[Steve McGhee via Super Punch]

It seems that once Roland Emmerich was done assembling all the CG components for destroying the world and gathering a full complement of "Hey, it's that guy!" actors, he realized 2012 had no script, and decided to cull characters and situations from every other disaster movie ever made. Despite its massive scale of destruction, 2012 will be familiar to anyone whose seen any movie about an earthquake, volcano, aquatic disaster, or celestial body striking the Earth.

2012 follows the parallel stories of several characters at the end of the world. John Cusack plays the sort of fellow John Cusack always plays, though this time he's also a struggling writer whose only novel sold roughly 400 copies. And Amanda Peet plays his Amanda Peet-esque ex-wife, who is dating a plastic surgeon named Gordon. Gordon is all kinds of perfect, adores Amanda, and is great with her kids, but of course she's only with him because she can't be with John Cusack. Oh, and John and Amanda (or Jackson and Kate Curtis as they've been named for the sake of the film) have perfectly generic children. There's the requisite daughter with a quirk (she's overly fond of hats) and the son who's mad at his father (and insists on calling him by his first name).

As it turns out, years earlier, an Indian scientist discovered that solar flares are causing mutant neutrinos to microwave the Earth's core, which will cause the tectonic plates to shift and the Earth's waters to boil (but somehow doesn't cause us humans to explode). He warns his friend and fellow scientist Adrian Helmsley (a blandly earnest Chiwetel Ejiofor), who in turn warns a Washington bureaucrat that the world is ending. World leaders are informed, contingency plans are made, precious art is stowed away, and important people mysteriously die. But the hoi polloi are left in the dark, and people in California gradually get used to the regular miniquakes and surface cracks that plague their streets.

After a chance encounter with a crackpot conspiracy nut (Woody Harrelson), and hearing rumblings of the aforementioned contingency plan, Jackson realizes just in the nick of time that the world is, in fact, ending. And through a mixture of superhuman feats and incredibly unlikely bouts of luck, puts his family on the path to safety.

Although 2012's main concern is Jackson and his family, the film shifts perspectives and introduces us to a range of characters, all straight from central casting: a stocky Russian billionaire, a trophy wife who loves her purse dog above all, a pair of horrid children who look like they should be touring Willy Wonka's factory, a world-weary and noble President, the beautiful and intelligent First Daughter, a young Tibetan monk, an interracial jazz duo. It's too few characters and too Western-centric to convey an epic scale, but too many for us to particularly care who lives and who dies. Caring is irrelevant anyway; following classic disaster movie tropes will give you a pretty accurate picture of who makes it to the end of the movie.

All in all, it's a very Hollywood view of how the world ends. With the exception of a few token minorities, it's American and European characters we're tracking, American and European high culture people are trying to save, and American and European monuments we're seeing destroyed. Yes, Emmerich didn't get a shot at the Kaaba, but surely there were other non-natural monuments he could have thought to break apart. There's a lot of menfolk making decisions while the women hang out with the children, and a lot of nice speeches about respecting all humanity while Western leaders are calling all the shots. Perhaps Emmerich is being cynical about the end of the world — suggesting that even then, Westerners and Western culture will get all the breaks — but if the non-Western characters fight as hard for their lives, we don't see it on screen.

But, if you can shut down the centers of your brain that demand logic, storytelling, or characters who aren't secretly Superman, 2012 can be an enjoyable experience. We were promised beautiful footage of the world falling apart, and on that point, 2012 delivers. Whole cities break apart, monuments crumple, volcanos shoot up from the Earth, and waves pull supercarriers from their watery homes and crash them into buildings. Save for a few odd seams, the computer-generated effects look incredible and there's something strangely satisfying about watching things break down so completely. And Emmerich recognizes that the apocalypse doesn't just demand disaster porn; it needs moments of absurdity as well. He manages to make room for some offbeat sight gags, some of which are genuinely funny and surprising. 2012 might actually be enjoyed most thoroughly on mute.

Emmerich has announced his plans to follow 2012 with a television series, 2013, which would pick up after the end of the movie. Perhaps now that Emmerich has finished blowing the world to smithereens, we can get back to characters and drama, and the year 2013 can prove more interesting than the year 2012.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the outage was extensive but also fairly shortlived:

Power was returned to some areas that were partially blacked out in as little as 15 minutes. In regions that were completely without electricity - which included Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Espirito Santo and Mato Grosso do Sul - it took as long as four hours.

Tuesday night's power outage took 28,800 megawatts out of the system, plunging several of the country's largest cities into darkness, the ONS said. That was more than 50% of available power generation available on the grid at the time.

The power outage affected 18 Brazilian states, starting at 0015 GMT (10:15 p.m. local time). The blackout caused traffic jams, closed metro stations and trapped people in elevators. Power was also briefly cut to Paraguay but was quickly restored.

But what's truly interesting is that there is no real explanation for how the grid went down so hard. Bad weather around Itabera, where there is a major transmission station, could have caused it. Some experts claimed lightning strikes caused the blackout, but the country's space agency says the strikes were too far from the transmission station to have affected it. Government representatives say they've closed the book on the case, even though it remains unsolved.

A previous blackout in Brazil was blamed on hackers, but turned out to be due to soot in insulators.

It's possible that the electrical grid infrastructure degrades in other nations, we can expect massive national blackouts to become the norm.

With a budget estimated to be somewhere in the region of $50 million already, and a weekly running cost that may be in the budget of $1 million a week, Julie Taymor's musical version of Marvel's superhero may be too expensive to be allowed to fail. That might explain the addition of Michael Cohl as new lead producer. Cohl, a music industry veteran and former chairman of Live Nation, brings with him experience with ridiculous demands for stage sets and dealing with budgets out of control. Although it likely had nothing to do with him, the announcement on the same day that the show has found its Peter Parker in Reeve Carney, who has previously worked with Taymor on her movie version of The Tempest, does at least give the impression of the show slowly coming together.

Sadly, it's looking increasingly unlikely to come together quickly enough to make the projected February 2010 opening date; rumors are now that people should expect a midyear premiere.

'Spider-Man' lands producer, Peter Parker [Variety]

By the time Jimina hit Mexico, it was no longer technically a hurricane, though it still did huge amounts of damage. Image 1 shows Jimena at full category 4 hurricane strength in late August, and the other two satellite photos show the diminished tropical storm as it lashed out at Mexico in early September. The picture of the storm on the ground is in Baja California.

Hurricane Jimena News at Huffington Post

Satellite photos by NOAA/Getty Images. Photo of the storm in Baja California by Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty Images.

It's true, the storms look menacing, but by the time they hit land in Hawaii, Enrique will be all but broken up, and Felicia will be a tropical depression, bringing lots of rain, but not the damaging winds of a hurricane. In this image, Felicia is a category 3 hurricane, and Enrique is a weakening tropical storm.

Granted, these two images are of storms that aren't likely to cause too much damage, but it feels strange getting excited about pictures of disasters and dangerous storms. XKCD also commented on this "disaster voyeurism" phenomenon. I don't know, though... I still love these stunning storm images.

Hurricane Felicia and Tropical Storm Enrique [NASA Earth Observatory]

The study, published today in PLoS One, is the result of work on climate modeling based on likely climate change in California's Central Valley. Researchers project that the region will lose more than half its winter chill by the year 2100. From the study:

Winter chill determines the ability of many deciduous trees from temperate climates to break their dormancy in the spring. Each species or cultivar has a specific chilling requirement, which if not met results in erratic growth patterns and economically unsuccessful fruit or nut production.

The authors used modeled temperature records for two past and 18 future climate scenarios and calculated the amount of safe winter chill that will be exceeded in 90 percent of all years for each scenario. Their findings indicate that imminent climatic change is likely to make most of California's Central Valley, which annually produces 1.2 million hectares of tree crops with chilling requirements and produces valued at about 9 billion dollars, unsuitable for many crops such as walnuts, cherries, prunes and peaches. Pistachios and almonds might also be affected.

What this means is that one of California's greatest sources of income will be strongly affected. Plus, many other regions will suffer since so many communities depend on California exports for fruits and nuts throughout the year.

Professor Minghua Zhang, whor worked on the study, said:

Depending on the pace of winter chill decline, the consequences for California's fruit and nut industries could be devastating.

Get ready for the post-farm California apocalypse. Without fruit exports, the main export from Central California could become some futuristic crystal meth. Of course if we're lucky, scientists will come up with GMO fruits and nuts that can bloom even with warmer winters.

via PLoS One

Image by Bill Sharp.

Galaxy Quest: Granted, the worst thing that happened at the actual convention celebrating the long-cancelled (and nonexistent) TV show Galaxy Quest was its star getting wasted and telling off a fan. But a long ways away, the Thermians were experiencing the minor crisis of genocidal war. For them, the convention is a bit of a salvation, as it puts them in touch with the actor they mistakenly believe to be the heroic Capitain Peter Taggart.

Futurama "Where No Fan Has Gone Before": Yes, the slaughter of all Star Trek fans (whose conventions had evolved into religious ceremonies) was pretty horrible, but the cast of the original Star Trek series seemed more miffed by the actions of noncorporeal fanboy Melllvar, who stages the most annoying Star Trek convention ever, and forces them to battle the crew of Planet Express.

Family Guy "Not All Dogs Go to Heaven": After watching the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation field a litany of irrelevant fan questions, a frustrated Stewie builds a transporter and kidnaps the actors to stage his own personal Star Trek convention (taking a page, it seems, from Futurama's Melllvar). And, in the spirit of the show, he kills off Denise Crosby early on.

Family Guy's Stewie meets Star Trek The Next Generation from Work Avoidance on Vimeo.

CSI "A Space Oddity" and "Fur and Loathing": Some fans will take drastic measures to keep their favorite shows from getting remade. In "A Space Oddity," a filmmaker looking to remake the cult TV show Astro Quest turns up murdered. As if that weren't a sufficiently obvious reference to Battlestar Galactica, Grace Park, Kate Vernon, Rekha Sharma, and Ron D. Moore all have cameos.

Perhaps more notorious is the episode "Fur and Loathing," where a dead murder victim is found wearing a raccoon fursuit, leading the CSI team to a furry convention. But it's portrayed as less a fan convention than an opportunity for costumed attendees to "yiff" one another.

Mr. Monk in Outer Space by Lee Goldberg: How do you get away with murdering a science fiction creator? Dress as one of the show's most popular characters and escape into the convention. That's the set-up for the fifth Monk novel, where Monk must investigate the creator of the fictional scifi drama Beyond Earth, and rely on his agoraphobic fanboy brother to help identify the killer.

Bones "The Princess and the Pear": When a booth babe from a science fiction and fantasy convention is found decomposing in a nearby sewer pipe, her fellow convention-goers seem less concerned for her well-being than for the fate of a sword she owned, a prop from an early fantasy film. The otherwise geeky team is out of their element here, relying on gloomy intern Colin Fisher and wunderkind psychologist Lance Sweets (who, amusingly enough, dons a redshirt Star Trek uniform) to infiltrate the con.

Numb3rs "Graphic": Admittedly, this episode of Numb3rs has occupies a soft spot in my heart, and not for the theft-of-priceless-comic-book-ends-in-murder primary plotline. It's because in addition to Numb3rs star David "Mr. Universe" Krumholt, it features Wil Wheaton as a douchebag collector.

Bimbos of the Death Sun by Sharyn McCrumb: Sharyn McCrumb's novel is an object lesson for all crotchety creators. Appin Dungannon is a fantasy author whose temper is so legendary that his fans attend conventions just to watch him throw furniture. When the small-statured author winds up dead, a hard science fiction author (implausibly named James O. Mega) has to figure out if one of Dungannon's fans took his insults to heart.

Deep Secret by Diana Wynne Jones: Jones' novel brings the entire multiverse down on an unsuspecting scifi and fantasy convention. Rupert is a Magid, a sort of magical lobbyist aiming to make Earth more magic-friendly. When his mentor dies, Rupert must take on an apprentice, and he gathers all the likely candidates at science fiction convention. Naturally, when things go awry, all multiverse breaks loose, leaving the convention vulnerable to rampant centaurs and assassins.

Atomic Betty "Cosmic Comicon": Conventions just wouldn't be the same without the occasional supervillain attack. When Atomic Betty's pal Noah publishes Atomic Chick a comic book based on her adventures, Dr. Cerebral becomes confused by a fan cosplaying "Dr. Brainy," and launches an attack on the convention. But, fortunately, a group of cosplayers portraying Atomic Chick make short work of him.

Link:

Sandman "The Doll's House": The "cereal convention" described in the second arc of Neil Gaiman's epic comic series isn't precisely a fan convention, but it's too weird and disturbing to ignore. Like any other group of professionals, serial killers apparently need to meet, hold panels, and swap trade secrets. But woe unto any tourist who inadvertently wanders into panels titled, "Women in Serial Killing" or "There is No Sanity Clause."

Power Rangers: Dino Thunder "Drawn into Danger": Who knew that Artists' Alley could be weaponized? The Power Rangers run into typical trouble at a comic convention, where their nemesis/high school principal hands a famous comic book artist a magical pen that traps the Rangers in a superpowered battle with the latest monster of the week, Fridgia.

Roswell "The Convention": It's no surprise that the city of Roswell, New Mexico, would attract the occasional alien enthusiast convention. And, given that Jonathan Frakes numbers among Roswell's executive producers, it's hardly shocking that Commander Riker would make a guest appearance. What couldn't be anticipated is the bloodshed that ensues when a conspiracy theorist meets up with an actual alien.

The Simpsons "Mayored to the Mob": Generally, the worst thing to hit Springfield fan conventions is the Comic Book Guy and his perpetually superior attitude. But during one ""Bi-Mon-Sci-Fi-Con," a riot sparks, threatening to kill Star Wars actor Mark Hamill. And in, a first for celebrity guest stars on The Simpsons, Hamill finds Homer Jay Simpson is his only hope.

National Geographic explains:

Yellowstone is a volcano, and not just any volcano. The oldest, most famous national park in the United States sits squarely atop one of the biggest volcanoes on Earth . . . The last three super-eruptions have been in Yellowstone itself. The most recent, 640,000 years ago, was a thousand times the size of the Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980, which killed 57 people in Washington. But numbers do not capture the full scope of the mayhem. Scientists calculate that the pillar of ash from the Yellowstone explosion rose some 100,000 feet, leaving a layer of debris across the West all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Pyroclastic flows-dense, lethal fogs of ash, rocks, and gas, superheated to 1,470 degrees Fahrenheit-rolled across the landscape in towering gray clouds. The clouds filled entire valleys with hundreds of feet of material so hot and heavy that it welded itself like asphalt across the once verdant landscape. And this wasn't even Yellowstone's most violent moment. An eruption 2.1 million years ago was more than twice as strong, leaving a hole in the ground the size of Rhode Island.

It's worth reading the rest of this article - it beautifully captures the pyrotechnic scientific mystery that is Yellowstone Park. Photographer Mark Thiessen captured the blowholes where Yellowstone lets off scalding, mineral-rich water.

via National Geographic (Thanks Marilyn Terrell!)

UC Berkeley seismologists Robert M. Nadeau and Aurélie Guilhem examined data gleaned from instruments buried deep in the earth around the Parkfield stretch of the San Andreas fault. What they discovered was that the area was constantly being rocked by small tremors from far underground, and that the number of these tremors had escalated greatly in the wake of two recent earthquakes.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser. In the map here, according to the researchers:

Parkfield is at the northern end of a locked segment of the San Andreas Fault (SAF) that, in 1857, ruptured south from Monarch Peak (MP) in the great 7.8 magnitude Ft. Tejon quake. As a result of nearby earthquakes in 2003 and 2004, tremors developed under Cholame and Monarch Peak. The black dots pinpoint 1250 well-located tremors. The square boxes are 30 kilometers (19 miles) on a side.

Color contours give regional shear-stress change at 20 km depth from the Parkfield earthquake (green segment) along the SAF. The thrust-type San Simeon earthquake rupture is represented by the gray rectangle and line with triangles labeled SS. The currently locked Cholame segment is about 63 km long (solid portion of the arrow) and is believed capable of rupturing on its own in a magnitude 7 earthquake. The gray lines within the Cholame box bound the west quadrant, where quasiperiodic episodes predominate.

According to a release from UC Berkeley:

The researchers conclude that the increased rate of tremors may indicate that stress is accumulating more rapidly than in the past along this segment of the San Andreas Fault, which is at risk of breaking like it did in 1857 to produce the great 7.8 magnitude Fort Tejon earthquake. Strong quakes have also occurred just to the northwest along the Parkfield segment of the San Andreas about every 20 to 30 years.

Added Nadeau:

We've shown that earthquakes can stimulate tremors next to a locked zone, but we don't yet have evidence that this tells us anything about future quakes. But if earthquakes trigger tremors, the pressure that stimulates tremors may also stimulate earthquakes.

He noted that there were tremors before a recent Parkfield quake, and that he's hopeful we'll get a similar burst of tremors before future quakes. Those tremors could be an advanced warning system, after more research reveals what causes them and what their exact relationship is to quakes. The new research Nadeau has done, he says, strengthens the connection between elevated levels of tremors and earthquakes.

That means the San Andreas might be ready to snap. Or it could just mean that we have a lot more to learn about tremors.

via UC Berkeley

Photo of earthquake damage to Shinkan Dam via Ross Boulanger.

During science fiction's Golden Age (roughly, 1935-65), scores of novels and stories depicted vast natural disasters. If 9/11 was the real-life version of a New York catastrophe we'd seen in SF many times before, Al Gore's melting-glaciers slideshow in An Inconvenient Truth was, uncannily, only the latest of many global-warming cataclysms about which SF fans had read in novels about, for example, sea-dwelling aliens (John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes), nuclear testing (Charles Eric Maine's The Tide Went Out), even the stalling-out of the Earth's rotation (Brian Aldiss's Hothouse).

J.G. Ballard's 1960s disaster tetralogy, and Golden-Age classics like George R. Stewart's Earth Abides helped legitimate and popularize the eco-disaster novel. But the writing of the natural disaster, as Blanchot might put it, is a pre-Golden Age phenomenon. Richard Jefferies' 1885 romance After London vividly depicted an England that had reverted to neo-medieval civilization after a Planet X-like "dark body" disrupted the Earth's climate; and Camille Flammarion's popular Omega: The Last Days of the World (1893-94 French, 1897 English) imagined the dissipation of the Earth's atmosphere after a comet strike. The Panama Canal project also sparked fears: In 1890, H.C.M.W.'s The Decline and Fall of the British Empire was among the first of many portrayals of the disastrous effects of merging the Atlantic with the Pacific via the Canal. Still, it wasn't until the early 20th century that the eco-catastrophe emerged as a literary sub-genre.

Here's a rundown — in no particular order — of 10 eco-catastrophes from SF's Pre-Golden Age (1904-33) that are particularly enjoyable and/or significant. Those influential examples on which I focused in my post on PGA apocalypses aren't written up here.

1) PLANT-KILLING VIRUS, in J.J. Connington's Nordenholt's Million (1923; 1948 reprint shown here).
As denitrifying bacteria inimical to plant growth spread around the world, causing agricultural blight, British car manufacturer Jack Flint is invited to become director of operations at a huge survivalist colony located in England's Clyde Valley. Superficially, Nordenholt's Million is a direct precursor of John Christopher's The Death of Grass (1956), and many other Golden-Age SF novels. [PGA fictions on the same topic include: Edgar Wallace's The Green Rust (Aug. 7-28, 1919), and Charles J. Finger's The Spreading Stain (1927).] But Connington is also issuing a timely warning — he was writing between the two world wars — about right-wing politicians and rapacious businessmen eager to use any disaster as an excuse to dispense with democracy, liberty, and justice.

Flint discovers that his employer, the ruthless plutocrat Stanley Nordenholt, has blackmailed the country's politicians in order to establish his stronghold, of which he becomes dictator in all but name. What's more, Nordenholt's henchmen purposely wreck what remains of British civilization, leading to scenes of horrific mass violence and agony; and the colony's workers are treated like serfs. (Does this sound a lot like Ayn Rand's 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, except not so favorably disposed to the industrialists and capitalists? Does to me, too.) In the end, the plant-killing plague comes to the end of its cycle. But things may never get back to normal. Nordenholt's collectivized serfs - Connington was also worried about the Soviet Revolution - snap. They refuse to work, blow up the factories on which their fragile community depends, and join weird religious cults. Fun facts: Connington was the pseudonym of Alfred Walter Stewart, the British chemist who coined the term isobar as complementary to isotope.

2) METEORITE, in Fred MacIsaac's The Hothouse World (serialized Feb. 21-March 28, 1931; 1950 reprint shown here).
George Putnam, a science student who's been in suspended animation since 1951, wakes up a century later in a technologically advanced utopia. He discovers that the domed city in which he now lives was built and stocked - by a foresighted group of scientists and their families - shortly before a comet struck the Earth in '87. Much of the planet's atmosphere was dissipated, and human and animal life perished in the new Ice Age. Alas, the utopian city turns out to be repressive (hello, Logan's Run, countless others). When it becomes apparent that there are habitable areas outside the dome, the population riots and Putnam attempts to escape, along with a dissident scientist and - of course - the president's beautiful daughter.

3) DYING SUN, in Gabriel De Tarde's Underground Man (w. 1884, p. 1896 in the Revue internationale de sociologie as Fragment d'histoire future, p. 1905 in English).
By the year 2489, Plato's Republic has been realized, for better or worse: a worldwide neo-Hellenic culture of sophistication and creativity dominates; selective breeding is practiced; and weak and stupid individuals of every race are sent to fight wars. As a result, intuition and survival skills have been bred out of the population. So when astronomers determine that the sun is going out, the citizens of this dystopian utopia rapidly lose the will to go on.

A sudden drop in temperature wipes out entire populations; the world is covered in ice and snow. Europe's survivors flee to the Sahara and the Middle East, where the only plan their greatest minds can devise is an inadequate one: a huge, furnace-heated concrete bunker, situated over a rich coal deposit. "Of the beautiful human race, so strong and noble, formed by so many centuries of effort and genius by such an extended and intelligent selection, there would soon have been only left... a few hundreds of haggard and trembling specimens, unique trustees of the last ruins of what had once been civilization." [I should point out that the survivalist bunker mentality is presented more favorably in other PGA fictions, including Clare Winger Harris's "A Runaway World" (July 1926), Morrison Colladay's "When the Moon Fell" (1929), and John and Ruth Vassos's Ultimo (1930).] Humankind is saved when a fellow named Miltiades, whom the narrator describes as "one of those who piously guard, deep in their heart, the seeds of dissidence" (even in a utopian social order, that is), urges the others to tunnel beneath the surface of the planet, closer to the earth's warm center.

Once life has been established underground, a new civilization evolves. While every spring a few individuals who desire engagement with "nature" voyage to the surface of the planet, never to return, the rest of the populace prefer to contemplate artistic and scientific representations of the natural world. Recordings of natural life on the planet's surface are discovered, but the underground men and women decide that artificial versions of these sights and sounds are far superior. Tarde's Underground Man is, in other words, a prequel of sorts to Plato's Myth of the Cave. So when a "madman" reports that he's been to the surface of the planet, where he's seen a revived sun melting the ice, the reader is not surprised when many of the citizens of this overly idealistic (in the Platonic sense) civilization refuse to investigate.

Fun facts: Tarde was a French sociologist, criminologist, and social philosopher who gave us such influential concepts as the "group mind" and economic psychology. Bruno Latour describes Tarde as "a truly daring but also, I have to admit, totally undisciplined mind."

4) GREEN TECHNOLOGY, in Andre Maurois' The Next Chapter: The War Against the Moon (1927; in English translation, 1928).
A meditation on the gullibility of the masses, and the dangerous influence of newspapers. Ben Tabrit, a great Moroccan scientist, invents a revolutionary "wind-accumulator"; this is in 1963, during a period of worldwide peace engineered by five benevolent newspaper barons known as the Dictators of Public Opinion. Thanks to a combination of worldwide boredom, the prospect of unemployment in the coal and oil industries (because of wind energy), and squabbling among nations about ownership of the world's windiest places, a new world war seems imminent.

Two of the DPOs conspire to avert war by uniting the human race against a common outside enemy. (Hello, Alan Moore's Ozymandias.) The enemy? The imaginary inhabitants of the Moon, whom hoax newspaper stories soon accuse of wiping out remote villages around the world with powerful death rays. All goes well, and a Worldwide Wind Company is established. But then the scientist Tabrit invents a death ray of his own, and fires it at the Moon. Unfortunately, it turns out that the Moon really is inhabited, and the Moon-men blast the city of Darmstadt. The Earth retaliates. The novella's final sentences: "On February 7th, the cities of Elbeuf (France), Bristol, Rhode Island, and Upsala (Sweden) were burned to ashes by the Moon. The era of Inter-Planetary War had begun." Fun facts: Maurois was a distinguished French litterateur. Other eco-catastrophes involving aliens: Homer Eon Flint's Out of the Moon (Dec. 1923 - Jan 1924), in which Lunarians plan to cause a solar flare that will incinerate or severely damage the Earth; and Flint's The King of Conserve Island (Oct. 12, 1918), in which a war between Earth and its Jupiter colony is averted by a device that makes the sun go dim.

5) CAPITALIST SCHEME, in William Wallace Cook's "Tales of Twenty Hundred" (serialized Dec. 1911-May 1912).
In 2050, financial and industrial magnate Vincent Blake and his fiancée, Arlie Fortescue, dodge one kidnapping and assassination attempt after another as Blake proceeds with plans to stabilize climatic conditions by "straightening the axis of the planet." Although Cook, a prolific dime novelist, tended to satirize Vernian romances whenever he turned to SF, in these six linked stories he's earnestly imagining a future world improved by technology in the hands of benevolent capitalists.

But is Cook in earnest? The Blake character would today be portrayed as a villain, while the kidnappers and hit men - who are agents of the Federated States of South America, the leaders of which are fully aware that Blake's supposedly benevolent plans will benefit only his backers (the US, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, Scandinavia, Japan), and will create chaos elsewhere - would be portrayed as heroes. Even at the time, fictional capitalists with climate-change schemes were suspect; for example, the shady protagonists of William Hawley Smith's 1904 SF novel, The Promoters, who speculate in land that will become valuable once they've thawed the Arctic, are villainous. So are the Boston Irish crooks who attempt to profit from their advance knowledge of a chlorophyll-killing plague about to be visited on Earth from outer space, in George Allan England's 1918 The Nebula of Death.

So don't be fooled by Cook's tacked-on happy ending, in which Martians - who heartily approve of Blake's climatic-change plans - appear out of nowhere in order to rescue Vincent and Arlie from a trap. This isn't, in other words, a romance-of-capitalism fable, or a straightforward Edisonade (like, say, George Griffith's 1906 The Great Weather Syndicate, in which a robber baron and British inventor battle a sinister syndicate and also Kaiser Wilhelm in their race to control the world's weather). Instead, "Tales of Twenty Hundred" is - or so I'd like to believe - a comedy of the blackest sort. Fun fact: Cook cranked out 66,000 words a week, thanks to a semi-aleatory writing mode of writing whose secrets he later revealed in a gonzo fiction-writing manual delightfully titled Plotto.

6) THE PANAMA CANAL, in Louis Pope Gratacap's The Evacuation of England: The Twist in the Gulf Stream (1908).
Despite geologists' warnings that the Panama Canal will cause the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to merge, with cataclysmic results, the Canal is finished. (Canal enthusiast Teddy Roosevelt is one of the book's characters.) Sure enough, entire countries must be evacuated because of climatic changes: "The sheltering power of the Gulf Stream was removed from Great Britain, and the frost of the Arctic world, so long repulsed, but now no longer compressed within the Arctic circle, expanded with instantaneous certainty, spreading the shroud of its killing cold over the same latitudes in Europe that for ages had slept beneath its spell in America." The novel's rather drippy protagonist, a businessman named Leacraft, is an eyewitness.

The Evacuation of England isn't thrilling. As E.F. Bleiler notes, "Leacraft's insipid romance is buried amid overlong didactic digressions." But its depiction of a new Ice Age is eerily realistic. Fun facts: Gratacap was a naturalist associated with New York's American Museum of Natural History for over 40 years; when he died in 1917, he was head of the museum's departments of mineralogy and conchology. Other SF novels: The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars (1903), The Mayor of New York (1910), The New Northland (1915), and the supernatural future tale The End - How the Great War was Stopped (1917). He also wrote works of theology (e.g., The Analytics of a Belief in a Future Life) and politics (e.g., Why the Democrats Must Go). READ IT

7) MARTIAN INVASION, in Austin Hall's "The Man Who Saved the Earth" (serialized Dec. 13, 1919).
Opalescent globes of force appear across the world, removing large chunks of land and ocean. One such globe, in the course of sucking up enormous quantities of ocean water, causes the Gulf Stream to be diverted, among other changes with radical effects. Charles Huyck, a maverick scientist, realizes that Martians - whose planet is dying, as proposed by Percival Lowell - are stealing Earth's natural resources. Devising a long-range solar weapon, Huyck disables the Martians' globe-creating apparatus. Fun fact: The Blind Spot, a novel that Hall wrote with fellow hack Homer Eon Flint, has been called (by Damon Knight) "the worst science fiction novel ever published."

8) MAD SCIENTIST, in Murray Leinster's "A Thousand Degrees Below Zero" (serialized July 15, 1919).
August, of a year in the near future: An extreme cold wave strikes New York, blocking the harbor with ice. Similar events occur in Gibraltar, Yokohama, elsewhere. A villainous scientist named Wladislas Varrhus takes credit for the cold weather, and threatens worse if he is not recognized as ruler of the world. Varrhus is ignored, until authorities determine that he has, indeed, mastered liquid hydrogen and superconductivity. Efforts are made to stop him, but they fail. Finally, Varrhus's sinister black plane is shot down in an air battle. More PGA eco-catastrophes caused by mad scientists: Burnie L. Bevill's "Restoring the Moon" (Sept. 1922), Leinster's "The Storm That Had To Be Stopped" (March 1, 1930), and Edmond Hamilton's "The Plant Revolt" (April 1930; a precursor of Day of the Triffids).

Fun facts: Murray Leinster (William Fitzgerald Jenkins) was a prolific pulp writer, one of the few SF writers from the 1930s to survive in the John W. Campbell era of higher standards; he's credited with the invention of parallel universe (or alternate worlds) stories, as well as some of the earliest descriptions of computers and the Internet. He was also an inventor, best known for the front-projection process used in special effects.

9) GEOLOGICAL UPHEAVALS, in S. Fowler Wright's Deluge: A Romance (1927).
A global upheaval turns oceans into deserts, and sinks land masses everywhere except what remains of the English midlands, which are transformed into an archipelago. (Hello, Waterworld.) With a marked lack of idealism, Wright - who also translated Dante's Inferno, and who uses this novel to criticize 1920s British society - tells the story of a new Adam and Eve: Martin Webster, a lawyer who attempts to find his wife; and Claire Arlington, an athlete ("like a valkyrie") and one of the few women to survive the flood. The two store up food, fend off feral dogs, and battle sex-starved and flood-maddened miners, laborers, and vagabonds. If it wasn't so un-cozy, you'd have to call Wright's novel an early example of the cozy catastrophe - because the author is obviously thrilled that modern civilization, with its motorcars and bureaucrats, is gone.

Fun fact: A shocked Time Magazine review of the time contains the following fun description of Deluge. "Follows matter enough for a dozen penny dreadfuls, threepenny thrillers: a fight with sledgehammer and dirk in the lurid shadows of a gypsy fire-Claire's body gleaming white but for the dark cords that bind her ankles and wrists; a struggle in the dank blackness of a railway tunnel which a gang of Claire's suitors blockade at one end, while others sneak in opposite: 'Kill the man, but save the wench! . . .' A relic of civilized scruple holds Martin from killing a hairy giant furnaceman, because he has sprawled over the tracks and technically is down. But Claire sees the prostrate giant heave a rock, and, with no scruples, jabs him, hacks, thwacks, kills, saving Martin's life."

10) COSMIC DUST, in Bruno Hans Bürgel's "The Cosmic Cloud" (German story published circa 1921; serialized, in English translation, Fall 1931).
A cloud of cosmic dust permeates the solar system, circa 2300, and most of Europe and the former north and south temperate zones are covered in ice. By the year 3000 life is nearly extinct, except in Africa, where a mixed-race civilization survives. A scientist, Johannes Baumgart, proposes a voyage to the Moon, because of his theory that intelligent life with advanced technology exists there. In a proto-Ballardian ending, the voyage is a failure. Earth is doomed! Fun facts: Bürgel was a factory worker who studied astronomy in his spare time, and was eventually hired as an observer at Germany's first public observatory. His 1908 book, From Distant Worlds; A Popular Science of the Sky, which argued that millions of inhabited worlds may exist within the universe, was a popular success.

Joshua Glenn is co-editor of the website Hilobrow.com. His most recent book is The Idler's Glossary. He's also written for io9 about Pre-Golden Age SF's coolest robots, super-est supermen, mad mentalists, best apocalypses, and most amazing cover art.

ALSO OF INTEREST

Here's a more complete list of PGA eco-catastrophes. For kicks, I've included stories and novels in which climatic and atmospheric change, weather control, and solar or "green" energy technology rate a mention. Confused about my eccentric SF periodization scheme? Here's a guide.

NINETEENTH CENTURY (1804-1903)

* Faddei Bulgarin, Plausible Fantasies of a Journey in the 29th Century (1824)
* Edgar Allan Poe, "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" (Dec. 1839)
* Alexander Pitts Bettersworth, The Strange MS. By ___ M.D. (1883)
* Richard Jefferies, After London, or Wild England (1885)
* A. Bleunard, Babylon Electrified 1888 French, 1890 English)
* H.C.M.W., The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (1890)
* Chauncey Thomas, The Crystal Button: Or, Adventures of Paul Prognosis in the Forty-Ninth Century (1891)
* Robert Barr, "The Doom of London" (Nov. 1892)
* Byron A. Brooks, Earth Revisited (1893)
* John Jacob Astor, A Journey in Other Worlds (1894)
* Louis Boussenard, Ten Thousand Years in a Block of Ice (1889, French)
* Camille Flammarion, Omega: The Last Days of the World (1893-94 French, 1897 English)
* Lysander Salmon Richards, Breaking Up (1896)
* John Mills, "The Aerial Brickfield" (June 1897)
* H.G. Wells, "The Star" (1897)
* Otto Mundo, The Recovered Continent: A Tale of the Chinese Invasion (1898)
* Robert Barr, "Within an Ace of the End of the World" (April 1900)
* M.P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud (1901)
* George C. Wallis, "The Last Days of Earth" (1901)
* Fred M. White, "The Dust of Death" (April 1903)
* Ira S. Bunker, A Thousand Years Hence (1903)

THE NINETEEN-OUGHTS (1904-13)

* William Hawley Smith, The Promoters: A Novel Without a Woman (1904)
* George Griffith, The Great Weather Syndicate (1906)
* Louis Pope Gratacap, The Evacuation of England (1908)
* H. Percy Blanchard, After the Cataclysm (1909)
* William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land (1912)
* Garrett P. Serviss, The Second Deluge (1912)
* William Wallace Cook, "Tales of Twenty Hundred" (Dec. 1911-May 1912)
* Arthur Conan Doyle, The Poison Belt (1913)

THE TEENS (1914-23)

* George Allen England, Darkness and Dawn (1914)
* George Allen England, The Nebula of Death (Feb.-May 1918)
* Homer Eon Flint, The King of Conserve Island (Oct. 12, 1918)
* Edgar Wallace, The Green Rust (Aug. 7-28, 1919)
* Murray Leinster, "A Thousand Degrees Below Zero" (July 15, 1919)
* Austin Hall, "The Man Who Saved the Earth" (Dec. 13, 1919)
* Murray Leinster, The Mad Planet (June 12, 1920)
* Burnie L. Bevill, "Restoring the Moon" (Sept. 1922)
* J.J. Connington, Nordenholt's Million (1923)
* Hugo Gernsback, Ralph 124C41+ (1923)
* Homer Eon Flint, Out of the Moon (Dec. 1923 - Jan 1924)

THE TWENTIES (1924-33)

* Clare Winger Harris, "A Runaway World" (July 1926)
* S. Fowler Wright, Deluge: A Romance (1927)
* Charles J. Finger, The Spreading Stain (1927)
* Otfrid Von Hanstein, Utopia Island (1927 German, 1931 English)
* Andre Maurois, The Next Chapter (1927 French; 1928 English)
* Edmond Hamilton, "The Time-Raider" (Oct. 1927-Jan. 1928)
* Edmond Hamilton, "The Polar Doom" (Nov. 1928)
* Ray Cummings, A Brand New World (Sept. 22-Oct. 27, 1928)
* Morrison Colladay, "When the Moon Fell" (1929)
* Leslie F. Stone, "When the Sun Went Out" (1929)
* Ray Cummings, The Snow Girl (Nov. 1929)
* Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (1930)
* John and Ruth Vassos, Ultimo (1930)
* Murray Leinster, "The Storm That Had To Be Stopped" (March 1, 1930)
* Edmond Hamilton, "The Plant Revolt" (April 1930)
* Bruno Hans Bürgel, "The Cosmic Cloud" (1921 German, 1931 English)
* Fred MacIsaac, The Hothouse World (Feb. 21-March 28, 1931)

In this image taken by NASA today, you can see each fire marked in red, and smoke hovering over everything. NASA explains:

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite passed over head and captured this image. Scores of active fires (red outlines) were detected. During the winter dry season, intentional fires for agriculture, brush clearing, and trash disposal are common in Southeast Asia. Intentional fires also get out of control, however, and some of these fires could be accidental forest fires.

Here are more fires in India, below. This image was also taken today.

Fires in India via NASA, and fires in Laos via NASA.

If you look at the center of the photos, you can see the asteroid moving across the sky. It looks small from Earth, but according to the Associated Press:

The space ball measured between 69 feet and 154 feet in diameter. The Planetary Society said that made it the same size as an asteroid that exploded over Siberia in 1908 and leveled more than 800 square miles of forest.

National Geographic, which posted these photos, reports that the asteroid came within 41,000 miles of Earth on Monday.

SOURCES:

National Geographic

Associated Press

The satellite, nine years in the making, was designed to monitor the carbon dioxide levels from orbit. Its crash is a major setback to those hoping to study the effects of rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and represents a loss of almost a quarter of a billion dollars.

The satellite launched just before 2 am on Tuesday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on a Taurus XL rocket. The first and second stages of the rocket separated without problem, but the nose cone of the rocket failed to separate after the firing of the third stage. The added weight of this section was too much for the rocket, and it crashed into the Antarctic ocean. This is the second failure for the satellite's developers, Orbital Sciences. The company has a second climate-examination satellite, set to launch later this year, but has delayed that launch until a solution to this problem can be found.

The failure of the mission leaves scientists without a valuable tool. The satellite, which was designed to measure levels of atmospheric and oceanic carbon, could have provided much needed insight into how the atmosphere and oceans interact when it comes to CO2. While monitoring stations have been able to provide results from set areas, this would have been a method to examine the global interactions.

Scientists are now looking to Japan's GOSAT satellite, which was launched last year, to gather some of the data. According to the New York Times, rebuilding the observatory will be contingent on the funding that NASA receives in the recent stimulus.

Read more at the Washington Post.

His name is Edgar Müller, and he's won so many street art contests that he bears the title "master street artist." Over the past two years, he's focused his attentions on creating large optical illusions on the streets and sidewalks of small towns. After creating one of these artworks, which take days even when he has several helpers, Müller likes to photograph people as they interact imaginatively with the optical illusion disasters.

Back in 2007, a small town called Moose Jaw in Saskatchewan, Canada, was suddenly flooded, leaving only a few survivors clinging to a life raft (which I think has a tattered Canadian flag on it).

And a few months ago, a town outside Dublin, Ireland called Dun Laoghaire watched as the ground was torn away to reveal glaciers from an ice age that might descend at any moment. I love watching the people balancing on the edges of the painting, dangling over frozen death.

You can see more of Edgar Müller's illusions of destruction on his website.

It wasn't weather that destroyed this year's crop - it was political unrest. Farmers abandoned their fields to flee for safety, and by the time they returned it was so late in the season that corn couldn't be planted. And other crops foundered too.

This satellite photo from NASA shows all the farm areas of Kenya that have suffered as a result of violence after the elections. According to NASA's Earth Observatory:

This image, which shows vegetation conditions between January 1 and January 10, 2009, shows part of the reason for the failed crops. Developing drought settled over eastern Kenya, slowing plant growth. Areas in which plants were growing less vigorously than average are brown, while areas in which plants were growing well are green. Rainfall during the “short rains” season, which typically runs from September or October through November or December, did not provide the moisture maturing crops required in eastern Kenya, and as a result, the end-of-year harvest was poor. By January, shortly after most crops were harvested, the remaining vegetation was clearly in bad shape compared to normal . . .

Corn, the primary crop, is typically planted when the long-season rains start between mid-February and mid-April. But in late 2007 and early 2008, post-election violence tore through Kenya, affecting much of the grain basket region. In many regions, farmers evacuated to camps and did not return until late April. By then, it was too late to plant a successful crop, said the Foreign Agricultural Service. Some farmers planted a late corn crop, and others planted wheat instead of corn because wheat has a shorter growing season. Altogether, the season shortened by violence resulted in a smaller harvest in the east, while drought reduced the harvest in the west, said the Foreign Agricultural Service.

This image, which looks so abstract with its greens and browns, offers a window into a future where violence begets violence. Political violence led to crop failure, which will lead to more violence as people begin to starve.

SOURCES:

NASA Earth Observatory

Millions Risk Starvation [via AP]

The report, published by the National Academies for the US Government, explains how previous solar storms of typical magnitude took out the Quebec power grid in Canada 20 years ago - and interrupted the telegraph system back in the nineteenth century. What if a really big solar storm hit? The likely outcome would be global blackout. Not only would you be cut off from the warm, friendly internet, but airplanes would lose directional systems, water and energy grids would go offline, phone and hospitals would be without power.

Solar storms interfere with high frequency emissions, including those used by most satellites. The charged particles released by flares accompanying such storms would first destroy instrumentation on the International Space Station, then when it reaches Earth would degrade solar arrays, damage high tech instrumentation, and blind optical systems of all types. Most importantly, it could play havoc with the electrical transformers that we use in almost all power grids.

The report explains that we are entering a period of greater solar activity, and that people working with electrical grids and other systems vulnerable to space weather could easily install shielding to protect against stray particles and geomagnetic bursts.

What's the lesson for you? Buy paper books, because they'll be the only form of entertainment after the global blackout destroys all those e-book readers and the internet goes dead.

SOURCES:

Severe Space Weather Events - Full Scientific Report from National Academies Press

Major Solar Storm Could Cause Lasting Damage [via New Scientist]

Below is the area soon after the breach. You can see the rivers around the area are pale blue, full of the toxic slurry. And the landscape itself around the plant are blackened by the ash.

SOURCE: NASA Earth Observatory

Located in Montana and Wyoming, Yellowstone is famous for its geysers, including "Old Faithful," which blasts steam into the air like clockwork every day. Now geologists studying the recent mini-quakes in the park say we might be in for a big blast. Such blasts tend to come about once every 600 thousand years, and we haven't seen one for roughly that amount of time.

The last big explosion in Yellowstone, according to Scientific American, was roughly 640 thousand years ago, and it covered about 240 cubic miles in hot ash, scalding rocks, and magma. But don't worry yet, says SciAm's David Biello:

Although the earthquake swarm continues, according to the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, the volcano alert level remains normal. And a slew of larger earthquakes have occurred throughout the western U.S., Alaska, Puerto Rico and even Pennsylvania in the past week without incident, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

In recent years, Yellowstone's caldera has been rising thanks to uplifting magma beneath it—leading to more cracks, hot springs and even more frequent eruptions of Steamboat Geysers. Paired with the earthquakes, such magma movement might presage an eruption—either big or small. Unfortunately, scientists can't really predict when the next such eruption will happen, and the range of possibilities is large: from later today to a million years from now.

How will we know if we should start worrying? The real warning signs will be rapid changes in the shape of the ground as well as volcanic gases leaking from the ground, neither of which have been sighted—yet.

Right now, in some dark Hollywood pitch meeting, Jerry Bruckheimer is mud-wrestling with Michael Bay over the rights to a movie about this potential explodey Yellowstone disaster.

SOURCE: Scientific American

Thanks, Robert Atlas!

Photo by Nina Raingold/Getty Images.