LIVE UPDATES: Massive tornado tears through Oklahoma City area – The Week

 

LIVE UPDATES: Massive tornado tears through Oklahoma City area – The Week.

A good friend and colleague teaches at Southmoore High School, just a few blocks south of the tornado’s path.  He and his students are ok physically.  Mentally it will be a long time.  Please keep the citizens of Moore, Oklahoma, in your thoughts, and if you are so inclined, in your prayers.

Cyclone Mahasen – Poor Bangladesh Just Can’t Catch a Break

Bangladesh is evacuating one million people with Cyclone Mahasen expected to hit its low-lying delta coast on Thursday evening, said the United Nations, which estimated 4.1 million people were at risk due to gale-force winds, heavy rain and flooding.

via Bangladesh Orders 1 Million Evacuated as Cyclone Nears – NYTimes.com.

Parts of Myanmar are also under threat,  from flooding and possible  mudslides in more mountainous areas.

How does such a poor country evacuate that many people?  Where will they go?  How will they be fed?  What will happen to the livestock they had to leave behind, which provide part of their livelihood?  How will they be able to begin again?  or Will they end up moving into the slums of Dhaka, providing more fodder for the factories?

Interesting Indian Demographics

India’s TFR is only 2.5—and falling steadily. This figure barely exceeds that of the United States. In 2011, the US fertility rate was estimated at 2.1, essentially the replacement level; a more recent study now pegs it at 1.93. Still, from a global perspective, India and the US fall in the same general fertility category, as can be seen in the map posted here.

via India’s Plummeting Birthrate: A Television-Induced Transformation? | GeoCurrents.

The author relates the drastic (and relatively recent) decline to the advent of television, and in particular to soap operas.

Television depresses fertility because many of its offerings provide a model of middle-class families successfully grappling with the transition from tradition to modernity, helped by the fact that they have few children to support.

400 ppm – Pliocene Levels of CO2

An instrument near the summit of Mauna Loa in Hawaii has recorded a long-awaited climate milestone: the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere there has exceeded 400 parts per million ppm for the first time in 55 years of measurement—and probably more than 3 million years of Earth history.

via Climate Milestone: Earth’s CO2 Level Nears 400 ppm.

Its been at least 800,000 years since it was this high. This has serious, and scary, implications for the people, plants, and animals on earth.  We are already seeing shifting agricultural zones, pests, and flora.

How will changing climate zones impact food production, and the pests that go with them?  Will we be able to produce enough food?  Will the changing climate be drier where we need it to be wetter?  Will we be creative enough to cope with 9 billion people dependent on a steady food supply?

If anything, those numbers understate how different the Pliocene climate was. The tropical sea surface was about as warm as it is now, says Alexey Fedorov of Yale University, but the temperature gradient between the tropics and the poles—which drives the jet streams in the mid-latitudes—was much smaller. The east-west gradient across the Pacific Ocean—which drives the El Niño-La Niña oscillation—was almost nonexistent. In effect, the ocean was locked in a permanent El Niño. Global weather patterns would have been completely different in the Pliocene.

What was it like when camels roamed Ellsmere Island?

Beavers and camels on Ellesmere Island, instead of glaciers, might not be so bad.  But there was a lot less ice in general in the Pliocene. That means there was a lot more water in the ocean, which means sea level was a lot higher—how high exactly, no one knows.

“The estimates have been all over the map,” Raymo says. They’ve ranged from 10 meters (33 feet) to 40 meters (131 feet) higher than today. But even the conservative estimate, were it to recur today, would mean flooding land inhabited by a quarter of the U.S. population.

Where will these people go?  And more importantly, who will pay for it?  And that’s just the US.  Rising seas will impact cities all over the world.  What sort of global trade will take place if the ports are flooded?

What questions do you have about climate change?

Mekong River – Quick, Look Before it’s Gone

In pictures: Damming Laos’ Mekong River – In Pictures – Al Jazeera English.

A total of 11 large hydropower dams are planned by the governments of Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia, while China has already completed five dams on the Mekong’s upper reaches, with another three under construction. China is also the driving force behind a cascade of dams on the Nam Ou River, a tributary of the Mekong in northern Laos.

Environmentalists fear these dams’ impact on fish numbers may have a devastating effect on food security and biodiversity in the region.

These countries are under intense pressure to industrialize and provide jobs for the people flooding into their cities.  Since factories require electricity, these dams are part of the vicious cycle – more displaced people needing more jobs.

The river also supplies the livelihood of millions of people.  How will damming it affect them?  The people most directly affected by this had no voice in the decision – how just is that?  What will become of the species that coexist with the river?  How will the changes affect the ecosystem of Indochina?  What would happen if these governments decided not to build the dams?

Human Trafficking

BBC News – Nepal: ‘I was

14 when I was sold’.

The real story, focusing on Nepalese women and children.

 

Restive Region of Russia

The Boston Marathon bombings and Chechnya’s long history of terrorism – The Week.

Chechnya is a predominantly Muslim region in the North Caucasus where insurgents have been fighting for an independent state ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In 1994, a full-scale insurgency broke out, leading to two years of heavy conflict in which tens of thousands of Chechens and several thousand Russian soldiers died.

A memorial to the victims killed in the Beslan school tragedy, 2004.

Wikimedia Commons/aaron bird

Although it seems to two brothers alleged to be the Boston marathon bombers left the region years ago, they apparently maintained an interest in the area.

Then this, from the younger brother

From Stratfor: