A new study from NASA has unveiled some interesting details about the tsunami that struck Japan after the March 11th earthquake: Turns out, that wasn’t a tsunami after all that swept into northeastern Japan last March, killing nearly 20,000 people and launching a major nuclear and environmental crisis. That was two tsunamis that merged far out [...]

It’s already caused Rick Perry to cancel a planned campaign appearance in South Carolina, and it may yet lead him to back out of tomorrow’s debate in California, but the real story in Austin is the fact that large swaths of Texas are burning: Another fire in eastern Texas killed a mother and her 18-month-old [...]

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and others on Capitol Hill, are saying that Federal disaster aid for states hit by Hurricane Katrina must be offset by spending cuts, but New Jersey’s Chris Christie isn’t too thrilled with that idea: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie reacted angrily to a fight brewing in Washington over whether Hurricane [...]

As flood waters have overwhelmed New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont and, to a lesser extent, Upstate New York, the debate over whether the media “overhyped” Hurricane Irene this past weekend has faded fast. Now, there’s news that Irene could end up being one of the most expensive hurricanes to strike the United States since records were [...]

Repeating the “destruction creates wealth” fallacy every time there’s a natural disaster doesn’t make it any less of a fallacy.

I concluded long ago that Rush Limbaugh was an insensitive jerk, but with 29 people dead and at least three states dealing with massive flooding, this pretty much takes the cake: On his Monday radio show, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh accused the news media of building up Irene out of their “desire for chaos.” “It [...]

The very question is rather dubious.

Apparently, Michele Bachmann thinks that Hurricane Irene was some kind of message from her God: She hailed the tea party as being common-sense Americans who understand government shouldn’t spend more than it takes in, know they’re taxed enough already and want government to abide by the Constitution. “I don’t know how much God has to [...]

Now that the storm has passed, the media is being accused of over-hyping Hurricane Irene.

Hurricane Irene has been much, much less severe than heralded.

As Hurricane Irene makes its way up the East Coast, Ron Paul says disaster relief isn’t a job for the Federal Government.

With a hurricane bearing down on the East Coast, the House Majority Leader is engaged in an accounting exercise.

Either a bunch of bloggers or one of the world’s smartest economists doesn’t understand economics.

When an earthquake hits, people flood the internet with posts about it–some within 20 or 30 seconds.

It’s called a Haboob, a name that comes from the Sahara Desert where they are quite common, last night though one hit Phoenix, Arizona: A dust storm up to 50 miles wide and a mile high descended on the Phoenix area on Tuesday night, grounding flights, forcing drivers to stop and causing thousands of power [...]

The nuclear disaster that occurred at the Fukushima nuclear power plan in Japan in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami that occurred in April has largely disappeared from the American media, where stories about a murder trial in Florida, the wine cooler induced antics of an Alaska teenager, and a Congressman’s body parts have [...]

Two major American military installations are in serious danger. From rising water, not terrorist attacks.

Should we worry about the deficit when funding “disaster relief”? Should we be funding “disaster relief” at all?

The news from Joplin, Missouri just seems to get worse: JOPLIN, Mo. — About 1,500 people are unaccounted for in this battered city, a Fire Department official said Tuesday, as rescue workers took advantage of a few hours of sunny weather to continue searching for survivors in buildings leveled by the country’s deadliest tornado in [...]

It’s been some time since the nuclear disaster that occurred in the wake of Japan’s earthquake and tsunami has been in the news, but it appears that things still aren’t going well: An adviser to Prime Minister Naoto Kan indicated Sunday that a plan to flood and cool the No. 1 reactor’s containment vessel at [...]

Via Twitter comes this incredible three dimensional image of the massive tornado that struck Tuscaloosa, Alabama last night:

At least 128 are dead, with the toll expected to rise, in the flurry of tornadoes that hit Alabama yesterday.

The American South has been ravaged by tornadoes for the better part of this week, and last night was probably the worst of it: ATLANTA — The death toll in five Southern states rose sharply Thursday morning to nearly 200 after devastating storms ripped through the region, spawning a deadly tornado in downtown Tuscaloosa, Ala., [...]

It’s likely to be the end of the year but before the nuclear crisis in Japan is fully contained: The operator of Japan’s crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has said it expects to bring the crisis under control by the end of the year. Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) aims to reduce radiation leaks in [...]

Radiation from the ongoing nuclear crisis in Japan continues to spread around the world: Washington (CNN) — There is no health risk from consuming milk with extremely low levels of radiation, like those found in Washington state and California, experts said Thursday, echoing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “When we have a disaster like we’ve [...]

Natural disasters in Japan have lessened the supply of pigments necessary to make black paint.

  Michael Friedlander, a nuclear engineer, writes in today’s New York Times: Contrary to the depiction of nuclear operators as bumbling slackers in “The Simpsons,” the typical employee is more like a cross between a jet pilot and a firefighter: highly trained to keep a technically complex system running, but also prepared to be the [...]

The Japanese nuclear crisis is becoming an international issue: A United Nations forecast of the possible movement of the radioactive plume coming from crippled Japanese reactors shows it churning across the Pacific, and touching the Aleutian Islands on Thursday before hitting Southern California late Friday. Health and nuclear experts emphasize that radiation in the plume [...]

Will one of the worst natural disasters to hit Japan in centuries change the relationship between the Japanese government and the people?

The latest casualty estimates out of Japan are quite disheartening: The terrible toll of Japan’s double disaster became clearer today as it emerged as many as 25,000 people could be dead. As rescue crews trawled through mile after mile of tsunami-stricken wasteland, officials from the coastal town of Ishinomaki confirmed that 10,000 of their citizens [...]

President Obama is once again catching flak for his leisure activities.

It seems that practically every story I hear about the very concerning situation in Japan regarding their damaged nuclear plants contains a requisite statement about how those events will affect moves to build new nuclear plants in the US. However, it strikes me that rather than being a blanket cautionary tale about nuclear power in [...]

Can the massive destruction caused by the Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns stimulate the economy?

A March 12 explosion at the earthquake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma, Japan, appears to have caused a reactor meltdown.

Via the Mercury News:  Calif. man swept out to sea taking tsunami pics The Coast Guard searched for a man Friday who was swept out to sea by powerful waves generated by the tsunami in Northern California while taking photos near the mouth of the Klamath River in Del Norte County. Two friends with him [...]

The damage in Japan from today’s quake is dramatic and heartbreaking.

Japan was rocked by a massive earthquake, which in turned spawned a tsunami.

New Zealand’s Stuff has an amazing photo essay, “Before and after the Christchurch earthquake,” using a reveal technique that I haven’t seen before. via Michael Reynolds

Via the BBC:  Brazil flood deaths top 800 with 400 still missing Officials in Brazil say more than 800 people are now known to have died in floods and landslides in the south-east of the country this month. More than 400 people are still missing after torrential rain caused whole hillsides to collapse. [...] The [...]

David Corn tweets, “Can I write the Hurricane-Earl-Is-Obama’s-Hurricane-Katrina piece? Or do I have to wait for Earl to make landfall? What’s protocol?”

Epic flooding in Pakistan is a humanitarian crisis which dwarfs the combined devastation of the 2004 Asian tsunami, the earthquake in Pakistan in 2005, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Why aren’t we paying attention?

The task of getting aid to the 20 million victims of Pakistan’s floods may have just gotten a lot more difficult

New reports indicate that New Orleans Police were given orders to shoot looters amid the chaos after Hurricane Katrina hit the city. Fortunately, that never happened.

The New York Times reports that Africa is currently experiencing a pandemic of a mutated virus affecting the cassava crop. Cassava is Africa’s main staple crop, and is right behind wheat and rice as the number one staple crop in the world. That newcomer, brown streak, is now ravaging cassava crops in a great swath [...]

AP is having great success with its “fact-checking” stories, Plum Line‘s Greg Sargent reports. I asked AP Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier about this, and he told me something fascinating, if not all together unexpected: Their fact-checking efforts are almost uniformly the most clicked and most linked pieces they produce. Journalistic fact-checking with authority, it [...]

It’s been roughly four months since the massive earthquake that struck Haiti and, predictably, the story has slipped from the headlines. Among the other things you may have missed is the fact that a United Nations Commission headed by former President Clinton is now effectively in control of the country: On April 15, the Haitian [...]

A strange one from Inside Higher Ed: The University of Florida has told two master’s students at the Documentary Institute that they cannot use footage they shot in Haiti for their thesis project because the university barred student travel to Haiti, The Gainesville Sun reported. The students say they needed the footage for their film, [...]

Haiti suffered much more devastation from its recent earthquake than Chile did over the weekend from a far more powerful earthquake. Jonathan Franklin and Jeffrey Smith report for WaPo: While the death toll rose steadily to more than 700, according to a midday estimate, it remained a small fraction of the tally from a far [...]

Snopes helpfully sorts reality from fiction: TRUE: You can donate $10 to Red Cross earthquake relief efforts in Haiti by texting the word ‘Haiti’ to 90999. FALSE: Phone companies have agreed to donate 25¢ towards relief efforts in Haiti every time a text message is forwarded. FALSE: Facebook has agreed to donate towards relief efforts [...]

HuffPo’s Laura Bassett reports, under the blaring headline “As Wallets Open For Haiti, Credit Card Companies Take A Big Cut,” that credit cards come with transaction fees. As a massive human tragedy unfolds in Haiti, relief organizations are soliciting credit-card donations through their hotlines and websites. About 97 percent of these donations will actually make [...]