Eideard

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is a big, serious government agency with a big, serious job: protecting public health from threats ranging from hurricanes to bird flu.

So when the good doctors of Atlanta warned people this week about how to prepare for a zombie apocalypse, the world took notice.

“That’s right, I said z-o-m-b-i-e a-p-o-c-a-l-y-p-s-e,” Dr. Ali S. Khan wrote on the CDC website this week, adding casually that “Resident Evil” is his “personal favorite” zombie movie.

As it happens, Khan, one of the nation’s top-ranking public health professionals (he’s a rear admiral and an assistant surgeon general), doesn’t actually believe the living dead are about to claw their way out of graves and start chewing on your brain.

But, he and his communications team recently noticed, what they’d want you to do if the world really did suddenly go “Night of the Living Dead” is pretty much the same thing they’d want you to do in case of a hurricane or a major pandemic…

The CDC got a question about zombies during an online chat about radiation leaks related to the meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in March, and they saw traffic spike.

Khan and his communications team knew they’d found a way to get the public interested in disaster preparedness, he said.

So they posted the advice on Monday. Their website crashed on Wednesday.

The advice is mostly stuff you should already know: Make an emergency plan. Stockpile food, water and medicine. Have a utility knife, duct tape and battery-powered radio handy, along with some changes of clothes and bedding…Have basic first aid supplies handy for a hurricane or a pandemic — although, Khan says, “you’re a goner if a zombie bites you.

The startling loss of Arctic sea ice has major meteorological, environmental and ecological implications. The region acts like a giant refrigerator that has a strong effect on the northern hemisphere’s meteorology. Without its cooling influence, weather patterns will be badly disrupted, including storms set to sweep over Britain.

What really unsettles scientists, however, is their inability to forecast precisely what is happening in the Arctic, the part of the world most vulnerable to the effects of global warming. ‘When we did the first climate change computer models, we thought the Arctic’s summer ice cover would last until around 2070,’ said Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University. ‘It is now clear we did not understand how thin the ice cap had already become – for Arctic ice cover has since been disappearing at ever increasing rates. Every few years we have to revise our estimates downwards. Now the most detailed computer models suggest the Arctic’s summer ice is going to last for only a few more years…’
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