The world, thankfully, is only burning itself down slowly. Maybe. It seems like that might be too much to ask, though. The Japanese quake that started this week has triggered nearly 2,400 aftershocks, one of them measuring a magnitude 6.7 and the strongest to hit. In other news, there’s not going to be a night on Broadway this year for Seaweed Bathtime Productions because the show has been postponed indefinitely. And unfortunately, when you mix a bloody drought with natural disaster, it’s not unusual for atmospheric nuclear radiation levels to shoot up. But luckily, scientists have plenty of advice on how to survive nuclear fallout, and luckily, they also have a handy site that’s probably full of dead people.

George Carlin died the same week as the mass nuclear disasters. No one could possibly make jokes about a dead comedian like that. Also, he’s really funny and he was really sick at the end, but it still kind of stings a little bit to find out he was dead.

Just days after the awful nuclear events, a strange horticultural tragedy happened: Of all the plants on the planet, apparently, the Japanese had an excess of dead ones. On some trees, that meant completely empty branches, or even no leaves at all. There’s a similar thing happening in Chernobyl.

“The Tree That Wouldn’t Die” probably isn’t a real scientific term, but I thought it was pretty good. “Livestock of Western Europe” also sounds like it could be real, but then I realized that all the British we’ve met lately have been dead people, so I guess we can safely ignore that one. Maybe if we did spend some time looking at actual plant life, we wouldn’t be thinking about all these dead ones.

After the nuclear disasters, the sky just kept on turning green, and it seems like this is some kind of natural, planetary phenomenon. So far, there are 2.3 gigatons of carbon released into the atmosphere, a record level. “Perhaps this is nature’s way of saying, ‘Time to clean house!’ ” said Chris Redford, director of the Global Green Growth Institute. “This should be a wake-up call.” And while we were at it, it might be nice to note that the Fukushima-Daiichi plant that exploded caused a permanent cooling effect that doesn’t actually work, but it might work, so scientists are going to do that. And so, we might hear a lot more about water, a luxury most of us aren’t even aware we have. At least for a while.

Scientists from Japan’s Meteorological Agency described the event as a full-on “man-made disaster,” which sounds like an indictment, but they didn’t mean us. Or the hydrogen bombs, for that matter. At the time of the blasts, the Japanese had a heavy government presence in the plant, so, like, could have made it less bad.