Tag Archives: risk

The map of doom!

This is a nice piece of risk communication from Dominic Walliman at Domain of Science (which I discovered on Open Culture.com). The “map” is actually a log-log plot of severity (number of deaths) and likelihood (average return period), but this guy manages to convey all that in a digestible way without dumbing it down. You can just stare at the chart, but in this case it really is worth watching the video.

Domain of Science

So what should we be paying more attention to? Well, we might actually pay more attention to pandemics now, and we should. The AIDS pandemic has actually been really bad, and is a good example of how we can just get used to and accept a hugely terrible event that unfolds over a long time. Also antibiotic resistance, synthetic biology, and some complex of climate change/ecosystem collapse/food supply issues. This last he explains pretty well and succinctly between about minutes 12 and 13, so that is worth watching if you have only one minute.

If I were a politician, I would want a chart like this on my wall, prepared by experts in risk management and system theory, and tapping into experts on each of the major risks. I would also want to add more mundane risks that are certain to happen and killing a lot of people, like air pollution, motor vehicle crashes (and pedestrian and cyclist deaths), and diabetes. Then I would tackle some of the worst ones and try to align my policies and budget allocations with them. Not glamorous stuff, but I would hire this guy to try to help explain it to the public. If he wasn’t available, I would pick another photogenic person with a soft and pleasing British (Australian?) accent to help.

October 2020 in Review

In current events, this was just the month that the fall resurgence of Covid-19 exploded in the U.S. and around the world. Just a month when a new, controversial Supreme Court justice was sworn in. Just the last month leading up to the Biden-Trump election, amid a swirl of questions about a peaceful and orderly transfer of power if the voting goes the way the polls clearly say it is going to. Just a month when my home city erupted in “unrest” for the second time this year and the National Guard rolled in. (Incidentally, Joe Biden is also here as I write this on November 1, and I wonder if the National Guard rolling in is entirely a coincidence.)

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Global ecological collapse is most likely upon us, and our attention is elsewhere. The good news is we still have enough to eat (on average – of course we don’t get it to everyone who needs it), for now.

Most hopeful story: We have almost survived another four years without a nuclear war. Awful as Covid-19 has been, we will get through it despite the current administration’s complete failure to plan, prevent, prepare, respond or manage it. There would be no such muddling through a nuclear war.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: There are at least some bright ideas on how to innovate faster and better.

Hurricane Zeta, or the benefits of a classical education

I’m embarrassed that I had to look up where zeta falls in the Greek alphabet. No, it’s not at the end (that would be omega), it’s actually sixth.

Die Hard, a work of classical literature in its own right for those of us who grew up in the 1980s!

So how unusual is it to run through the Roman alphabet (no, America didn’t invent the alphabet) and have a named Category 2 Hurricane hit the mainland at the end of October? Well, I remember educational materials when I lived in Florida saying the Atlantic hurricane season lasts through October, and the Gulf season through November. But according to Jeff Masters, it’s not all that common.

Dr. Phil Klotzbach of Colorado State University says Zeta is the strongest hurricane ever recorded so far to the west in the Gulf of Mexico this late in the year. If Zeta makes landfall as a hurricane, it will be sixth continental U.S. landfalling hurricane this year, tying 2020 with 1886 and 1985 for most continental U.S. landfalling hurricanes in a single Atlantic season on record.
Zeta will also be the fifth named storm to make landfall in Louisiana this year, along with Tropical Storm Cristobal, Tropical Storm Marco, Hurricane Laura, and Hurricane Delta. The previous record for most landfalls in a single season in Louisiana was four in 2002, when Tropical Storm Bertha, Tropical Storm Hanna, Tropical Storm Isidore, and Hurricane Lili all made landfall.
Yale Climate Connections

Luckily, the New Orleans levees seem to have held fine in this one, although there were widespread power outages and a few deaths from things like electrocution in falling trees. Not everybody lives inside the levee system of course, and some people did have to evacuate from this storm. I’m actually reading a book about Katrina right now because I think it has important lessons for the Coronavirus situation and how we should plan for the next disaster, whatever it will be. (We might get ready for the next pandemic after this. Are we ready for the big earthquake we know is coming? What about a catastrophic meltdown of the electric or telecommunications system? What about a serious food shortage?)

what’s really going on with the food supply?

The USDA, the UN, and Bloomberg say there is a “food inequality crisis…sweeping the globe”. It sounds like supplies of soybeans and wheat are down somewhat due to drought in some places (South America and Europe) and storms in others (Iowa specifically is mentioned in the article.) In this environment, prices are up, and because incomes are down due to the pandemic, poor countries and poor people are outbid and going hungry.

Of course, no specific flood, drought, or pandemic can be attributed to climate change…blah blah yada yada. Looking at the FAO Food Price Index, the current mini-spike is well below the major spikes of 2008 and 2011. Well, climate change is a long term signal embedded in a lot of short term noise, but dealing with food supply and food price issues in the short term could be a trial run for how we deal with the creeping long term problem before it is too late. The long term problem will gradually keep creeping up on us, embedded in lots of noise, and then some big event or series of events will be the straw that breaks the global food supply camel’s back. Let’s do something about it now.

What should we do? Well, I’m not an expert, but it starts with water. We need to stop overexploiting groundwater, and we probably need to think about shifting food production away from areas that rely primarily on glaciers and snowmelt, coastal areas that may experience saltwater intrusion or outright inundation, and areas expected to experience increasingly severe droughts. We need to pay attention to soil conservation. We need to pay attention to biodiversity, both to protect ecosystem services such as pollination and to make crops themselves more resilient (crops are subject to their own pandemics). We need sustainable fisheries. Maybe we need to move more production indoors under lights powered by renewable energy (or, I hate to say it, nuclear reactors). That might also help us control the nutrient pollution that is choking our coastal ecosystems. Recovering more nutrients from wastewater and farm waste might play a role. We may need to encourage people to eat more plants and less meat. Maybe we need more urban gardens and rooftop gardens and food forests. Finally, biotechnology probably has a role to play, but in my opinion we shouldn’t rely on this but should think of it as icing on the cake made of a mix of all the low-tech ingredients I mention above.

ice loss following worst case predictions

Treehugger, summarizing an article in Nature Climate Change (which you can’t read without belonging to a university library or paying a lot of money) says loss of ice in Greenland, Antarctica, and around the world is tracking the most pessimistic model results included in the most recent IPCC report.

Up until this point, global sea levels have increased mostly due to thermal expansion, which means the volume of seawater expands as it gets warmer. However in the last five years, water from melting ice sheets and mountain glaciers has become the primary cause of rising sea levels, the researchers point out.
It’s not only Antarctica and Greenland causing sea level rise. The researchers say that thousands of smaller glaciers are melting or disappearing completely.
Treehugger

I think it may be time to get away from coastlines, hot places, and dry places. But not so far north I have to deal with thawing permafrost. And I don’t want to deal with earthquakes or volcanoes. This would seem to leave limited choices.

August 2020 in Review

Goodbye summer, hello fall (or do you prefer to say autumn?) in this weird and consequential year.

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

We just had the 15-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a major regional crisis that federal, state, and local governments failed to competently prepare for or respond to. People died, and decades later the recovery is incomplete. Coronavirus proves we learned nothing, as it is unfolding in a similar way on a much larger and longer scale. There are many potential crises ahead that we need to prepare for today, not least the inundation of major cities. I had a look at the Democratic and (absence of a) Republican platforms, and there is not enough substance in either when it comes to identifying and preparing for the risks ahead.

Most hopeful story:

Automatic stabilizers might be boring but they could have helped the economy in the coronavirus crisis. Congress, you failed us again but you can get this done before the next crisis.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

Vehicle miles traveled have crashed during the coronavirus crisis. Vehicle-related deaths have decreased, but deaths per mile driven have increased, most likely because people drive faster when there is less traffic, absent safe street designs which we don’t do in the U.S. Vehicle miles will rebound, but an interesting question is whether they will rebound short of where they were. One study predicts about 10% lower. This accounts for all the commuting and shopping trips that won’t be taken, but also the increase in deliveries and truck traffic you might expect as a result. It makes sense – people worry about delivery vehicles, but if each parcel in the vehicle is a car trip to the store not taken, overall traffic should decrease. Even if every 5 parcels are a trip not taken, traffic should decrease. I don’t know the correct number, but you get the idea. Now, how long until people realize it is not worth paying and sacrificing space to have a car sitting there that they seldom use. How long before U.S. planners and engineers adopt best practices on street design that are proven to save lives elsewhere in the world?

Katrina, 15 years on

August 29, 2020 will be the 20-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in New Orleans. I think it’s a critical event to understand for at least two reasons. First, it was an early, regional example of U.S. governmental failure to prepare, respond, and recover from a known risk. Now we have a crisis unfolding on a much larger scale, and the government is proving to be just as inept as it was in 2005, with far greater consequences. So I think Katrina was an early warning of government dysfunction that we failed to heed.

As far as coronavirus goes, we are past the prepare stage and it is getting late to mount an effective response. We can still recover though. New Orleans didn’t really recover fully, according to this article.

A year after the storm, over half the city’s schools remained shut; under a third of flooded-out residents had returned; and few buses were running in a city where more than a third of African American households did not own cars. By the second anniversary, no further schools had reopened and damaged rental units largely languished unrepaired. And in 2015, the number of children living in poverty, almost 40 per cent – nearly twice the national average – remained unchanged from when the levees broke.
TLS

So Katrina was a cautionary tale of the U.S. government (and I’m talking federal, state, and local) failing to prepare, respond, and recover from a known risk. On a more literal level, it will not be the last coastal American city to be inundated. Eventually they may all be inundated. It is time to learn from what went wrong in Katrina and figure out how to apply it nationally to prepare, respond, and recover from the disasters that are coming.

the Democratic Party Platform

Since the Democratic convention is this week (as I write), let’s have a look at the party platform. I’ll get to the Republican one eventually.

First, let me think about what I’d like to see in there before I read it (seriously, I haven’t read it yet!)

Anti-corruption measures. One person, one vote instead of one dollar, one vote. Free political speech for human beings only. Without this you can’t really get anything else done because a tiny rich and powerful minority affected by each policy can block it. This probably means a constitutional amendment.
A major childcare, education, and training commitment. This would help struggling working parents, students, and people out of work right now, and put children on the right path to contribute to the economy and society in the long term.
A major public infrastructure and private capital investment commitment. This is necessary for both economic growth and quality of life.
A major research and development commitment. This is necessary for growth and competitiveness, and also creates jobs.
Universal health care. Just join the world’s modern nations and f-ing do it now! It will help with problems like the pandemic, drug addiction, depression, suicide, child mortality, etc.
A major risk management program. This sounds unglamorous, and it can be called something else, but the basic insight here is that we were not prepared for the pandemic and we should have been. Well, there will be another pandemic sooner or later, and there are many other risks big and small like nuclear war, famine, fires, floods, earthquakes, and sea level rise. Then there is preventable disease, accidents, violence, and pollution that kill small numbers of people predictably every day and add up to big numbers over time. We need to pick a top five or ten risks and really tackle them systematically, both domestically and internationally. Once we understand what the biggest risks are, we could realign funding, policy and institutions to match.
New revenue to support investment. We might be able to take most of what we need from the defense budget, but we might need to RAISE TAXES. If so, join all the other modern nations and just institute a value added tax. It’s the best practice, do it now! I would also support taxes on pollution (e.g., a carbon tax) and waste (e.g., non-recyclable packaging).
Unemployment and disability benefits probably could be shored up, and retirement benefits are basically adequate but need to be protected and adequately funded. All this would help deal with the pandemic in the short term and automation in the longer term.

You might ask where climate change, or environmental protection more broadly, or social justice are in this platform. Well, if done right they are woven throughout all of the above.

Okay, that’s the platform for my pretend party. Now for the Democrats.

Anti-corruption? Yes, p. 58 gets around to mentioning a constitutional amendment on campaign finance.
A major childcare, education, and training commitment? Yes – it’s pretty strong here.
A major public infrastructure and private capital investment commitment? an infrastructure bank is mentioned, basically transportation-only
A major research and development commitment? “historic federal investments”!
Universal health care? Yes, there’s a public option, and people without private coverage get signed up automatically unless they opt out. There’s some cryptic language though about it being in place “until the end of the pandemic”. Hopefully once it’s in place it would be politically difficult to remove it.
A major risk management program? piecemeal – pandemics are mentioned as one might expect. Gun violence is mentioned. Agriculture is mentioned but there’s not really a focus on long-term food security. Climate change and air pollution are discussed in some detail. Biodiversity and habitat actually get a paragraph. It gets around to tepid mentions of defense spending and nuclear weapons somewhere towards the end. Only nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, not even reduction let alone elimination.
New revenue to support investment? not really anything new – roll back some previous cuts, reduce loopholes, etc. Campaigning on raising taxes is obviously not a winning strategy. Only Bernie Sanders had the guts to go there.
Unemployment, disability, retirement? piecemeal proposals, “shore up the states”

So the platform kind of, mostly contains the stuff I care about, except it’s weak on nuclear weapons and peace and tepid on infrastructure. The stuff I care about is buried in a lot of other…stuff. Race and gender stuff. Union stuff. I’m not against most of this stuff, I just think it is a lot of empty words for the most part.

July 2020 in Review

Coronavirus certainly continues to be the main thing going on in current events globally. I just don’t have a lot of new or insightful things to say about it. Here’s some other stuff I read and thought about in July. WITH THE STUPID WORDPRESS BLOCK EDITOR, I CAN’T SEEM TO PUT A SPACE BETWEEN THESE PARAGRAPHS NO MATTER WHAT I DO. Most frightening and/or depressing story:

Here’s the elevator pitch for why even the most hardened skeptic should care about climate change. We are on a path to (1) lose both polar ice caps, (2) lose the Amazon rain forest, (3) lose our productive farmland, and (4) lose our coastal population centers. If all this comes to pass it will lead to mass starvation, mass refugee flows, and possibly warfare. Unlike even major crises like wars and pandemics, by the time it is obvious to everyone that something needs to be done, there will be very little that can be done.