I won't keep you very long today because I don't want to dilute the point.
Here is Presidential candidate Ron Paul, while in Gilford, New Hampshire, while saying that we shouldn't bother calling in FEMA over Hurricane Irene:
"We should be like 1900; we should be like 1940, 1950, 1960," Paul said. "I live on the Gulf Coast; we deal with hurricanes all the time. Galveston is in my district."
If you didn't just shoot out your screen and aren't quite sure as to why this is the single stupidest thing Ron Paul has ever said in his entire life, head here and find out how Galveston made out in 1900. It comes complete with authorities downplaying the danger of an oncoming hurricane.
BONUS: Thanks to Penny Arcader Tomanta, who dug up the 1940's (1943, specifically, the forecasts for which were actively censored by authorities), 1950's (1957, specifically), and 1960's (1967, specifically, which at least saw evacuation efforts). All of which hit Texas.
As horrific as the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and across the Pacific has been, as much misery as has been caused, the silver lining is that, if an 8.9 is going to strike, Japan is where you would, absent someplace completely uninhabited, want it to hit, for lack of a better term. Japan is among, if not the, best on the planet at dealing with both types of disasters, both in damage prevention and knowing what to do after the damage is done. The talk is that a death toll could reach 1,300; it currently stands at 680 as confirmed by NHK World; some reports have the number higher by a couple hundred.
Were that to have hit most anywhere else on Earth, that death toll would be much, much higher than that. The Boxing Day tsunami in 2004 struck hardest in Indonesia, which has drastically less capable infrastructure. The estimated death toll there eventually was estimated at 230,000.
Obviously, 680 dead is 680 too many. But it's a whole lot better than 230,000.
And then there's the fact that Japan has some sturdy ground. This is critical in an earthquake, as Port Royal, Jamaica learned on June 7, 1692.
Back then, Port Royal was, unofficially, Jamaica's capital. It was also a pirate capital; its location made it easy to reach a number of choke points along the Caribbean side of the Atlantic. This is historically a popular way for pirates to choose a base of operations: find narrow passages where all the shipping boats have no choice but to traverse, and set up camp nearby. Somalia and Singapore are two other such locations. Four different well-defended ports also served to make it a safe haven. If a pirate was being chased and made it to Port Royal, the chase was as good as over.
With such a population, Port Royal acquired a reputation for wealth and depravity, earning it the nickname "the wickedest city in the world".
Port Royal had one other weakness: the city sat on a large sand spit just beyond Kingston, upon which, as the city grew, they would place more and more buildings of heavier and heavier weight. Port Royal was only populated with about 6,500 people, but that was still a pretty good size for that time period. This was the situation when the earthquake struck, measured at 7.5. A recovered pocket watch from the site puts the time at 11:43 AM.
When sand, or any kind of soil, is shaken up such that it loses stiffness and stress resistance, a process called liquefaction occurs, in which the ground begins to act like a liquid. Loose sand, combined with large quantities of nearby water, provide for a quite profound liquefaction. The multitude of heavy objects that made up Port Royal suddenly had no substantial foundation.
And so 33 acres of the city, two-thirds of the town, sank into the ground, buildings, ports, riches, pirates and all. According To Robert Renny's 1807 book An History Of Jamaica, "All the wharves sunk at once, and in the space of two minutes, nine-tenths of the city were covered with water, which was raised to such a height, that it entered the uppermost rooms of the few houses which were left standing. The tops of the highest houses, were visible in the water, and surrounded by the masts of vessels, which had been sunk along with them". When the earthquake stopped, so did the liquifaction, and the sand became solid again, trapping all that had sunk. This distressed the survivors on two fronts: first, the resolidification made rescue and recovery efforts almost impossible, and second, they weren't done looting the dead bodies yet. As one report recalled, "The Dead were robbed of what they had about them, some stript, others searched, their Pockets pick'd, their Fingers cut off for their Rings, their Gold Buttons taken out of their Shirts." (People liked capitalizing nouns back then for some reason.)
There was a tsunami as well, but by then it was overkill. Port Royal was effectively finished as the capital of Jamaica; Kingston would over the years progressively take over.
Because of Port Royal's reputation, and due to the time period, some were quick to call the disaster divine retribution, particularly by one pastor, Emmanuel Heath, who also lived at Port Royal and claimed his home made it through unscathed. The Jamaica Council recommended that every June 7th thereafter "be kept and observed by all the inhabitants of this Island, an an anniversary day of fasting and humiliation."
Five years later, a visitor described the remaining inhabitants as having gone right back to normal, stting that the locals "regard nothing but Money, and value not how they get it."
If the original earthquake was a warning from God, God must have decided Port Royal just didn't get it, and acted accordingly. Disease from the dead bodies, a fire in 1703, a hurricane in 1722, another fire in 1750, another hurricane in 1774, another fire in 1815, a cholera outbreak in 1850, and finally another liquefaction-causing earthquake in 1907 combined to essentially wipe the town off the map. It now sees importance primarily in archaeology.
Approximately 5,000 died in Port Royal in 1692, from either the earthquake itself (about 2,000) or the immediate aftermath (about 3,000). Compare to Japan's astronomically higher population base, and you start to get an idea of just how well prepared Japan was.
For years now, we've been fretting about the long-term effects of global warming: rising sea levels, disappearing polar regions, vanishing polar species, more severe, unpredictable weather patterns. And the solutions are so complex, long-term and reliant on several mutually antagonistic countries taking actions they view as hamstringing themselves competitively, that implementing those solutions has been difficult-to-impossible.
If, though, one is truly serious about reducing global warming, right now, National Geographic has found a solution.
However, it comes with a couple minor tradeoffs...
A) You will not see your shadow tomorrow, because it will be snowing and therefore cloudy.
B) You will be wrong. Because you will be not seeing your shadow in the middle of Snowpocalypse or Snowmageddon or Snowmicide or Snowlocaust or Snowsterf**k or something.
This will be the norm. Historically, groundhog accuracy rates, of Phil and others across North America, tend to come in somewhere around the high 30's overall; Phil himself is showing at 39%. You'd do better flipping a coin, or flipping the signs: shadow means spring, no shadow means winter.
Proponents will tell you not to pay attention to the numbers and to just have fun with it. You know what's fun? Not going out in a blizzard.
Meanwhile, towards our neck of the woods, in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, Jimmy the Groundhog- generally the groundhog of record should Phil prove unable to perform his duties- will be giving the same prediction in the middle of a 20-inch snow dump "capable of paralyzing parts of southeast Wisconsin."
So we've got blizzard conditions in eight states. The Wisconsin Department of Transportation has told my entire state to stay off the roads. The roof of the Metrodome has collapsed due to the weight of the snow piled on top of it. The gist is, if the snow doesn't get you, the wind will.
Basically, I'm glad I have a roof over my head. Because there are people who don't. Imagine having to live out in those kind of conditions.
Today we have our first measurable snowfall of the year, and Watertown busted out a 'snow emergency' for the occasion. I'm only seeing a couple inches outside my window, but it is enough to where you have to bust out the plows, so sure, why not.
Wisconsin, however, comparatively gets off easy. The American recorded record for snowfall in a 24-hour period (recorded being the keyword; sometimes snowfall doesn't get recorded because it falls in a place not equipped to measure it, which makes the identity of record-holders pretty volatile) is at Mile 47 Camp, Alaska, which recieved 78 inches of snow on February 9, 1963. In the lower 48, the record- some say the overall record and in fact world record when they don't count Mile 47 Camp- is held by Silver Lake, Colorado, which comes up 2.4 inches short of Alaska at 75.8 inches in April 1921. (When this happens, the Alaska record seems to revert to a 62-incher taken by Thompson Pass in 1955.)
Ranking the states by their respective record 24-hour snowfall, and counting Mile 47 Camp, along with the other highest numbers I've come across since I've really got no way of knowing which figures are more trustworthy than others, we see this, (tied states ordered chronologically):
Kansas and Oklahoma got their state records on the same day- March 28, 2009- from the same storm. Georgia and Kentucky also shared a date; March 3, 1942. Again, they shared a storm.
While several of the states- the western ones in particular; again, it's hard to measure snowfall in the mountains to the degree you might want for this kind of thing- are in dispute, Neillsville doesn't get displaced by anyone.
That established, it only takes 3-4 inches and some gradient on Portland, Oregon roads to cause this to happen (3-4 inches being what these drivers had; it doesn't even really take that much):
Be careful out there this winter. Don't be these people.
Has anything ever been a more sure-fire way since the days of alchemy to be more reliably, predictably wrong?
We have here an article about how earthquakes hitting Southern California have been more frequent than previously suspected, and how the supposed 'Big One' could be right around the corner.
Okay, great. What is someone exactly supposed to do with this information? We aren't even able to predict an earthquake down to the precise month. There are early warning devices that can be used once an earthquake has begun, and aftershocks are common, but that doesn't give anyone a chance to leave or take cover before the earthquake actually starts. Which makes any prediction functionally useless. Hurricanes, tornadoes, thunderstorms, blizzards, you can see those coming with a reasonable amount of lead time: enough to say 'there's something coming, make yourself scarce', but not enough to where you're asking people to make themseves scarce for a ridiculously long time. 'Uh, yeah, can you take April off and hole up with friends in Nevada? We think it's April, at least. Maybe. We're not entirely sure. You know what, go ahead and take May off too. Perhaps June.'
When one can say 'There is an earthquake warning until Thursday at 8 PM for Kern, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties and the Baja Peninsula', then you've got something useful. Until then, what is the point of this?
I intend to impart some sort of knowledge. What knowledge exactly, I make no promises. You never know what might come up in life, so on some level it's good to just shotgun it and better your odds.
