Salon.com > tsunami

Will water supplies provoke World War III?

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:00:00 +0000

Brace yourself. You may not be able to tell yet, but according to global experts and the U.S. intelligence community, the earth is already shifting under you. Whether you know it or not, you’re on a new planet, a resource-shock world of a sort humanity has never before experienced.

Two nightmare scenarios -- a global scarcity of vital resources and the onset of extreme climate change -- are already beginning to converge and in the coming decades are likely to produce a tidal wave of unrest, rebellion, competition, and conflict. Just what this tsunami of disaster will look like may, as yet, be hard to discern, but experts warn of “water wars” over contested river systems, global food riots sparked by soaring prices for life’s basics, mass migrations of climate refugees (with resulting anti-migrant violence), and the breakdown of social order or the collapse of states. At first, such mayhem is likely to arise largely in Africa, Central Asia, and other areas of the underdeveloped South, but in time all regions of the planet will be affected.

To appreciate the power of this encroaching catastrophe, it’s necessary to examine each of the forces that are combining to produce this future cataclysm.

Resource Shortages and Resource Wars

Things they lost in a tsunami

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 21:00:00 +0000

IN MARCH of last year, after a violent spring storm, Sheila Williams took her long-legged Afghan hound, Saffy, out for a walk on the Wild Pacific Trail near Ucluelet, on the southwestern tip of Vancouver Island. Off the trail, at the end of an unmarked path in an unnamed cove, they found a white and blue rubber house slipper with Asian characters. Williams wondered if it could have made its way from the tsunami-ravaged east coast of Japan, and headed to an Asian supermarket to ask for a translation.

A few weeks later, the ghost ship Ryou-Un Maru was spotted off the BC coast, just one wreck among the estimated five million metric tons of debris washed into the ocean from Japan by the 2011 tsunami. About 30 percent of that flotsam now drifts across an area in the North Pacific roughly three times the size of the continental US (the rest sank). It is impossible to know when, where, or in what quantities the debris will land on the west coast of North America, but the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts that it will begin arriving en masse with the early winter storms of this year.

“Wave”: A family vacation turns into the worst kind of nightmare

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 23:00:00 +0000

The first time Sonali Deraniyagala heard the word "tsunami," she was shut up in a darkened bedroom in her aunt's house in Colombo, Sri Lanka. It was 2004, and the wave had just taken her parents, her husband and her two young sons.

Deraniyagala had been vacationing with her family in a seaside hotel near a national park when, through a terrace window, she saw the sea rising rapidly past its familiar bounds. With her husband, Steve, she grabbed Vikram, 8, and Malli, 5, and rushed out the door and up the drive. They jumped in a passing jeep, but soon the wave overwhelmed even that. The last time Deraniyagala saw her husband's face, he was looking in horror at something over her shoulder. Then the jeep overturned, and for Deraniyagala the next few hours were chaos, violence and filthy water, the tsunami tossing her miles inland and then sucking her out again. Just before she would have been swept out to sea, she grabbed an overhanging branch and felt the ground materialize under her feet. She never saw her family again.

Pick of the week: Beautiful white people hit by tsunami!

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 01:00:00 +0000

Using natural disaster – or manmade apocalypse, ecological catastrophe, alien invasion – as the backdrop for human drama goes clear back to the invention of cinema as spectacle, and arguably a long way before that. Of course we’re not supposed to think that the big, dramatic flood is the main point of the Noah story in the Book of Genesis, or in the Epic of Gilgamesh. But it certainly helped hold the audience’s attention. Given that, it’s surprising that mainstream filmmakers have all but ignored the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, an event that killed almost 100 times more people than the 9/11 attacks and may well have been the worst natural disaster in recorded history.

Floating junkyard, straight ahead!

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 14:46:00 +0000

TOKYO, Japan — What do an empty fishing boat, a Harley-Davidson, and a soccer ball have in common?

For residents of the West Coast of the US and Canada, they are all reminders of the devastation unleashed on the other side of the Pacific Ocean by last year's Japanese tsunami.

The March 11 disaster, which killed almost 20,000 people, generated tens of millions of tons of wreckage, most of which remained on land. But it also swept an estimated 5 million tons of debris out to sea, 70 percent of which later sank. The fate of the remaining 1.5 million tons is causing concern in communities from Alaska to California, amid warning that the trickle of debris arriving on US shores could soon turn into a deluge.

Fear the almighty wrath: Five natural disasters “caused” by gays

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 15:45:00 +0000

Look at what the gays have done now.

Hurricane Sandy is just the latest weather calamity being blamed on gay people. Who is doing the finger-pointing? This time, it's self-appointed biblical scholar John McTernan of Defend and Proclaim the Faith ministries in Pennsylvania, who made the connection between gays and Sandy, writing this week the hurricane is “a huge bucket of vomit in America’s face during the election,” forcing us to choose between “a pro-homosexual Mormon along with a pro-abortion/homosexual, Muslim Brotherhood promoter, Hard Left Fascist.”

Here are five other natural disasters mankind suffers because of the gay agenda:

1. Hurricane Katrina, August 2005. The grand dame of gay gales! This storm resulted in flooding 80 percent of New Orleans and 1,833 deaths, causing untold damage and the public shaming of President George W. Bush and his administration. In 2006, Megachurch Pastor John Haggee of San Antonio, Texas, said “God caused Hurricane Katrina to wipe out New Orleans because it had a gay pride parade the week before and was filled with sexual sin.” What Pastor Haggee doesn’t know is that New Orleans has a gay pride parade every weekend! God should have wiped this town out long ago starting when that French ninny Napoleon Bonaparte was marching about in his culottes and passing out copies of “Madame Bovary.”