A few weeks back, I met Søren Ekelund. We were both invited to a Halloween party at the house of the first people who travelled around the globe in an electric car — a car that Søren himself had helped build. The car was a converted Nissan Qashqai and it had some trouble charging. After
There are the good wildfires, and there are the bad. Unfortunately, the latter often overwhelm the beneficial ones. We’ll go on with stories from San Diego in a minute—it’s a long story of an actually short time—but here’s a word about the bright side first. Whoopi Goldberg had a thought that’s worth repeating: When you
For this little Fukushima irony, many thanks to Fukushimaemergencywhatcanwedo.blogspot.com!
Though we try to keep a very positive focus here, PlanetSave isn’t just a blog about the wonders of the natural world and the glory of Mankind’s inventions. It also offers knowledge and a caution about our failures as individuals and as a species. We’ve all made mistakes before, big and small. By acknowledging anthropogenic
Deadly storms strike the coast, snow blankets the interior, drought cripples rural communities, and flooding inundates the poor. Scientists expect natural disasters such as these — and worse — to grow in magnitude and increase in regularity as global warming takes its toll on the planet, and in many situations there is not much we
NASA announced the birth of Tropical Storm Evan on the 12th of December maybe not knowing just how damaging this storm would end up being. The Samoan government has declared a state of disaster after now-Cyclone Evan ravaged the small South Pacific nation, leaving an unknown death toll and massive damages in its wake. Cyclone
A controversial piece of “forest reform” legislation was passed by the Brazilian senate this past Tuesday that would ostensibly give amnesty to landowners and give more autonomy to Brazilian states over setting their own conservation standards. Environmental groups largely view this as a major mistake and a give-away to ranchers and farmers.
” Climate change poses an immediate and grave threat, driving ill health and increasing the risk of conflict, such that each feeds on the other.” asserts a new report in the British Medical Journal by a group of UK defense, medical and public health officials.
In a forceful, March 16 statement on behalf of the Union of Concerned Scientist to the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Chief Scientist Dr. Edwin Lyman states:
“The NRC and the industry cannot hide this time behind the ‘it can’t happen here’ excuse. We have 23 plants of the same design. We have plants that are just as old. We have had station blackouts.”
Earthquakes are one of those phenomenon that occur and immediately elicit sympathy and empathy from those watching on TV. But they seem like they’re a semi-irregular occurrence, taking place maybe twice a year. At least, that would appear to be the situation if we were directed solely by TV news. In New Zealand, earthquakes are
Russia Today, on their YouTube channel, has posted footage taken of the Christchurch in the aftermath of the 6.3-magnitude earthquake that hit on Tuesday.
With the scale of just how hard and damaging the recent 6.3-magnitude quake quickly increasing with each hour that passes, with each revision of the dead and missing, Australia has increased the number of rescue experts they are sending in to help. Attorney-General Robert McClelland announced on Tuesday that Australia would be sending a total
I’ve already covered the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand from a human perspective, including sharing a number of photos from the disaster, and covered the tremendous 30 million tons of ice the earthquake knocked off Tasman Glacier, the country’s largest glacier. Now, here’s a little more detail on the earthquake from the U.S. Geological Survey
Joe Romm of Climate Progress has a post up on the best climate and energy cartoons or other humor of 2010. Definitely worth a share. Here are few cartoons from the post as a teaser. More in the article and a ton more good ones in the comments. Enjoy! (I thought about compiling my own
My home is Australia, and I woke up this morning to hear that 8 people were dead and another 72 currently missing, with the death toll expected to rise, as floodwaters sweep through the north of our country. “There’s no doubt that we are now in a very different sort of disaster,” said Australian prime
Amazing footage of the East Creek on Monday the 10th of January, washing cars downstream as if they’re little toys. And make sure you watch this video of an amazing rescue in the midst of the raging floodwaters.
Here are some photos that people have put up on the internet for people to see, and understand just what is going on in Queensland, Australia, as the floodwaters continue to rush through and rise. Kingbob86 lordphantom74 robstephaustralia kingbob86
Below is a video of the flood waters rushing through Toowoomba, Queensland.
It has been six years since the devastating Earthquake that rocked Indonesia on Boxing Day of 2004, but in that time scientists have not been idle. The German-Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System for the Indian Ocean, tidily known as GITEWS, has been completed and will end on the 31 of March before being handed over
After streaming through and contaminating smaller rivers and streams, toxic sludge from a Hungarian factory has now reached the Danube River. The Danube is Europe’s second-largest river and experts from the European Union (EU) fear that if the toxic red sludge contaminates the Danube it could affect half a dozen nations. The toxic sludge is
TIME magazine once gave us the photos that were painful to accept of the Vietnam War, so did our TVs, and Walter Cronkite. Due to these images, we rose up as a country to question the status quo. These days, the Great Pakistan Deluge happens, and what does TIME magazine do? Pull the story. An
NASA adviser and UCSF psychiatrist Nick Kanas, writing in an op-ed in Monday’s NY Times, lists the crucial factors needed to maintain good mental health in isolated, confined spaces for prolonged periods of time, based upon space and extreme habitation psychological studies…factors which will become more crucial to the Chilean miners as time passes.
BP oil spill is capped, but have we learned our lessons? Finally! The BP oil spill is reportedly capped. Jeremy Bloom over on our sister site, FailDrill, has a good in-depth post on this story (BP Shuts Off the Oil, For Now“) but thought I’d throw in a few cents here as well.
Nuclear energy experts warning that proposed deregulation of the nuclear energy industry could result in a nuclear-style BP oil spill disaster. [social_buttons] Just as deregulation of the oil industry was a key factor leading to the BP oil spill, energy experts are warning that we may be setting ourselves up for a disaster in the
