Tag Archives: risk

decrease in U.S. child deaths

This blog crunched the monthly numbers on death from all causes in the U.S. (something the CDC still manages to do well) and came up with an unexpected result: the number of children (under 18) who died each week since mid-March is down 15-20% compared to the long-term average. The conclusion? Children have not been in and around cars, and CARS KILL CHILDREN. “15-20%” seems a bit abstract, but it means 85 U.S. children per week DID NOT DIE, who otherwise would have been killed by cars. Cars are a worldwide serial killer of children – why do we put up with it? Our children need to be able to walk or bike to school, and we all need safe walking and biking infrastructure that is completely separated and protected from cars. Now!

The blogger is a self-described climate change skeptic by they way, and I don’t full endorse all of his views, and there are many nuances to the data that he made choices how to deal with. So have a look and make up your own mind, but I actually find it convincing.

June 2020 in Review

In current events, the coronavirus crisis in the U.S. is spinning out of control as I write this in early July. I made a list of trackers and simulation tools that I have looked at. Asian countries, even developing countries, pretty much have it under control, Europe is getting it under control, and the U.S. and a few other countries are melting down. Some voices are very pessimistic on the U.S. economy’s chances to come back. So of course I’m thinking about that, but I don’t have all that many novel or brilliant ideas on it so I’m choosing to write about other things below. Most frightening and/or depressing story:
  • The UN just seems to be declining into irrelevancy. I have a few ideas: (1) Add Japan, Germany, India, Brazil, and Indonesia to the Security Council, (2) transform part of the UN into something like a corporate risk management board, but focused on the issues that cause the most suffering and existential risk globally, and (3) have the General Assembly focus on writing model legislation that can be debated and adopted by national legislatures around the world.
Most hopeful story:
  • Like many people, I was terrified that the massive street demonstrations that broke out in June would repeat the tragedy of the 1918 Philadelphia war bond parade, which accelerated the spread of the flu pandemic that year. Not only does it appear that was not the case, it is now a source of great hope that Covid-19 just does not spread that easily outdoors. I hope the protests lead to some meaningful progress for our country. Meaningful progress to me would mean an end to the “war on drugs”, which I believe is the immediate root cause of much of the violence at issue in these protests, and working on the “long-term project of providing cradle-to-grave (at least cradle-to-retirement) childcare, education, and job training to people so they have the ability to earn a living, and providing generous unemployment and disability benefits to all citizens if they can’t earn a living through no fault of their own.”
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • Here’s a recipe for planting soil using reclaimed urban construction waste: 20% “excavated deep horizons” (in layman’s terms, I think this is just dirt from construction sites), 70% crushed concrete, and 10% compost

Jeff Masters: We’re all going to die!

Jeff Masters, who used to write a neat blog for Weather Underground before weather.com/IBM destroyed everything that was ever good about that site, has a dark take on climate change. He now writes on Yale Climate Connections, which is okay, but I notice that one by one my beloved RSS feeds are falling prey to neglect (there’s an RSS feed for Yale Climate Connections, which is okay, but not one for Jeff Masters’s blog specifically.)

When the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica melt, the forests of the Amazon transition to scrubland, and vast swaths of once-fertile land become inhospitable desert, there will be no climate change vaccine that will suddenly bring an end to these essentially irreversible catastrophes. Tens of millions will starve. Wars will break out over scarce resources. Hundreds of millions of climate change refugees will flee rising seas, coasts will be ravaged by stronger storms, and desert-like lands will be without the food and water needed to sustain civilization.

Jeff Masters, Yale Climate Connections

I think that’s a pretty good elevator pitch for the “why should I care?” crowd: (1) massive melting of ice sheets on both poles leading to catastrophic sea level rise, (2) loss of the Amazon rain forest, which along with the oceans maintains the mix of gases in the atmosphere that we have become accustomed to throughout human history, (3) loss of huge amounts of what used to be productive farm land, due to high temperatures and lack of water. These processes will play out slowly, maybe over decades. We are the frogs in the slowly heating up cook pot. We may see slowly rising prices for food, and we will have to clean up after increasingly frequent storms, floods, and fires. Eventually we may see absolute food shortages. These acute crises will start to affect poorer nations, and poorer people in richer nations, before others, of course. Mass migrations, civil conflicts within nation-states, and geopolitical conflicts between nation-states may break out. Throw in a few random events like earthquakes and pandemics at already vulnerable moments, and things may get dicey.

This sounds awful, and there is certainly no worldwide effort to effectively deal with it. At the same time, science, technological know-how, and financial wealth continue to increase, although they obviously are not spread equally or fairly among the world’s people. We have seen examples of effective leadership and cooperation in the past at times of crisis, and maybe these will emerge again. As Jeff Masters rightly points out though, unlike wars and pandemics, a big difference with climate change is that when it becomes obvious to absolutely everyone that something has to be done, there may be no good options left.

the latest on the Drake equation and the Fermi paradox

An updated (and serious) estimate on the Drake equation, which estimates the number of alien civilizations in the Milky Way, says it’s complicated, and uncertain, and highly sensitive to input assumptions…and a possible answer is 36. This kind of sounds like a lot to me, but the article says that given the size of the galaxy, and how far the 36 would be from each other on average, it could explain why we haven’t been able to detect anyone else so far. An important variable in the Drake equation is how long advanced civilizations tend to last. “Advanced” is defined as having invented the radio, because this should make them possible to detect by other civilizations that have also invented the radio. But the theory goes that once the radio is invented, the ball also starts rolling on potentially civilization-ending and ecosystem-killing technologies. There could be many civilizations that come and go, but only a few around at any given time.

pandemic reinsurance

You can buy insurance against a pandemic. Well, if you are a giant corporation or a small country. It seems like insurers wouldn’t be able to offer it, but some of the reinsurers, which insure insurance companies against rare catastrophic risks, actually do. They do it by finding parties that can insure them, and the parties that are willing to insure them are pension funds, because when old people start dying in large numbers pension funds actually have a lot of extra cash lying around. The bigger the pandemic and the more people are dropping like flies, the more cash they have to pay off the reinsurance companies. Yes, the insurance business is kind of sinister, so there it is. From Wired.

May 2020 in Review

You can’t say that 2020 has not been interesting so far. The Covid-19 saga continued throughout May. I certainly continued to think about it, including a fun quote from The Stand, but my mind began turning to other topics.

 

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • Potential for long-term drought in some important food-producing regions around the globe should be ringing alarm bells. It’s a good thing that our political leaders’ crisis management skills have been tested by shorter-term, more obvious crises and they have passed with flying colors…doh!

Most hopeful story:

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

  • There are unidentified flying objects out there. They may or may not be aliens, that has not been identified. But they are objects, they are flying, and they are unidentified.

biodiversity, food and agriculture

Morally, biodiversity should matter to us just because it is. Life on Earth is special, and beautiful, and possibly unique in this universe. But it also matters because losing it could be bad for us humans. The more genetically uniform our sources of food are, the more vulnerable and less resilient they are.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization put a massive report out on this last year. The verdict? Diversity is lower than it should be, it is declining, and some things are being done but not enough things are being done to reverse the decline. Doesn’t that describe most of the thorny problems facing our planet and species at the moment? We better pay attention to food though – cleaning up after storms, fires and floods is one thing; a few million babies and old people out of billions dying prematurely is another thing; but a serious food crisis could be the one that brings our civilization to its knees.

UN reform

This article argues that the failed global response to the coronavirus crisis shows that the UN is in an increasing downward spiral.

More recently, however, the UN’s role has been steadily declining, and its influence on world events and governments has waned. Once the world’s pre-eminent moderator and arbitrator, it has become too constrained by old concepts and doctrines to be the truly effective, collaborative global governing body that its founders envisioned. It can no longer instill respect among governments for international legitimacy, international law, and the maintenance of global peace and security, as it did after both World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example.

Project Syndicate

The answer is “reform”, which seems to focus on some vague proposals to expand the Security Council. That sounds like a good idea, but based on the premise of powerful entities voluntarily giving up some of their power, which is not how the world works. Powerful entities are going to do what they think is in their own interest. I think maybe that means a focus on risk reduction. The IPCC actually is a pretty good example of this – despite some setbacks, it has built consensus around the science, laid out clear objectives and policies that nation-states can choose to adopt or adapt, and reached win-win agreements among a range of pretty powerful parties (with notable exceptions). Public health, food supply, biodiversity, and arms reductions (conventional, nuclear, biological, cyber, space) are other areas where nation-states should be able to come together and forge win-win agreements that reduce collective risk.

Another idea I have is that the UN – perhaps the General Assembly – could focus on writing model legislation on these topics that national legislatures around the world can choose to adopt or adapt to their own situations.

The UN does not seem to be likely to evolve into a world government anytime soon, other than in pretty much all science fiction movies.

Maybe the UN is just too old, bureaucratic and set in its ways, and it is time to create a new body of some sort to replace it and achieve some of its original objectives.

CDC in the ICU?

I’m not the only one disappointed in the CDC. The Lancet has a scathing editorial.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the flagship agency for the nation’s public health, has seen its role minimised and become an ineffective and nominal adviser in the response to contain the spread of the virus. The strained relationship between the CDC and the federal government was further laid bare when, according to The Washington Post, Deborah Birx, the head of the US COVID-19 Task Force and a former director of the CDC’s Global HIV/AIDS Division, cast doubt on the CDC’s COVID-19 mortality and case data by reportedly saying: “There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust”. This is an unhelpful statement, but also a shocking indictment of an agency that was once regarded as the gold standard for global disease detection and control. How did an agency that was the first point of contact for many national health authorities facing a public health threat become so ill-prepared to protect the public’s health?

The Lancet

Well, you can read the rest for yourself, but the answer to the question is defunding and political interference.

April 2020 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • The coronavirus thing just continued to grind on and on, and I say that with all due respect to anyone reading this who has suffered serious health or financial consequences, or even lost someone they care about. After saying I was done posting coronavirus tracking and simulation tools, I continued to post them throughout the month – for example here, here, here, here, and here. After reflecting on all this, what I find most frightening and depressing is that if the U.S. government wasn’t ready for this crisis, and isn’t able to competently manage this crisis, it is not ready for the next crisis or series of crises, which could be worse. It could be any number of things, including another plague, but what I find myself fixating on is a serious food crisis. I find myself thinking back to past crises – We got through two world wars, then managed to avoid getting into a nuclear war to end all wars, then worked hard to secure the loose nuclear weapons floating around. We got past acid rain and closed the ozone hole (at least for awhile). Then I find myself thinking back to Hurricane Katrina – a major regional crisis we knew was coming for decades, and it turned out no government at any level was prepared or able to competently manage the crisis. The unthinkable became thinkable. Then the titans of American finance broke the global financial system. Now we have a much bigger crisis in terms of geography and number of people affected all over the world. The crises may keep escalating, and our competence has clearly suffered a decline. Are we going to learn anything?

Most hopeful story:

  • Well, my posts were 100% doom and gloom this month, possibly for the first time ever! Just to find something positive to be thankful for, it’s been kind of nice being home and watching my garden grow this spring.

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

  • There’s a comet that might be bright enough to see with the naked eye from North America this month.