR recording of the National Geographic Channel special Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron ("National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence") that the myriad mysteries for which he gathered his team of experts to thrash out answers, once and for all, to the limit of our present knowledge, don't much interest me. Yes, I get it that the "mystery" of the ship's sinking won't be fully solved until the position and condition of every bit of discovered wreckage is puzzled out. But fascinating as those mysteries may be to experts, they just don't interest me much except insofar as they have a bearing on the fate of the ship up to the point of its final disappearance into the ocean.

Meet the Titanic Experts

National Geographic Channel caption: In the shadow of a massive 42-foot replica of the Titanic from his blockbuster film, Cameron has brought together some the world’s leading Titanic experts to solve the iconic shipwreck's lingering mysteries. Learn more about these engineers, naval architects, artists, and historians, whose combined expertise may reveal new insights.

That could just be me, of course. And I should add that the NGC webpage to which I've directed attention has links for any number of online reports that really do have to do with what happened to the ship up to the point of its final demise, some of which I expect to be checking out. Goodness knows, there's plenty to know about the ship and its one and only voyage which I don't know. I was moved by a piece in BBC Music Magazine that gathered what has been pieced together about the ship's musical crew, which earned its place in history by continuing to play, according to the eyewitness testimony, until the ship went down. I find it hard to imagine anyone, reading what's known about the musicians' prior careers and what's known about their musical duties at sea, not being choked up.

I suppose eventually I'll get through Cameron's NGC Final Word on the subject (my goodness, are there really four hours of it? I recorded two two-hour blocks), but it may take a number of sittings. And I'm thinking maybe I won't get around to seeing Titanic the movie after all, in any number of dimensions. I might want to take another look at A Night to Remember, though. I don't think the disaster of the sinking of Titanic has lost its hold on my imagination; I'm just getting a better grasp of the size and shape of that hold, and I don't think Leonardo di Caprio figures in it.

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The numbers measured in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown are only scary if you think about them

This memorial service for victims of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami was held on July 24 in Ohkuma-cho, Fukushima Prefecture, 20 kilometers from the Daiichi nuclear plant that melted down.

by Ken

Consider this my version of the Friday news dump. Here's a story I'm guessing hardly anybody wants to read. In a long and impressively detailed report in AlJazeera, "Fukushima radiation alarms doctors," reporter Dahr Jamail writes that (a) Japanese health-care officials are complaining ever more bitterly about what they see as the government's exceedingly lackadaisical approach to monitoring radiation levels in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear-plant disaster, and possibly related to the above (b) doctors believe they're already seeing the beginning -- and only the beginning -- of an alarming public health impact.

"How much radioactive materials have been released from the plant?" asked Dr Tatsuhiko Kodama, a professor at the Research Centre for Advanced Science and Technology and Director of the University of Tokyo's Radioisotope Centre, in a July 27 speech to the Committee of Health, Labour and Welfare at Japan's House of Representatives.



"The government and TEPCO have not reported the total amount of the released radioactivity yet," said Kodama, who believes things are far worse than even the recent detection of extremely high radiation levels at the plant. . . .

Kodama's centre, using 27 facilities to measure radiation across the country, has been closely monitoring the situation at Fukushima - and their findings are alarming.



According to Dr Kodama, the total amount of radiation released over a period of more than five months from the ongoing Fukushima nuclear disaster is the equivalent to more than 29 "Hiroshima-type atomic bombs" and the amount of uranium released "is equivalent to 20" Hiroshima bombs. [Emphasis added.]

The Fukushima meltdown, you'll recall, is the only nuclear incident beside the Chernobyl one to be rated Level 7 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES), which reporter Jamail points out is defined as "a major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects requiring implementation of planned and extended countermeasures."

What's more, writes Jamail, "Doctors in Japan are already treating patients suffering health effects they attribute to radiation from the ongoing nuclear disaster."



"We have begun to see increased nosebleeds, stubborn cases of diarrhoea, and flu-like symptoms in children," Dr Yuko Yanagisawa, a physician at Funabashi Futawa Hospital in Chiba Prefecture, told Al Jazeera. 


She attributes the symptoms to radiation exposure, and added: "We are encountering new situations we cannot explain with the body of knowledge we have relied upon up until now."



"The situation at the Daiichi Nuclear facility in Fukushima has not yet been fully stabilised, and we can't yet see an end in sight," Yanagisawa said. "Because the nuclear material has not yet been encapsulated, radiation continues to stream into the environment."

There's more, oh so much more, but I think this is enough to prove my point: You don't want to read this, do you?

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Is it really news that disaster is good for business?

Marketplace's Steve Chiotakis took this photo of tornado
damage in Tuscaloosa two weeks ago.

by Ken

On American Public Radio's Marketplace Morning Report this morning host Steve Chiotakis interviewed Lary Cowart, a professor of accounting and finance at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who's described as "a real estate expert," for a segment that in the Web version is headlined, "How the storms could help the housing market in the South." This part of the conversation caught my attention.

STEVE CHIOTAKIS: We're obviously not trying to find any kind of bright side to the devastation in Alabama; I saw it certainly first-hand in Tuscaloosa [the link is to an April 28 report that notes that Chiotakis "was in Alabama visiting family when the storms hit," and reported live from there]. But people are going to need housing, right?

LARY COWART: There's over 5,000 houses destroyed in two counties, plus there's another 1,000 distributed over a much wider area. Here in Birmingham, there's sufficient supply to take care of all the people who were displaced.

CHIOTAKIS: What does this mean for the housing situation in Alabama?

COWART: Well in Birmingham, there's about 10,000 to 12,000 houses on the market for sale right now. And at the current rate of sale -- based on last month's sales -- it would take 12 months for every one of those houses to be sold. Of course now, we're going to get to the bottom of the market a lot quicker than in other places, so for us, this will kind of start the absorption to get us back to a normal market.

CHIOTAKIS: Thousands of people, as you said, lost everything in those storms. Where is the money going to come from, Lary, to buy up these properties all over the state?

COWART: In the short run, there's going to be an inflow of cash to cover the insurance costs for those people who had insurance -- the federal government, the state government; there's a lot of donations that are bringing things into the Birmingham area to try to help everybody out. The cost of this is going to be significant; the estimates right now are $2 billion to $5 billion. And going up everyday. The long-term damage is going to be pretty significant.

What caught my attention was not the news that the tornado damage is going to be good for business, but Steve Chiotakis's apparent astonishment at it. Is it really still news that disaster is good for business? At least for businessfolk who by good fortune or good planning are situated appropriately to reap the windfall.

I mean, what in the end were those eight grueling years of the Bush regime about, if not to create enough mayhem worldwide to provide the owner-investors of the regime with serial bonanzas? This included both manmade as well as natural disasters, not to mention hybrids, but the genius of the Bush regime was that by handling the natural disasters with the sniveling, contemptuous, thieving ineptitude that is the Right's secret weapon, they could be made even more profitable than the manmade ones.

Naturally no one ever wants to claim to find "any kind of bright side to the devastation." Nevertheless, it turns out that amid all those dramatic calculations of the financial "losses" incurred through disasters, the money doesn't necessarily just disappear. Heaps of it find their way into the coffers of the savvy and well-connected. This is so well-established that the only surprise, again, is why Steve C seemed so surprised.

It's not hard to grasp the basic logic. When there's large-scale destruction, provided there's money for rebuilding, there's going to be rebuilding, and that means money is going to be pumped into the local or regional economy. It may not seem "fair," and certainly not pretty, but it's just business -- up to a point.

In the March 28 New Yorker, the always-interesting James Surowiecki had an even more interesting than usual "Financial Page" titled "Creative Destruction?," which began:

Even if Japan’s nuclear crisis is contained, its earthquake and tsunami now seem certain to be, economically speaking, among the worst natural disasters in history, with total losses potentially as high as two hundred billion dollars. In response, fearful investors sent the Nikkei down almost twenty per cent on the first day of trading after the tsunami, and it’s still down more than ten per cent. Yet, while the fear is understandable, this may turn out to have been an overreaction: history suggests that, despite the terrifying destruction and the horrific human toll, the long-term impact of the quake on the Japanese economy could be surprisingly small.

That may seem hard to reconcile with the scale and the scope of the devastation. But, as the economists Eduardo Cavallo and Ilan Noy have recently suggested, in developed countries even major disasters “are unlikely to affect economic growth in the long run.” Modern economies, it turns out, are adept at rebuilding and are often startlingly resilient.

He offered as "the quintessential example" Japan's own experience of the 1995 earthquake that --

levelled the port city of Kobe, which at the time was a manufacturing hub and the world’s sixth-largest trading port. The quake killed sixty-four hundred people, left more than three hundred thousand homeless, and did more than a hundred billion dollars in damage (almost all of it uninsured). There were predictions that it would take years, if not decades, for Japan to recover. Yet twelve months after the disaster trade at the port had already returned almost to normal, and within fifteen months manufacturing was at ninety-eight per cent of where it would have been had the quake never happened. On the national level, Japan’s industrial production rose in the months after the quake, and its G.D.P. growth in the following two years was above expectations.

"Similarly," he added,

after the Northridge earthquake, in 1994, the Southern California economy grew faster than it had before the disaster. A recent FEMA study found that after Hurricane Hugo devastated Charleston, in 1989, the city outpaced growth predictions in seven of the following ten quarters. And the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, despite its enormous human toll, may have actually boosted the economy’s growth rate.

These were all monumental catastrophes, and yet, a couple of years after the fact, domestic growth rates showed little sign that they had happened. The biggest reason for this, as the economist George Horwich argued, is that even though natural disasters destroy physical capital they don’t diminish the true engines of economic growth: human ingenuity and productivity. With enough resources, a damaged region can reconstruct itself with surprising speed. Although the Northridge quake demolished the Santa Monica Freeway, it reopened after just sixty-six days. Healthy economies are by definition adaptive: in the case of Kobe, other Japanese ports picked up the slack until it was back on line. And, because governments generally flood disaster areas with money, there’s no dearth of cash for new investments.

The crucial caveat here is that we're talking about societies and economies in the developed world, "with enough resources" to harness those "true engines of economic growth: human ingenuity and production." While there has undoubtedly been money to be made from, say, the successive natural disasters in Haiti, in the underdeveloped world disaster tends to remain, well, disastrous.

And even in the developed world the rebound from disaster may be highly unevenly distributed. This is what I had in mind when I suggested that this process is understandable "up to a point." Because unfortunately the nature of human greed is such that it tends to produce a class of disaster profiteers, and an economic culture of disaster cultivation. Whether the disasters of the Bush regime, and continuing on into the present administration in such forms as the Gulf oil-rig catastrophe, are sought or merely taken advantage of, an alarmingly significant and growing chunk of the economy is increasingly devoted to harvesting the riches of catastrophe -- for the harvesters.

Do I believe, for example, that the financial finaglers deliberately provoked the economic meltdown? Not really. But I do know that (a) they positioned themselves to weather the storm a whole lot better than the people whose livelihoods and lives were tanked by it, (b) they had the political muscle to make sure that they were taken care of without concern for economic recovery, (c) such recovery as there has been has wildly disproportionately benefited them, and (d) in the aftermath they have continued to use that political muscle to permanently restructure the politics of the economy to institutionalize their chokehold.

So to the extent that construction and real-estate people in Alabama get a boost from the storms via the sweat of their honest brows -- and ditto all along the trail of destruction of the disastrous flooding heading down the Mississippi toward New Orleans (about which Doug Kahn filled us in so well last week) -- well, good for them. I'm just saying that if disaster recovery becomes our major growth industry, and that growth is reserved for people who get to make the rules for it (including the rules by which the manmade disasters are created), then we've got big trouble.

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Déjà vu all over again: Who could have foreseen the Deepwater Horizon disaster?

Who could have foreseen the explosion of

the space shuttle Challenger? (Who indeed.)

"The commission found that the Challenger accident was caused by a failure in the O-rings sealing the aft field joint on the right solid rocket booster, which allowed pressurized hot gases and eventually flame to 'blow by' the O-ring and make contact with the adjacent external tank, causing structural failure. The failure of the O-rings was attributed to a design flaw, as their performance could be too easily compromised by factors including the low temperature on the day of launch."

-- from the Wikipedia entry on the Rogers Commission

Report on the Challenger space-shuttle disaster

From today's New York Times:

Documents Show Early Worries About Safety of Rig

The Deepwater Horizon rig last month.

By IAN URBINA
Published: May 29, 2010

WASHINGTON — Internal documents from BP show that there were serious problems and safety concerns with the Deepwater Horizon rig far earlier than those the company described to Congress last week.

The problems involved the well casing and the blowout preventer, which are considered critical pieces in the chain of events that led to the disaster on the rig.

The documents show that in March, after several weeks of problems on the rig, BP was struggling with a loss of “well control.” And as far back as 11 months ago, it was concerned about the well casing and the blowout preventer. . . .

by Ken

Remember the Challenger disaster?

My goodness, can it really be 24 years already? I think, next to the JFK assassination and the planes flying into the World Trade Center on 9/11, it's my most vivid "Do you remember where you were when you heard the news?" moment.

Remember O-rings? Who outside the aviation and space-flight industries had ever heard of an O-ring until some time after the Challenger blew up?

By the time of that ill-fated launch, we had all become pretty blasé about the no-longer-dramatic "routine" of space launches. However, the news that a space shuttle had blown up sure as shootin' riveted the country's attention. And what I remember most vividly from that time, after the unbelievable news itself, was the utter mysteriousness of it all. Officially, at least, nobody had a clue how such a thing could happen. Even in those pre-cable-news days, the talking heads suddenly had a lot of air time to fill, and everyone seemed to agree it was all beyond the realm of possibility, beyond even the possibility of speculation. Truly unfathomable.

Except it wasn't. We found out eventually that there were a lot of people who not only could fathom it but knew it could happen. There were even people who lived in haunted dread that it would happen, under conditions like those, incredibly, that obtained the day of the Challenger launch. Namely, that it was really, really cold. Oops!

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's try to reimagine ourselves back in those tender days of innocence, when the Challenger explosion was still beyond the range of human understanding. The job of sorting out what happened was entrusted to a commission popularly known by the name of its chairman, former Secretary of State William Rogers.

I remember reading much later about the participation on the Rogers Commission of Nobel physicist Richard Feynman. Apparently Feynman was by nature, as you would expect any great scientist to be, a questioner and doubter, possibly to the point of being a positive pain in the posterior. I know I should probably do some research to refresh my memory of what I read, but heck, this is just a blog, so let's go with memory, even knowing how that would have appalled Richard Feynman.

It would have appalled but not surprised him. My recollection is that it was an ex-wife of Feynman's who recalled how dubious the scientist had been about accepting appointment to the commission. He felt it would just be a dozen people being herded from official briefing to official briefing swallowing officially sanctioned talking points for the purpose of arriving at an officially sanctioned conclusion. The ex-wife, as I recall, pointed out to him that that's what the commission would be without him, whereas with him it would be 11 people shuttling from official briefing to official briefing plus him prowling around asking unofficially sanctioned sources inconvenient, likely embarrassing or even incriminating questions.

I suppose the Rogers Commission would have figured out about the O-rings with or without Feynman. You have to figure, though, that it didn't hurt to have him tramping around asking those embarrassing questions, interested only in the facts, with no concern for who might be embarrassed or inconvenienced. Here's Wikipedia on the role of Feynman:

One of the commission's best-known members was theoretical physicist Richard Feynman. His style of investigating with his own direct methods rather than following the commission schedule put him at odds with Rogers, who once commented, "Feynman is becoming a real pain." During a televised hearing, Feynman famously demonstrated how the O-rings became less resilient and subject to seal failures at ice-cold temperatures by immersing a sample of the material in a glass of ice water.[4] Feynman's own investigation reveals a disconnect between NASA's engineers and executives that was far more striking than he expected. His interviews of NASA's high-ranking managers revealed startling misunderstandings of elementary concepts. One such concept was the determination of a safety factor.

The facts, alas, were almost unimaginably horrible. Not only were both space-shuttle contractor Morton Thiokol and NASA fully briefed about the danger; there were people who argued to the death (the death of the shuttle crew, as it turned out) against going ahead with the launch under the conditions in effect that day.

I seem to remember there was one engineer at Morton Thiokol who was so sure that just such an eventuality could eventuate that he lived in a state of constant torment. Against tremendous pressure from above, he kept shooting his dread up the chain of command, and naturally was dismissed by his superiors as a troublemaker, and coerced to shut his Nervous Nellie trap. After all, there was a lot of money at stake, both in the space-shuttle program generally and specifically in sticking as closely as possible to the schedule -- meaning going ahead with the launch with a minimum of delay. And "money at stake" trumps the whining of some pathetic engineer who probably wasn't even making a six-figure salary. How important could he or his whining be?

And then the Challenger blew up.

I learned something from that experience which other people already knew but which we all need to learn, one way or another. Anytime one of these "inexplicable" events occurs, surpassing the limits of human understanding, just wait for it. The odds are overwhelming that soon enough we'll learn that not only can it be understood, it was understood, and was probably a subject of deadly concern among the initiated.

The odds are also extremely good that a small, beleaguered band of fact-based whiners was pitted against a larger, or at any rate more powerful, group of deniers. Usually it will turn out that the deniers were looking at a balance sheet, seeing precious dollars flying out the window to assuage the concerns of the comparatively lowly whiners, who might not even know how to read a balance sheet.

In the end, of course, the balance sheet on the Challenger didn't look all that great even to the all-important and all-powerful Money People. Just as the balance sheet on the Deepwater Horizon mess isn't going to look so good, unless you happen to be looking at the balance sheet of one of the companies that is, er, cleaning up on the disaster. (Never forget that article of faith to the Corporate Right: Disasters are just financial windfalls that haven't been cashed in yet.)

For what it's worth, I haven't bothered reading much beyond the portion of Ian Urbina's NYT report I've quoted above. Somehow, I have the feeling I've already read it. Too many times.

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