Social Science Disasters

Taking listeners from the melting Alaskan permafrost to storm-torn New Orleans, acclaimed journalist Elizabeth Kolbert approaches this monumental problem from every angle. She interviews researchers and environmentalists, explains the science, draws frightening parallels to lost civilizations, and presents the moving tales of people who are watching their worlds disappear.

Warning sirens are blaring. You have 15 minutes to evacuate. What will you do? Cataclysmic events strike sleepy towns and major cities every year. Residents face escaping quickly or perishing in rising waters, raging fires, or other life-threatening conditions. By the time the evacuation starts, it's already too late. Being prepared makes the difference between survival and disaster. Guiding you step by step, Bug Out tells you how to be ready at a second's notice.

An inside account of the fight to contain the world's deadliest diseases - and the panic and corruption that make them worse. The Next Pandemic is a firsthand account of disasters like anthrax, bird flu, and others - and how we could do more to prevent their return. It is both a gripping story of our brushes with fate and an urgent lesson on how we can keep ourselves safe from the inevitable next pandemic.

It’s goodbye, Brewster Elementary and hello, Broomsfield Academy when Heidi starts middle school at the only school in the country that has secret classes for witches in training! Heidi is excited but nervous about living on her own and making new friends (and new crushes)! Her first day takes a turn for the worse when Heidi discovers her roommate is none other than her old rival, Melanie Maplethorpe! Melanie is also less than thrilled, and the two find themselves engaged in an epic prank war. But when magic enters the mix, will the reluctant roommates go too far?

In its 4.5 billion–year history, life on Earth has been almost erased at least half a dozen times: shattered by asteroid impacts, entombed in ice, smothered by methane, and torn apart by unfathomably powerful megavolcanoes. And we know that another global disaster is eventually headed our way. Can we survive it? How?

As a species, Homo sapiens is at a crossroads. Study of our planet’s turbulent past suggests that we are overdue for a catastrophic disaster, whether caused by nature or by human interference.
It’s a frightening prospect, as each of the Earth’s past major disasters—from meteor strikes to bombardment by cosmic radiation—resulted in a mass extinction, where more than 75 percent of the planet’s species died out. But in Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, Annalee Newitz, science journalist and editor of the science Web site io9.com explains that although global disaster is all but inevitable, our chances of long-term species survival are better than ever. Life on Earth has come close to annihilation—humans have, more than once, narrowly avoided extinction just
during the last million years—but every single time a few creatures survived, evolving to adapt to the harshest of conditions.
This brilliantly speculative work of popular science focuses on humanity’s long history of dodging the bullet, as well as on new threats that we may face in years to come. Most important, it explores how scientific breakthroughs today will help us avoid disasters tomorrow. From simulating tsunamis to studying central Turkey’s ancient underground cities; from cultivating cyanobacteria for “living cities” to designing space elevators to make space colonies cost-effective; from using math to stop pandemics to studying the remarkable survival strategies of gray whales, scientists and researchers the world over are discovering the keys to long-term resilience and learning how humans can choose life over death.
Newitz’s remarkable and fascinating journey through the science of mass extinctions is a powerful argument about human ingenuity and our ability to change. In a world populated by doomsday preppers and media commentators obsessively forecasting our demise, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember is a compelling voice of hope. It leads us away from apocalyptic thinking into a future where we live to build a better world—on this planet and perhaps on others. Readers of this book will be equipped scientifically, intellectually, and emotionally to face whatever the future holds.

Detroit high-priority 911 calls average 58 minutes for a response. How much longer will it be until budget cuts, natural disaster, or a total collapse make you responsible for your own security? Retreat Security and Small Unit Tactics by David Kobler and Mark Goodwin will teach you how to organize your team or neighborhood into a force to be reckoned with. You'll get tips to harden your home and protect your family, life, and property, both now and after the stuff hits the fan.

Almost 7,000 fans eagerly packed into the Ringling Brothers big top on July 6, 1944. With a single careless act, an afternoon at the "Greatest Show on Earth" quickly became one of terror and tragedy as the paraffin-coated circus tent caught fire. Panicked crowds rushed for the few exits, but in minutes, the tent collapsed on those still struggling to escape below. A total of 168 lives were lost, many of them children, with many more injured and forever scarred by the events.

On January 25, 2020, after the central government imposed a lockdown in Wuhan, acclaimed Chinese writer Fang Fang began publishing an online diary. In the days and weeks that followed, Fang Fang’s nightly postings gave voice to the fears, frustrations, anger, and hope of millions of her fellow citizens, reflecting on the psychological impact of forced isolation, the role of the internet as both community lifeline and source of misinformation, and most tragically, the lives of neighbors and friends taken by the deadly virus.

The advent of the internet has been one of the most significant technological developments in history. In this thought-provoking and ground-breaking work David Eagleman, author of international best seller Sum, presents six ways in which the net saves us from major existential threats: pandemics, poor information flow, natural disasters, political corruption, resource depletion and economic meltdown.

This audiobook will help you to prepare well for disaster. Preparedness needs adequate knowledge and understanding, as well as careful planning and proper execution in order to be successful. Nobody wants to get all the hard work done only to find out that you got the wrong supplies or it wasn't enough to tide you and your family through the critical days. This book will also show you how to best prepare without too much strain on your budget. Find out all these and more in this two-in-one box set.

Averting Catastrophe explores how governments ought to make decisions in times of imminent disaster. Cass R. Sunstein argues that using the "maximin rule", which calls for choosing the approach that eliminates the worst of the worst-case scenarios, may be necessary when public officials lack important information and when the worst-case scenario is too disastrous to contemplate. He underscores this argument by emphasizing the reality of "Knightian uncertainty", found in circumstances in which it is not possible to assign probabilities to various outcomes.

The year was 1922: World War I had just come to a close, the Ottoman Empire was in decline, and Asa Jennings, a YMCA worker from upstate New York, had just arrived in the quiet coastal city of Smyrna to teach sports to boys. Several hundred miles to the east in Turkey's interior, tensions between Greeks and Turks had boiled over into deadly violence. Mustapha Kemal, now known as Ataturk, and his Muslim army soon advanced into Smyrna, a Christian city, where a half a million terrified Greek and Armenian refugees had fled in a desperate attempt to escape his troops.

Much of New Orleans still sat underwater the first time Gary Rivlin glimpsed the city after Hurricane Katrina. Then a staff reporter for The New York Times, he was heading into the city to survey the damage. The interstate was eerily empty. Soldiers in uniform and armed with assault rifles stopped him. Water reached the eaves of houses for as far as the eye could see.

2015 saw the worst American maritime disaster in decades. The captain of the SS El Faro commanded his crew to sail straight into a hurricane. The ship sank and all 33 crew members died. The sinking raised troubling questions: Why did the captain choose to sail into the hurricane? Why did no one on board or on shore stop him? And why was such an old and heavily loaded ship even allowed on the water?

Natural disasters and the dire effects of climate change cause massive population displacements and lead to some of the most intractable political and humanitarian challenges seen today. Yet, as Maria Cristina Garcia observes in this critical history of U.S. policy on migration in the Global South, there is actually no such thing as a "climate refugee" under current U.S. law. Most initiatives intended to assist those who must migrate are flawed and ineffective from inception because they are derived from outmoded policies. In a world of climate change, U.S. refugee policy simply does not work.

On March 8, 2014, Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 disappeared with barely a trace, carrying 239 people onboard - seemingly vanishing into the dark night. The airplane's whereabouts and fate would quickly become one of the biggest aviation mysteries of our time....

On January 12, 2010, a major earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Hundreds of thousands of people died, and the greater part of the capital was demolished. Dr. Paul Farmer, U.N. deputy special envoy to Haiti, who had worked in the country for nearly thirty years treating infectious diseases like tuberculosis and AIDS, and former President Bill Clinton, the U.N. special envoy to Haiti, had just begun to work on an extensive development plan to improve living conditions in Haiti.

Catastrophe weaves together compelling stories and potent lessons learned from the calamitous Halifax explosion—the worst non-natural disaster in North America before 9/11. Written from a scholarly perspective but in a journalistic style accessible to the general listener, this book explores how the explosion influenced later emergency planning and disaster theory.

Having had unparalleled access to the Chilean mine disaster, award-winning journalist Jonathan Franklin takes readers to the heart of a remarkable story of human endurance, survival, and historic heroism. 33 Men is the groundbreaking, authoritative account of the Chilean mine disaster, one of the longest human entrapments in history.

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, Alberta, the hub of Canada's oil industry, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 90,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the story of this apocalyptic conflagration, John Vaillant explores the past and the future of our ever-hotter, more flammable world.