And I really really mean it this time...
Obviously I don't mean to belittle or diminish the huge devastation and suffering in northern coastal areas, where the news is pretty horrific. But down here in the Tokyo area, come on...the media hype is just ridiculous.
I would certainly say it's not a great time for a holiday here, but even Saturday's somewhat ad-hoc train journey home would have counted for a good day on the London Tube. Info on the planned rolling blackouts is a bit sketchy, but it seems that the first one (which was supposed to start here at 6:20am) has been postponed. It's inconvenient for our visitors trying to schedule meetings and seminars, but it is not threatening in any way. It's actually a great time of year for power cuts, our electricity consumption plummets in the spring anyway as the climate is so comfortable.
I did take a picture of the "empty shelves" in Tsukuba UPDATE now featured on the BBC. (Technically that is Niel's pic not mine, but it's the same shelf.) ButI we had to frame it carefully to cut out all the full shelves round the rest of the shop. I'm not sure that my first thought in a disaster would be Hokkaido cheese cake and raisin bread though. Perhaps it is the chocolate croissant shortage that has panicked the cheese-eating surrender-monkeys into running away?
This is what panic buying looks like in Kamakura. Yes, we stockpile Perrier for emergencies. But only for washing with, we drink champagne :-)
Come on people, get a grip. It's an inconvenience. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a catastrophe down here, and the best thing most people can do is to get back to normality as quickly as possible. Turn off the wall-to-wall disaster porn on TV and have a look out of the window. It's a beautiful spring day and the cherries are starting to blossom.
Obviously I don't mean to belittle or diminish the huge devastation and suffering in northern coastal areas, where the news is pretty horrific. But down here in the Tokyo area, come on...the media hype is just ridiculous.
I would certainly say it's not a great time for a holiday here, but even Saturday's somewhat ad-hoc train journey home would have counted for a good day on the London Tube. Info on the planned rolling blackouts is a bit sketchy, but it seems that the first one (which was supposed to start here at 6:20am) has been postponed. It's inconvenient for our visitors trying to schedule meetings and seminars, but it is not threatening in any way. It's actually a great time of year for power cuts, our electricity consumption plummets in the spring anyway as the climate is so comfortable.
I did take a picture of the "empty shelves" in Tsukuba UPDATE now featured on the BBC. (Technically that is Niel's pic not mine, but it's the same shelf.) But
This is what panic buying looks like in Kamakura. Yes, we stockpile Perrier for emergencies. But only for washing with, we drink champagne :-)
Come on people, get a grip. It's an inconvenience. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a catastrophe down here, and the best thing most people can do is to get back to normality as quickly as possible. Turn off the wall-to-wall disaster porn on TV and have a look out of the window. It's a beautiful spring day and the cherries are starting to blossom.
14 comments:
Send people to Barry Brook's Brave New Climate
Josef Oehmen on the situation
Barry Brook on the situation earlier
disaster porn on TV
Well stated.
Second EliRabett's choice of links.
Ta for the links.
And in return I recommend to people the BBC for a surprisingly familiar (but rather unrepresentative) picture of empty shelves :-)
ok, I don't want to sound like a concern troll but I find it amazing your downplaying things like tottering nuclear plants etc. Considering we basically try to get people with some sort of panic or concern about hypothethical events in 50-200 years; but when real horrible live disaster strikes we assume an air of detachment or forced nonchalance?
Normal human behavior during and after large industrial accidents is to lie about conditions and risks. This is particularly true in the nuclear industry, and there is absolutely no reason to trust any official statement about reactor conditions or radiation release.
It is possible that things are as rosy as Eli's links indicate, but without independent confirmation of containment vessel integrity or 3rd party radiation measurements, it would be foolhardy to trust that things are that good.
I'm sorry, but this is weird. More than 10,000 of your neighbors have suddenly died and nearly all of your neighbors will suffer economic consequences well into the future. While the nuclear threat ight be overstated, it is certainly plausible. yet you wax indignant about "hype". And somehow you are just fine with Romm et. al. Weird.
I agree with "silence" -- having worked in the nuclear industry for 4 years (albeit '86-90') -- if they are reporting things this scary you can bet that things on the ground are really FUBAR, no matter what "reassuring" links Eli can find.
Although you have provided a useful service -- it seems the way to reassure (fool) the public now & in future climate disaster scenarios will be simply to hire blase' Oxbridge students & graduates to explain away everything! ;-)
Professor John Beddington, the UK Government's Chief Scientific Adviser and straight-talker, was on BBC News today telling how he convened a meeting of nuclear/physics/you-name-it experts at the weekend. The upshot on the reactors was that even if the worst case scenario did occur, it'd last an hour and reach 500 metres into the air. Chernobyl lasted weeks or months and reached tens of thousands of metres into the air.
Carl,
It's true that probably 10,000 people or more have died. That was my own ballpark estimate, back at the start when the official figure was around 100. There are probably people suffering up there waiting for rescue, and even those in refuges won't be having a picnic.
That doesn't change the fact that down here, were it not for the power shortages, life would have been back to normal a couple of days ago. And running around wailing isn't gong to help anyone. I can see and feel the effects that the relentless hype is having in getting people worked up and upset etc...and I don't like it. It's not a question of downplaying things here. There is literally nothing to downplay apart from some cancelled trains (which have been a pain, frankly, but I'm sympathetic to their difficulties). We didn't even have the threatened power cuts (yet).
PS I don't think I have ever approved of Romm. If I did, it was probably a typo :-)
As for the nuclear issue, I agree the govt always lies, and it's interesting to see that when push comes to shove plenty of Japanese don't seem to believe the official line either. But on the other hand, every nuclear "disaster" has worked out to be at least an order of magnitude less serious than the scenarios presented in the press. I might not be so sanguine if I was anywhere near the plant, but I'm 200 miles upwind!
I'm not the only one who isn't panicking - Hugo seems to have been enjoying his impromptu holiday in Tokyo, for example :-)
Usually a lurker but good to hear you are all OK - I had been wondering about folks at the Photon Factory but if empty shelves and late trains are all you have to worry about in Tsukuba then it can't be too bad. Looks grim up North though :-(
Oh well, as the old wartime poster says "KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON". BTW, TomC -I think this is what James is getting at - he is not being heartless, just practical.
>Hugo seems to have been enjoying his impromptu >holiday in Tokyo, for example :-)
ha, well I learned long ago it doesn't take much of an excuse for an Oxonian to supremely slack-off....
I love the calm in the face of an overblown crisis. Now, if we could just get you guys to quit with the global warming panic....
Carl,
:-)
But to be fair to Hugo, he did try to get some meetings arranged. But the transport is really hit and miss at the moment, on top of the threats of power cuts. So I think he was just making the best of things really.
Howard, global warming isn't a crisis of a comparable urgency to the earthquake and tsunami damage, but it is a genuine problem that is not going to just go away if we ignore it.
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