Man Made Natural Disasters

Technocrat

Man Made Natural Disasters

zogger

Thu Jul 31 18:48:00 -0700 2008

Environment

manage

Not a rehash of global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions, but a list of other sorts of man made natural disasters that are possible, and some that could be possible in the near future.

ed.z.: there's an obvious big one they left out, man made disasters from intentional or accidental forest fires. Anyone else have some likely candidates? How about genetically modified whatevers? The potential there is large for a serious "whoops!" Some people already consider the "roundup ready" canola or rapeseed to be a "superweed". And just fooling around with moving normal species here and there, thousands of miles from where they aren't adapted and in balance? Been a lot of that invasive species disaster stuff so far. Introducing chemicals into the environment and finding out later they were a bit more toxic and long lasting and pervasive than thought, like MTBE? Got any more?

Man Made Natural Disasters

mengel

Fri Aug 01 08:00:13 -0700 2008
manage

Hmm....

Overfarming -> desertification

Plagues from species migration, mutated medicinal viruses, etc. or spread by manmade travel, or accidental release from military experimentation

Hurricane damage due to manmade damage to river deltas

And everybody's favorite, Global Warming increasing incidence of all sorts of severe weather.

Man Made Natural Disasters

zogger

Fri Aug 01 11:34:37 -0700 2008
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That over farming is a good one, cutting down trees for the grazing animals in Africa in particular that leads to desert expansion. About as nuts as it gets. Now I like our herd, but I would *never* go that far, I would just reduce the numbers if we did not have adequate grazing and water. All the way to zero if that is what it took. Like, what good is having 100 goats/cows/sheep/camels whatever if you only got feed for 5? I know it is a cultural thing there and one of the few ways to build wealth, not a lot of jobs kicking around the desert, but really, a healthy and well fed stock critter is just worth more than a dozen scrawny sickly ones, plus it is just cruel to starve your animals that way, and it is really bad to make your grazing area a desert. This is something where cheap laptops and wireless access could help some of the poorest farmers on the planet, just get some real information to them to help dispel some old myths about how to go about doing things.

And I am not letting western over exploitation styled farming off the hook, just pointing out where the desertification is hitting the hardest now and where the people need the most help.

And we can mention over fishing, too much market hunting for bush meat, ecologically unsound mining and logging practices, etc. It all adds up. You can work with nature, but pure rape loot and pillage methods just won't work for long.