Tag Archives: risk

we know what killed the dinosaurs, right?

Well, apparently there is a loose scientific consensus but still plenty of debate, summarized in this article in The Atlantic.

Before the asteroid hypothesis took hold, researchers had proposed other, similarly bizarre explanations for the dinosaurs’ demise: gluttony, protracted food poisoning, terminal chastity, acute stupidity, even Paleo-weltschmerz—death by boredom. These theories fell by the wayside when, in 1980, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Luis Alvarez and three colleagues from UC Berkeley announced a discovery in the journal Science. They had found iridium—a hard, silver-gray element that lurks in the bowels of planets, including ours—deposited all over the world at approximately the same time that, according to the fossil record, creatures were dying en masse. Mystery solved: An asteroid had crashed into the Earth, spewing iridium and pulverized rock dust around the globe and wiping out most life forms.

Their hypothesis quickly gained traction, as visions of killer space rocks sparked even the dullest imaginations. nasa initiated Project Spacewatch to track—and possibly bomb—any asteroid that might dare to approach. Carl Sagan warned world leaders that hydrogen bombs could trigger a catastrophic “nuclear winter” like the one caused by the asteroid’s dust cloud. Science reporters cheered having a story that united dinosaurs and extraterrestrials and Cold War fever dreams—it needed only “some sex and the involvement of the Royal Family and the whole world would be paying attention,” one journalist wrote. News articles described scientists rallying around Alvarez’s theory in record time, especially after the so-called impacter camp delivered, in 1991, the geologic equivalent of DNA evidence: the “Crater of Doom,” a 111-mile-wide cavity near the Mexican town of Chicxulub, on the Yucatán Peninsula. Researchers identified it as the spot where the fatal asteroid had punched the Earth. Textbooks and natural-history museums raced to add updates identifying the asteroid as the killer…

While the majority of her peers embraced the Chicxulub asteroid as the cause of the extinction, Keller remained a maligned and, until recently, lonely voice contesting it. She argues that the mass extinction was caused not by a wrong-place-wrong-time asteroid collision but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions in a part of western India known as the Deccan Traps—a theory that was first proposed in 1978 and then abandoned by all but a small number of scientists. Her research, undertaken with specialists around the world and featured in leading scientific journals, has forced other scientists to take a second look at their data. “Gerta uncovered many things through the years that just don’t sit with the nice, simple impact story that Alvarez put together,” Andrew Kerr, a geochemist at Cardiff University, told me. “She’s made people think about a previously near-uniformly accepted model.”

 

cyber-attack – nothing to fear but fear itself?

Another thing Axios is worried about is a “crippling cyber-attack”.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said this week that the U.S. is in “crisis mode,” comparing the danger of a massive attack to a Category 5 hurricane looming on the horizon. Intelligence chiefs from the last three administrations agree, and told Axios there is no graver threat to the United States.

A well-executed cyberattack could knock out the electrical grid and shut off power to a huge swath of the country, or compromise vital government or financial data and leave us unsure what is real.

That last phrase is chilling to me. Even if a cyber-attack didn’t result in immediate loss of life, if it creates real fear that the systems of civilization are breaking down (such as transportation, communication, food and financial systems), it could lead to panic and severe consequences. Most of us do not have a stash of gold coins under our mattresses these days.

June 2018 in Review

Most frightening stories:

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • Explicit taxes to fund wars were the norm in the U.S. right up to the Vietnam war.
  • In technology news, Google and Airbus are considering teaming to build a space catapult. The Hyperloop might be a real thing between Chicago’s downtown and airport.
  • Just under 0.1% of migrants crossing the U.S. border are members of criminal gang such as MS-13. About half of border crossers are from Mexico while the other half are mostly from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Some are fleeing violence or repression, while others are simply looking for economic opportunity.

sustainability risk

HSBC publishes its “sustainability risk policies” (a public version of them anyway). They are fairly general, but what I find interesting is that they follow various international conventions from the UN, World Bank, and others in making lending decisions. Examples include the Paris convention and the Ramsar wetland convention. So even if politicians in certain countries deride these international bodies and conventions as being a lot of hot air, they can in fact have a large impact when adopted widely by public and private actors around the world.

big banks divesting from dirtiest fossil fuels

A number of banks have stopped funding new coal and tar sand projects due to climate risk, including HSBC.

Europe’s largest bank HSBC said on Friday it would mostly stop funding new coal power plants, oil sands and arctic drilling, becoming the latest in a long line of investors to shun the fossil fuels.

Other large banks such as ING and BNP Paribas have made similar pledges in recent months as investors have mounted pressure to make sure bank’s actions align with the Paris Agreement, a global pact to limit greenhouse gas emissions and curb rising temperatures.

I might like to believe that the finance industry has become socially responsible, but I don’t. It is completely amoral. Still, that means that when it thinks there is a significant risk to investment returns and takes action as a result, we can assume the risk is real.

 

San Francisco area earthquake forecast

USGS reminds us that a big earthquake in the San Francisco area is eventually coming.

In the 50 years prior to 1906, there were 13 earthquakes with a magnitude between 6 and 7, but only 6 earthquakes of similar magnitude in the 110 years since 1906. The rate of large earthquakes is expected to increase from this low level as tectonic plate movements continue to increase the stress on the faults in the region…

Smaller earthquakes occur more frequently than larger earthquakes. The probability that an earthquake of magnitude 6.0 or larger will occur before 2043 is 98 percent. The probability of at least one earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or larger in the San Francisco Bay region is 72 percent, and for at least one earthquake of magnitude 7.0 or larger it is 51 percent. These probabilities include earthquakes on the major faults, lesser-known faults, and unknown faults.

January 2018 in Review

Most frightening stories:

  • Larry Summers says we have a better than even chance of recession in the next three years. Sounds bad, but I wonder what that stat would look like for any randomly chosen three year period in modern history.
  • The United States is involved in at least seven wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and Pakistan. Nuclear deterrence may not actually the work.
  • Cape Town, South Africa is in imminent danger of running out of water. Longer term, there are serious concerns about snowpack-dependent water supplies serving large urban populations in Asia and western North America.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

record U.S. weather disasters in 2017

Major hurricanes, fires and floods set a new record for the cost of damage in the U.S. in 2017. Setting aside the human misery caused, natural disasters tend to provide a short-term economic stimulus, because it is rare time that politicians tend to set aside their differences and borrow or print money as necessary to solve the problem. In the longer term though, I can’t help thinking that this is one way climate change can make us poorer, because we will be spending money and effort dealing with a higher rate of disasters that we could otherwise be spending on more productive work, investment or innovation. The other way climate change can make us poorer is just the long, slow grind of rising energy, food and water prices. I can imagine these two trends working together, where we are adapting to that long, slow grind, but when the disasters hit we no longer have the ability to recover completely like we used to. This is not unlike a stressed ecosystem that manages to hang on until that fire or flood hits, but then does not have the soil conditions or the seed bank or whatever to rejuvenate itself in the same spot after it gets wiped out.