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Trillions of gallons of rain have already fallen on the state of California, and more rain continues to fall as I write this article. Billions of dollars in damage has already been done, but of even greater concern is what all of this water could mean for southern California’s fault lines. As you will see below, geophysicists have discovered that the additional weight that flooding puts on fault lines can help trigger earthquakes. Of course we have been warned for many years that “the Big One” is way overdue in southern California, and when it finally happens it will be...

Chinese authorities have warned of extreme weather and "multiple natural disasters" in the coming month, as heavy rain in parts of the country led to thousands being evacuated. An alert was in place on Tuesday (Jul 4) for rain-triggered disasters in large swathes of central and southwestern China, according to the Xinhua news agency. Meteorological authorities have warned the country will face "multiple natural disasters in July, including floods, severe convection weather, typhoons and high temperatures", Xinhua said.

Should we be concerned by all of the volcanic activity that we are witnessing all over the planet right now? According to Volcano Discovery, 27 different volcanoes are erupting at this moment and many others are showing signs of waking up. Of course, this comes at a time when we are also seeing lots of unusual earthquakes around the globe. I have been regularly warning my readers about the instability of our planet, and it appears that seismic activity is beginning to spike as we approach the end of 2022. So will this trend continue once we get into 2023?...

Thanks for joining us. Today we study what Scripture says about natural disasters, drought, pestilence, and plague. Could God prevent natural disasters and pestilence from happening? Does He cause them to happen? Those are tough questions that I know loyal readers will answer in the comments section. Let’s begin with an account of the Bible’s first epic natural disaster, enacted by God, who boldly proclaimed His objective reasoning: “The LORD said, ‘I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for...

Correcting the record is important since assigning the wrong reasons for Texas’s electric blackouts will lead to the wrong solutions.hen the lights went out in Texas earlier this year, corporate media and the left swiftly developed a narrative and stuck to it: Texas failed because it didn’t regulate enough and it wasn’t part of the national grid.This storyline also claimed a lack of electricity from wind and solar had nothing to do with the disaster that claimed almost 60 lives. Instead, the blackouts were the failure of normally reliable thermal power—natural gas, coal, and nuclear—due to a reluctance to spend...

Widespread, severe flooding has killed at least nine people and affected 210 000 households or more than half a million people in southern Thailand, officials reported Friday, December 4, 2020, describing the situation as the worst they have seen in 50 years. A state of emergency has been declared for Nakhon Si Thammarat Province, where all the fatalities occurred. Thailand's Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation (DDPM) said another person reportedly went missing. The youngest victim was a child aged five. DDPM added that the affected provinces are Surat Thani, Phatthalung, Trang, Songkhla, Pattani, Narathiwat, and the worst-hit, Nakhon Si...

A new United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) report confirms how extreme weather events have come to dominate the disaster landscape at the beginning of 21st century. Floods and storms were the most prevalent disaster events, followed by earthquakes, extreme temperatures, landslides, droughts, wildfires, volcanic activity and dry mass movement. UNDRR used statistics from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) maintained by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) which records disasters which have killed ten or more people, affected 100 or more people, resulted in a declared state of emergency, or a call for international...

42,000-foot plumes of ash. 143-mph firenadoes. 1,500-degree heat. These wildfires are a new kind of hell on earth, and scientists are racing to learn its rules. On the windy, hot day of July 26, 2018, as record 113-­degree temperatures baked Redding, California, in the northern Sacramento Valley, Eric Knapp toiled in an air-conditioned government office. After work, he planned to meet his wife and 3-year-old daughter, and some family friends, for dinner. Slender and fair-skinned with a gentle smile, Knapp is a research ecologist for the US Forest Service. He was well aware that, three days earlier, in coastal mountains...

It's time to stop throwing money at an obsolete form of travel and focus on the transportation system that is already moving more than 80 percent of passenger travel in the U.S. When most of the nation’s governors shut down nonessential businesses and directed people to stay at home, they made the mistake of keeping urban transit systems running despite a 2018 study showing that mass public transportation systems expedite the spread of infectious diseases in communities. Further, a 2011 study found that people who ride urban transit are nearly six times more likely to suffer from upper respiratory infections...

The spectre of one's mortality that a global pandemic raises can be a needed and sobering opportunity to reconsider and reorder our lives, if we're granted them longer. The spectre of one’s mortality that a global health and economic crisis raises can be a needed and sobering opportunity to reconsider and reorder our lives, if we’re granted them longer.The coronavirus pandemic is a social stress test exposing many Americans’ lack of responsibility for our lives, our willingness to hold other people’s lives hostage to our own, and our national unpreparedness to manage danger. What are some long-term positive steps this...

The U.S. government is taking wise measures to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. But, as the saying goes, we should pray like it all depends on God and prepare like it all depends on us. When I was in school studying infectious disease epidemiology, none of the cool kids worked on flu. We all wanted to chase Ebola, HIV/AIDS, drug-resistant tuberculosis, malaria, and other exotic killer bugs.Everyday, ho-hum killers like influenza, pneumonia, and other respiratory illnesses were just too mundane for globetrotting adventurers like us. Who wants to spend her life hand-sanitizing and finger-wagging about vaccines when you could...

Despite being the start of meteorological autumn, September felt more like a summer swelter across much of the contiguous United States. The month was also drier than normal, but 2019 continued its soggy stretch with the wettest January through September period (YTD) ever recorded. The U.S. also experienced four new weather disasters since May, each exceeding $1 billion: Hurricane Dorian, Tropical Storm Imelda, a southern/eastern severe weather outbreak, and flooding of the Arkansas River that impacted Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kansas. Here are more highlights from NOAA’s latest monthly U.S. Climate Report: Climate by the numbers September 2019 The average temperature...

Explaining disasters While the loss of life stemming from tragedies is heartbreaking, we can’t fully understand God’s plan Msgr. Charles Pope May 29, 2016 Question: Given God’s mercy, how do we explain devastating earthquakes and other natural disasters? It certainly tests our faith!— Gerald Olesen, Fortuna, California Answer: Part of the answer we must accept is that we cannot really know the full answer since there is so much we don’t see or understand. This was the basic answer God gave Job, who asked the meaning of suffering in his own life. In effect, God challenged Job to explain...

Three months after leaving the White House in 2001, former President Bill Clinton arrived in India to cheering throngs to help those who had just lost a million homes in the aftermath of a massive earthquake that killed 20,000 and injured 166,000. In classic Clinton style, he solemnly promised that his new nonprofit — called the American India Foundation (AIF) — would rebuild 100 villages. Rajat Gupta, his millionaire co-chairman, pledged $1 billion for the victims. It never happened. Years later, AIF’s annual reports were reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation and show only seven villages were partially rebuilt...

As President Trump settles into the Oval Office, most folks dealing with dire emergencies would probably agree that FEMA is one of the executive agencies that deserves disbanding Disorganization of federal agencies is never more evident than when a natural disaster strikes and the bureaucracy charged with coordinating relief efforts is nowhere to be found. The South has had more than its share of weather related tragedies over the last decade and, despite the numerous opportunities for FEMA to learn from past inefficiency, nothing has changed. What has changed in Mississippi is how well the community and churches have garnered...

An estimated $40 billion is needed annually to help the rapidly growing number of people needing humanitarian aid as a result of conflicts and natural disasters - and one possibility to help fill the $15 billion funding gap is a small voluntary tax on tickets for soccer games and other sports, concerts and entertainment events, airline travel, and gasoline, a U.N.-appointed panel said. The panel's report on humanitarian financing, launched Sunday by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at an event in Dubai, says the world is spending around $25 billion today to provide life-saving assistance to 125 million people devastated by...

One of Hillary Clinton’s closest advisers told her that Barack Obama should use a deadly hurricane to boost his re-election campaign, a proposal that she agreed to pass on to the White House, a new tranche of emails reveals. Blair and Clinton transcripts reveal global concerns of two buddies Read more Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime friend of the Clintons, sent a memo in 2012 presenting a strategy for turning Hurricane Isaac to the Democrats’ political advantage by contrasting it with President George W Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

Miami (AFP) - US President Barack Obama warned Thursday that climate change was making natural disasters worse, as he toured the National Hurricane Center ahead of the annual storm season. "The best climate scientists in the world are telling us that extreme weather events like hurricanes are likely to become more powerful," Obama said on a visit to the facility in Florida, restating his case for action to tackle manmade changes to the environment. "When you combine stronger storms with rising seas, that's a recipe for more devastating floods." "Climate change didn’t cause Hurricane Sandy, but it might have made...

GENEVA— The World Health Organization reports more than 800,000 people die by suicide every year. WHO, which is launching its first global report on suicide prevention, said more people die from suicide than from conflicts, wars and natural disasters combined. The World Health Organization reported every 40 seconds a person somewhere in the world commits suicide. Despite this shockingly high statistic, WHO said only a handful of countries have policies aimed at suicide prevention. WHO Director of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Shekhar Saxena said there also is much more that communities can do to provide support for vulnerable people....

The New York Times is pleased with Mayor Michael Bloomberg's 438-page, $20 billion plan to protect New York from the effects of future hurricanes. It notes benignly that the cost is probably an underestimate but agrees with the mayor, "Whether you believe climate change is real or not is beside the point; the bottom line is we can't run the risk." Really? Imagine the argument: "Whether you believe zombies are real or not is beside the point. ... We can't run the risk." Clearly one's willingness to undertake these sorts of preparations depends completely on whether the perceived danger is...