Tag Archives: natural disasters

Climate change is gonna be freakin’ expensive, government office warns.

The demonstrations call on households, cities, and institutions to withdraw money from banks financing projects that activists say violate human rights — such as the Dakota Access Pipeline and efforts to extract oil from tar sands in Alberta, Canada.

The divestment campaign Mazaska Talks, which is using the hashtag #DivestTheGlobe, began with protests across the United States on Monday and continues with actions in Africa, Asia, and Europe on Tuesday and Wednesday. Seven people were arrested in Seattle yesterday, where activists briefly shut down a Bank of America, Chase, and Wells Fargo.

The demonstrations coincide with a meeting in São Paulo, Brazil, involving a group of financial institutions that have established a framework for assessing the environmental and social risks of development projects. Organizers allege the banks have failed to uphold indigenous peoples’ right to “free, prior, and informed consent” to projects developed on their land.

“We want the global financial community to realize that investing in projects that harm us is really investing in death, genocide, racism, and does have a direct effect on not only us on the front lines but every person on this planet,” Joye Braun, an Indigenous Environmental Network community organizer, said in a statement.

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Climate change is gonna be freakin’ expensive, government office warns.

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Could one of these robots save you in a climate disaster?

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Could one of these robots save you in a climate disaster?

By on 5 Jun 2015 4:12 pmcommentsShare

We spend a lot of time worrying about how robots are out to get us. I get it — it’s good to be ready for the worst. But while we wait for the singularity, we could put these invulnerable machines to use helping us weak humans cope with disasters both natural and un-.

On June 5 and 6, entrants from academia and industry are trying in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. You can watch livestreams of mechanical men taking on a series of challenges as their human overlords (for now) look on in sweaty, nerdy anticipation.

From Gizmodo:

Twenty-four teams from around the world (about half from the U.S.) have built robots that must complete a number of tasks. The course is set up to simulate a disaster scenario not unlike the Fukushima nuclear disaster that occurred in Japan in 2011.

The ‘bots have to perform a series of tasks including: driving a vehicle, locating and closing a valve, getting through a wall and up a set of stairs, and a “surprise task” that we hope involves learning how to love. They must be controlled wirelessly, and for a portion of the challenge they must be fully autonomous (“look, Ma! No controller!”). Here’s more from the Washington Post:

If you’ve read about a cool robot during the course of the past few years, chances are pretty good that it was being groomed for these challenges. The winning team will receive $2 million from DARPA, with the first two runner-ups receiving $1 million and $500,000, respectively.

You hear that, R2? Save the world, make bank — and may the best robot win.

Source:
Everything You Need to Know About Today’s DARPA Robotics Challenge

, Gizmodo.

Live: Watch robots battle it out in the DARPA challenge

, Washington Post.

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Could one of these robots save you in a climate disaster?

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Colorado Wildfires Are So Big They Can Be Seen From Space

Image Credit:ISS Crew Earth Observations experiment and Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by the Expedition 36 crew

The fires in Colorado continue to rage through dry forest timber, damaging both forests and towns. Coloradans have already endured the most destructive fire in state history, and while that one has abated, others have sprung up in different corners of the state. Hundreds of firefighters are currently battling the West Fork Complex and the East Peak Fire. The blazes are so large that they can be seen from space. Astronauts on the ISS took these dramatic images of the smoke plumes from the West Fork Complex and the Wild Rose Fire.

Image Credit: ISS Crew Earth Observations experiment and Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by the Expedition 36 crew.

The smoke from these fires reached European airspace on Monday.

Firefighters trying to contain the East Peak fire got some help from the weather last night, in the form of less than an inch of rain. It wasn’t much moisture, but it was enough. The fire is now 75 percent contained, but its scars remain on the landscape. Satellite images form NASA’s Earth observatory show what kind of impact the fire has already made in the forested area.

On June 22, 2013, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured this false-color image of the East Peak fire burning in southern Colorado near Trinidad. Burned areas appear dark red, while actively burning areas look orange. Dark green areas are forests; light green areas are grasslands. Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Caption by Adam Voiland.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Here’s What $110 Million in Fire Damage Looks Like
Colorado Wildfire Forces Evacuations, Threatens World’s Highest Suspension Bridge
Fires Are Escaping Our Ability to Predict Their Behavior

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Colorado Wildfires Are So Big They Can Be Seen From Space

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One Upside to Drought: the Fewest Tornadoes in the U.S. in At Least 60 Years

A funnel cloud in Texas. Photo: Charleen Mullenweg

For two years the majority of the continental U.S. has been plagued by drought, a confluence of natural cycles that have worked together to drive up temperatures and dry up the land. But for all the damage that has been done by the long-running drought, there’s been an upside as well. The lack of water in the atmosphere has also sent the U.S. toward a record low for tornadoes, says Climate Central‘s Andrew Freedman.

The National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) in Norman, Okla., estimates that, between May 2012 and April 2013, there were just 197 tornadoes ranked EF-1 or stronger on the Enhanced Fujita scale. That beats the previous 12-month low, which was 247 tornadoes from June 1991 and May 1992.

That’s the lowest recorded tornado activity since 1954, when scientists first really started keeping track. The number of deaths connected to tornadoes went down, too:

The U.S. did set a record for the longest streak of days without a tornado-related fatality — at 220 days — between June 24, 2012 and Jan. 26, 2013. And July 2012, which was the hottest month on record in the U.S., saw the fewest tornadoes on record for any July.

But the tornadoes didn’t just up and disappear, says Freedman in an August story. Rather, some of them just moved to Canada.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Don’t Blame the Awful U.S. Drought on Climate Change
Surviving Tornado Alley
Tornado Power: Green Energy of the Future?

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One Upside to Drought: the Fewest Tornadoes in the U.S. in At Least 60 Years

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Hurricanes May Cause Earthquakes

Repair crews inspect for damage after the 2011 Virginia earthquake. Photo: National Park Service

On August 23, 2011 a rare magnitude 5.8 earthquake hit Virginia. The shaking cracked the Washington Monumenttoppled part of the National Cathedral and shook around a third of the U.S. population. Later that week, Hurricane Irene moved into the region, wiping out power, downing trees and, according to new research presented at the meeting of Seismological Society of America, says Nature, triggering more small earthquakes in the recently ruptured fault.

The rate of aftershocks usually decreases with time, says study leader Zhigang Peng, a seismologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. But instead of declining in a normal pattern, the rate of aftershocks following the 23 August, 2012 [sic], earthquake near Mineral, Virginia, increased sharply as Irene passed by.

The waves of the Virginia earthquake were felt far and wide.

Hurricanes are known to produce strong seismic waves all by themselves. Indeed, says Smithsonian‘s Surprising Science blog, Hurricane Sandy “generated seismic shaking as far away as Seattle.” But hurricane-triggered seismic waves these were not. These were real aftershocks. “Scientists did not initially notice the unusual pattern, Peng said, because the aftershocks were small (many below magnitude 2) and the hurricane itself produced a lot of seismic noise.” A careful analysis of the data, however, revealed that the aftershock activity actually rose around the time of the hurricane’s passing.

The scientists, says Nature, argue that “a decrease in pressure caused by the storm’s travel up the East Coast might have reduced forces on the fault enough to allow it to slip.” More research will be needed to definitively pin down the proposed tie between the hurricane and the earthquake. But the suggestion that the Virginia fault system would have been susceptible to the stresses caused by the hurricane aligns well with the idea that big natural systems, sometimes treated as if they act independently of the world around them, might actually all be connected.

The Irene-triggered aftershocks could have happened because the fault system that had ruptured in Virginia has memory—that is, the fact that it slipped so recently makes it easier for it to do so again. The idea of a natural system having memory is one that is becoming increasingly important for scientists trying to understand natural disasters. The idea is important to the field of complexity science. In a previous interview by this author with Surjalal Sharma, the University of Maryland astronomer explains this idea of memory:

“Memory is, essentially, a correlation in time or space. My memory of past events affects what I do now; that’s long range or long-term correlation. The bunching or clustering of events is, as we understand it, due to the memory of the events in a system. That is, a sequence of natural disasters may not be just a coincidence. [I]f we look at the data for floods, earthquakes, or solar storms, we see that their distributions are [not shaped like a bell curve.] This indicates that these are not random events. Rather, these systems have long-term memory.

So in the case of space weather, let’s imagine that a coronal mass ejection reached the Earth and disturbed the magnetosphere. There are two things about this disturbance that we need to characterize: one, how long does the visible or measurable effect of the disturbance last? The other is, how long would this system remember that the disturbance happened? If a second coronal mass ejection were then to come along within the memory time scale, the disturbance is likely to be much bigger and more prominent in some ways than the first, even if the two ejections are of similar intensity. It is in this context that we have to worry about long-term memory. As one might imagine, this is very important for extreme events.”

A fault that has slipped as an earthquake loads more stress. More research is needed, but if it turns out to be the case that hurricanes really can cause earthquakes, then Gaea just got a whole lot more dangerous.

More from Smithsonian.com:
Oklahoma’s Biggest-Ever Earthquake Was Likely Man-Made
Hurricane Sandy Generated Seismic Shaking As Far Away As Seattle

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Hurricanes May Cause Earthquakes

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