Natural Disasters
Expert mocked for alarmist tweetstorm The data were in before the pandemic began, and one scientist tried to sound the alarm. A Harvard epidemiologist using Twitter tried to warn society back in January about the global threat COVID-19 represented. He was ignored, ridiculed, or asked to tone it down, in one case by the elite […]
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Spurred by climate change, civil war and poverty, a new plague of locusts is sweeping though northeastern Africa. And experts say the out-of-control insect swarms are going to get worse before they get better. Previously, locusts — also known as short-horned grasshoppers — haven’t appeared in such numbers in the region since the 1950s. Tens […]
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In southern, temperate Australia, this year’s fire season has been one of the worst in living memory — but in much of the country’s tropical north, it is nothing out of the ordinary. This is no accident, experts say — it’s partly due to the predominance of Aboriginal people in the north, and whites in the […]
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The good news: Millions of farmers around the world are using ecologically sound methods to produce small harvests of high-quality coffee beans for global markets. The bad news: they’re just as vulnerable to drought, intense storms and other symptoms of climate change as industrial-scale coffee plantations — but they’re lower income and cannot recover as […]
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In September 2017, Mexico City was rocked by a magnitude 7.1 earthquake in which over 200 people died in building collapses. The high death toll was blamed on lax building codes, and a lack of effective regulation and government oversight of the construction industry. [RELATED: “Corruption blamed for hundreds of deaths in Mexico City earthquake”] […]
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Do natural disasters discriminate by social class and ethnic background? Judging by the tragedy still unfolding in the demolished shantytown of Mudd, on Abaco island in the Bahamas, the answer is a resounding “Yes.” Residents who remain after Hurricane Dorian speak of at least 1,000 dead, many of these Haitians immigrants, who have long suffered […]
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