ImaginativePRO Blog

UNREAL VIDEOS OF A PASSENGER CRUISE SHIP BEING ROCKED VIOLENTLY BY THE WAVES OF A HURRICANE

Ever wonder what it's like to be a passenger inside a luxury cruise ship in a full-fledged hurricane. Be sure to watch both videos.

 

The video belows shows the chaos inside the ship as ships furniture, contents and passengers are being knocked around like riding a brahma bull.

COMMENTARY:    I can attest to the power of the sea, having experienced first hand a typhone during my U.S. Navy days.   I can remember how difficult it was to walk from my bunk room to the bridge to relieve the midnight watch on the bridge. This happened in the middle of the night, without any moonlight, so you get very disoriented and quickly became seasick.  No coffee that night.  Passenger cruise ships are supposed to be equipped with stabilizers that keep the ship from listing violently.  However, this passenger cruise ship is being bounced around mercilessly, no wonder the passenger's and contents of the ship are swaying back and forth.  If you know the name of the ship and date this happened, please psot a comment.   

I wonder how the Carnival Lines' Oasis of the Seas, the world's largest passenger cruise ship would fair in a full-fledged hurricane.  

Courtesy of an article dated May 10, 2011 appearing in Before It"s News

 

 

 

THE U.S. NATURAL DISASTERS MAP SHOWS WHERE YOU SHOULDN'T LIVE TO AVOID NATURAL DISASTERS LIKE HURRICANES AND EARTHQUAKES

Not Louisiana or Texas!

After last week's horrifying news of tornadoes that swept across the South, killing over 350 people, you had to wonder: Is anywhere in America safe? On the Mid-Atlantic coast, there's hurricanes, which every year seem to be getting more and more fierce; all across the south, tornadoes; and the West Coast lives under constant threat of a catastrophic earthquake. And enormous tracts of our country face severe droughts.

This astonishing infographic from The New York Times lays all those risks out -- and, most remarkably, compares them all against each other. What you get is a map that shows what cities are safest from and which are most threatened by natural disaster.

The larger the circle, the more people live there. The redder it is, the more risk of natural disaster. As you can see, Texas and Louisiana are pretty terrible places to set up huge cities, given all the immediate threats.

The data was crunched by Sperling's Best Places, and it takes into account the infrequency -- but greater threat -- posed by earthquakes, compared to severe weather.

They also produced this nifty set of heat maps, showing the threats posed by hurricane, earthquake, and tornado:

If anything though, this analysis isn't quite complete because while earthquakes and tornadoes are scary, maybe the most significant long-term threat to a city's well-being is drought. You can easily imagine San Francisco rebuilding after an earthquake (because it has). But if, say, Atlanta, saw a 20-year period of low rains, you can bet that the city's growth would slow and that the city would face an enormous drag on its economy, as a greater and greater share of dollars went to procuring just enough water to get by.

COMMENTARY:   If you are afraid of earthquakes, the west coast of the U.S. is not for you.  The New Madrid earthquake fault line has been very quite for narly 150 years so the Big One is overdue. The last time it woke up it moved the course of the Mississippi River.  States near the New Madrid fault line include Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi.  If you don't like tornado's then you don't want to live in the southwest and central U.S..  If you hate hurricane's then the Gulf states and the states stretching from the Carolina's south to Florida is definitely not for you.  If you don't want to experience heavy snow storms and blizzards, anything east of the Rocky mountains  is definitely not for you.  Having said this, natural disasters are totally unpredictable and can occur almost anywhere when you least expect them.  From the looks of things, Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska and the Dakotas are pretty safe from serious natural disasters.       

Courtesy of an article dated May 6, 2011 appearing in Fast Company Design

INFOGRAPHIC: THE WORLD'S DRINKING WATER CRISIS, POLLUTION AND WATER SCARCITY REACHING EPIDEMIC PROPORTIONS

Every year, we're paying more and more for water as our infrastructure rots and supplies shrink.

Perhaps you're vaguely aware that the world is wracked by drinking water shortages. But as much as we hear that news these days, the problem always seems fairly abstract. Here's aninfographic that tries to solve that dilemma, by showing exactly why water supplies are falling in the world's biggest cities.

The piece was designed by Florian Kräutli, for Visualizing.org'sWorld Water Day Challenge, a $5,000 prize offered by GE for the best visualization of the world's water woes.

Kräutli's infographic has two basic components. One is a bubble chart that shows water price increases in cities across the world. Once you click the individual cities, you get a newsfeed filled with relevant news reports, and you also see the exact price of water, how it's risen in the last five years, and how that compares to population growth:

As you can see, the stats are almost hard to believe. For example, Chicago has seen a 54% rise in water costs, compared to a 2% rise in population. And Chicago is hardly unusual. Washington, D.C. has seen a 44% rise; New York, 46%. And all while population has remained basically flat. (In Honduras, one town has seen water use grow by 1,617%.) Those rising costs reflect both diminishing water supplies and an aging infrastructure stretched by overuse.

Given those shocking facts, what's probably most surprising is how little attention our water woes receive. But switch up the chart a little, and you see why: Even though water costs are spiraling, water remains supremely cheap in the U.S. Here's how much various cities pay in water, relative to GDP:

COMMENTARY:   What the above maps do not show is how safe is the world's drinking water supply.  We are so lucky to live in America, where we have an abundance of safe drinking water.  However, many parts of the world do not have safe drinking water.  

As you can readily see from the following World Water Pollution Map, pollution continues to be a problem, especially in industrialized nations, where a lot of pollutants are finding their way into our river's and oceans.

Courtesy of an article dated March 14, 2011 appearing in Fast Company Design

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INFOGRAPHIC: A GLOBAL WARMING MAP THAT SHOWS HOW COUNTRIES ARE BEING AFFECTED IN 2010 AND WILL BE BY 2030

Those who pollute the least also stand to lose the most.

Westerners like you and me are the alpha consumers of the global marketplace -- never in the world's history have humans ever had so much. Which sounds awesome, except we know now that everything we consume comes with the cost of the carbons emitted to produce it.

Now, if the world were fair, we'd be the ones eventually footing that bill. But you know what they say about life, and this vitally important map shows exactly how true that old saw is. The ones least responsible for climate change are also the ones who pay the most dearly.

The map, produced by Jason Samson, a PhD candidate in McGill University’s Department of Natural Resource Sciences, provides a quantitative measure of climate-change impacts; the red spots indicate the places which stand to be damaged the most.

What follows just might be the most succinct, elegant summary of global warming's impacts ever created.

Created by DARA, a humanitarian research outfit, the 2010 Climate Vulnerability Monitor is a sprawling model that predicts, for every country in the world, the impacts of global warming in 2030. It's meant to serve as a guide to areas in crucial need of aid, and in so-doing, highlights a stark tragedy: Those who emit the most will suffer least, meaning the world's great powers have little incentive to address the problem.

Consider, for example, Africa, which has the lowest per capita carbon emissions in the world. DARA's chart looks at four different areas of climate impact:

• Health, which can suffer due to rises in Malaria and other diseases. 
• Weather, such as severe storms. 
• Habitat, which covers populated lands under threat. 
• Farming, which can be devastated by desertification and shifting weather patterns.

Those four areas are represented by different icons:

• Heart icon = Health 
• Hurricane = Weather
• House  = Habitat
• Grain Silo = Farming

The severity of global warming is depicted by colored dots: 

• Dark Green - Least impacted.
• Lime Green - Lightly impacted
• Yellow - Moderately impacted.
• Orange - Severely impacted.
• Red - Catastrophic.

The bigger and redder the corresponding dot, the worse things are. Impacts are divided into present day and a projection for 2030. What you see is that almost no region of Africa won't be severely affected:

Asia, meanwhile, fares a bit better -- but again, it's the most economically vibrant countries, such as Japan and Australia, which escape the worst impacts:

Europe does a little better still -- in fact, only Eastern Europe is under dire threat. Western Europe, meanwhile, is relatively unscathed:

Which brings us home. While America doesn't have quite the rosy outlook as Western Europe, we're surrounded by countries who can only envy how well we'll fare:

You'll see that they're clustered around the equator, for a simple reason: In places that are already hot, it's difficult to farm and get enough potable water. When temperatures rise, those difficulties grow exponentially. As Samson notes:

Take Somalia for instance. Because it’s so hot there, it’s already very difficult to grow things, and it will only become more difficult if the temperature rises. It’s also clear that Somalia is not a big contributor of greenhouse gas to the atmosphere. Now thanks to this map, we have concrete quantitative evidence of the disparity between the causes and the consequences of climate change at a national level.

But I'd argue that the greatest looming problem lies not in the red zones, but in the cool blue swathes of China. China is already the world's largest carbon emitter. Meanwhile their per capita incomes are tiny, but are growing at astonishing speeds. As the Chinese assume the earning power of Westerners, their carbon emissions will swell to staggering levels.

If this chart is right the Chinese won't feel global warming's effects as keenly as Africans, for example. Climate change will continue to feel like someone else's problem -- and so, like us, the Chinese can just go on getting rich. You can't blame them, and that's the tragedy.

COMMENTARY:   From the looks of things, with about half of the continental U.S. hot and very cold (up tp 18 degrees below zero).  China will fare about the same.  Western Europe will come out smelling like a rose.  I feel sorry for Africa.  They are already having problems with fresh water and food.   Looks like Rio de Janeiro will be a lot cooler.  The Carioca's are not going to like that.I wonder what those who don't believe in global warming will be saying in 2030.   We definitely need to move towards energy self-sufficiency and get off carbon-based fuels.

What is lacking from the DARA and McGill University studies, is the global effects of rising sea levels due to global warming.   According to the GlobalFloodMap.org, if ocean sea levels were to rise just 18 inches most of the U.S.'s coastal areas would be under water.  This includes all of the Eastern Seaboard from Main to Florida.   Millions of people would be displaced.   If you want to know how rising sea levels due to global warming with affect your continent, country or city click HERE. 

Courtesy of an article dated March 9, 2011 appearing in Fast Company Design and an article dated December 15, 2010 appearing in Fast Company Design and the GlobalFloodMap.org  

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