marmar
marmar's JournalFlash floods kill at least 650 in Philippines; 800 still missing
ILIGAN, PHILIPPINES — As a storm that killed more than 650 in the southern Philippines raged outside the store where she works, Amor Limbago worriedly called home to check on her parents, but their cellphones just kept ringing and later went dead.
Limbago, 21, rushed home as soon as the flash floods receded and confirmed her worst fear: Her parents and seven other relatives were gone, swept away from their hut by the river. They had eagerly planned a small Christmas dinner in that hut just days earlier.
“I returned and saw that our house was completely gone,” a weeping Limbago told the Associated Press from Cagayan de Oro city. “There was nothing but mud all over and knee-deep flood waters.”
Tropical Storm Washi blew away Sunday after devastating a wide swath of the mountainous region on Mindanao island, which is unaccustomed to major storms. .............(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1103818--flash-floods-kill-at-least-650-in-philippines-800-still-missing?bn=1
Climate Hawks: Unleash Hell
from Grist:
‘Brutal logic’ and climate communications
by David Roberts
16 Dec 2011 2:00 PM
In a couple of posts last week -- here and here -- I laid out the brutal logic implied by the latest climate science (with credit to scientist Kevin Anderson for stripping away the rosy assumptions hiding in many of today's common climate scenarios). To sum up: a rise in temperature of 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) will be extremely dangerous; a rise of 4 degrees C (7.2 degrees F) or higher could threaten civilization; the only way to avoid 2 degrees C -- or even 4 degrees C -- is a massive crash program that will likely involve, for the rich, industrialized countries of the world, peaking emissions in 2015 and declining them 10 percent year-on-year after that. Alarming!
In this post I want to take a step back (sideways?) and have a bit of a meta-discussion about messages of alarm/urgency and where they fit into the climate communications landscape.
Reaction to the posts has been interesting. I've gotten a ton of (mostly positive) emails and calls about them, had tons of Twitter and meatspace conversations, but as far as I know, nobody's written about or reacted to them publicly. And I guess that's not surprising. This kind of thing tends to end conversation like flatulence at a cocktail party. That's part of why there's a whole cottage industry devoted to urging climate hawks not to talk like this. What good can it do? Terrifying people just elicits all sorts of defense mechanisms -- denial, disengagement, apathy, system justification, what have you. The forces at work are so colossal, so utterly out of scale with what any individual or group can hope to tackle, that the logical conclusion seems to be, "we're f*cked." Our overwhelming instinct is to ... change the subject.
There's plenty of social psychology work on these kinds of reactions; I've written about it myself. Nonetheless, it seems to me that work has been interpreted in a fairly crude way. ..............(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.grist.org/climate-change/2011-12-16-brutal-logic-and-climate-communications
Sacrificing the Earth: Neither of the two main parties in U.S. is fit to protect the environment
from the International Socialist Review:
MAROONED FROM the mainland United States, in June, the nuclear power plant at Fort Calhoun, Nebraska, became a small island. Sandbags were hurriedly deployed to prevent inundation from floodwaters as the Missouri river burst its banks, a consequence of the greatest flood in U.S. history.
Another nuclear facility, this time at Los Alamos in New Mexico, birthplace of atomic weapons, was threatened by an altogether different force of nature. Los Alamos was forced to evacuate as flames overran fire defenses and firefighters struggled to contain the largest wildfire in New Mexico history.
As the Las Conchas wildfire blazed out of control at the end of June, it consumed over 130,000 acres of forest. Large areas of land at Los Alamos are contaminated with radioactive waste from decades of nuclear research and testing. Scorched land increases water runoff and the danger from flash flooding. Thus, a further alarming side effect of the wildfire and Los Alamos’s legacy of radioactive contamination is the likelihood that radioisotopes will spread, as happened when wildfires threatened the Hanford nuclear weapons plant in Washington state.
Extended drought and persistent wildfires saw the U.S. Department of Agriculture declare the entire state of Texas a natural disaster area, as more than 30 percent of crops have been lost due to severe water shortages. This follows a spring in which the majority of counties in Texas were on fire as Texas experienced its eighth year out of the last twelve for “exceptional” drought. ................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://isreview.org/issues/79/analysis-climatechange.shtml
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