Armageddon

REAL-WORLD NEWS EXCERPTS

India’s energy crisis cascaded over half the country Tuesday when three of its regional grids collapsed, leaving 620 million people without government-supplied electricity for several hours in, by far, the world’s biggest-ever blackout.

Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde blamed the new crisis on states taking more than their allotted share of electricity.

“Everyone overdraws from the grid. Just this morning I held a meeting with power officials from the states and I gave directions that states which overdraw should be punished. We have given instructions that their power supply could be cut,” he told reporters.

“The situation is very grave. We are doing everything to restore power,” the Power Minister said.

Last week, the Texas power grid was “4 minutes 37 seconds away from a total collapse,” meaning a statewide blackout, Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) officials said at an emergency board meeting Wednesday. Had it happened, Texas would have been in the dark for weeks if not longer.

“This was a devastating event,” one official said in his opening statements. “Power is essential to civilization.”

ERCOT officials said controlled outages were implemented to prevent a statewide blackout, saying the storm was unlike anything Texas has experienced before.

Three-hundred and fifty-six generators were knocked offline during the storm event.

In his first sit-down interview with an American news outlet, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz said Friday that Israel has updated its target list and is preparing to strike Iranian nuclear sites if the world does not act to stop Iran’s nuclear development. Gantz said Israel has found numerous targets in Iran that would slow its nuclear development if attacked.

Gantz said Israel has identified thousands of rocket sites targets along the Israeli border with Lebanon, including many that are in civilian areas.

If the United States and Russia waged an all-out nuclear war, much of the land in the Northern Hemisphere would be below freezing in the summertime, with the growing season slashed by nearly 90 percent in some areas, according to a Rutgers-led study. Indeed, death by famine would threaten nearly all of the Earth’s 7.7 billion people, according to a study in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres.

Lead author Joshua Coupe and other scientists used a modern climate model to simulate the climatic effects of an all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia. Such a war could send 150 million tons of black smoke from fires in cities and industrial areas into the lower and upper atmosphere, where it could linger for months to years and block sunlight.

“This means that we have much more confidence in the climate response to a large-scale nuclear war,” Coupe said. “There really would be a nuclear winter with catastrophic consequences.”

In both the new and old models, a nuclear winter occurs as soot (black carbon) in the upper atmosphere blocks sunlight and causes global average surface temperatures to plummet by more than 40 degrees Fahrenheit in some cases.