Tag Archives: risk

drought

Alarm bells are beginning to sound on drought risk in western North America and around the world, including some important and populous food growing regions.

Here’s an article in Science talking about “an emerging North American megadrought”:

Severe and persistent 21st-century drought in southwestern North America (SWNA) motivates comparisons to medieval megadroughts and questions about the role of anthropogenic climate change. We use hydrological modeling and new 1200-year tree-ring reconstructions of summer soil moisture to demonstrate that the 2000–2018 SWNA drought was the second driest 19-year period since 800 CE, exceeded only by a late-1500s megadrought. The megadrought-like trajectory of 2000–2018 soil moisture was driven by natural variability superimposed on drying due to anthropogenic warming. Anthropogenic trends in temperature, relative humidity, and precipitation estimated from 31 climate models account for 47% (model interquartiles of 35 to 105%) of the 2000–2018 drought severity, pushing an otherwise moderate drought onto a trajectory comparable to the worst SWNA megadroughts since 800 CE.

Science

Here’s an article in Earth’s Future (from the American Geophysical Union, which I consider prestigious) talking about some other regions with high drought risk.

The multi‐model ensemble shows robust drying in the mean state across many regions and metrics by the end of the 21st century, even following the more aggressive mitigation pathways (SSP1‐2.6 and SSP2‐4.5). Regional hotspots with strong drying include western North America, Central America, Europe and the Mediterranean, the Amazon, southern Africa, China, Southeast Asia, and Australia. Compared to SSP3‐7.0 and SSP5‐8.5, however, the severity of drying in the lower warming scenarios is substantially reduced and further precipitation declines in many regions are avoided. Along with drying in the mean state, the risk of the historically most extreme drought events also increases with warming, by 200–300% in some regions.

AGU

So, our species has identified the problem and identified solutions, but is continuing to fail to actually do anything. This is a little like the coronavirus, where early action could have been cheap and effective compared to the drastic action required when the problem became really obvious to even the densest politicians. It’s unlike the coronavirus in that once the problem becomes obvious to even the densest politicians, there may be no effective measures that can be taken, even maximally disruptive ones.

The mention of the Amazon and Southeast Asia are particularly concerning to me. These are both important food growing regions and biodiversity hot spots.

New Start expires February 2021

With the coronavirus crisis raging, it is easy to forget that nuclear weapons are still out there. One thing coronavirus should be teaching us all is that the unthinkable can happen. Trump, aka the angel of death, has already made us all less safe by withdrawing from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty with Russia, the nuclear deal with Iran, ratcheting up tensions with China. Now the New Start treaty, through which the U.S. and Russia have achieved further arms reductions over the past decade, is set to expire on February 5, 2021. The current administration and/or the current Congress could do the right thing just this one time and extend the treaty. Then the next President and Congress could start working on extending the gains.

the next crisis

In the thick of the Covid-19 crisis, it’s hard to think about the next crisis. But how many articles are there right now talking about all the research, all the warnings, all the reports and studies and past evidence pointing to something like this being inevitable? So if I were President (or anyone in charge of anything at any level), I would be asking what the ten or so biggest risks are out there that we need to be preparing for. We will probably be prepared if another coronavirus or flu pandemic somewhat similar to this one comes along. But what about an even more horrifying disease, or god forbid one created on purpose in a laboratory? That dark day may come.

Nuclear terrorism, war or accidents would certainly be on the list. We spend a lot of time thinking about this and a fair amount of effort on prevention and preparation, but still it seems like this day may come.

Earthquakes, like disease outbreaks, just happen – small ones happen a lot, big ones less often, catastrophic ones very rarely. A big earthquake or volcanic eruption should be on our list.

A major food crisis should be close to the top if not at the top of our list. We are closing in on 8 billion humans on the planet and have managed to feed most of them most of the time with some to spare. Dwindling groundwater, melting glaciers and snowpacks, heat and drought and floods depressing crop yields especially in the tropics, and the collapse of fisheries all have the potential to change this. Disease outbreaks can also affect crops and livestock, and the less genetic variety in our crops and animals the more susceptible they may be. Habitat loss and other unknown factors are devastating insects, which pollinate our crops and form the base of the food chain. What if one or more of these factors strike at once, and/or a volcano or nuclear exchange blocks out sunlight for years on end?

“Climate change” is real, but part of the problem in building public support to actually deal with it is that it is too broad and too vague. I would try to break it down into concrete things that are going to affect people like the loss of coastal cities, floods, fires, droughts, famines, hurricanes, etc. People should be able to understand how those are going to affect them.

Our complex financial, communication, energy, water, and transportation systems can just melt down if they are not carefully planned, maintained, renewed and continually invested in. External threats like cyberattacks and climate change do not make these challenges easier to deal with, or even easy for the experts to understand and explain well enough to build support for action.

And there is always good old fashioned war.

At the same time, I would want to know how many of the citizens I am accountable to are dying of preventable causes like car accidents, air pollution, diabetes, drug overdoses, homicides and suicides. Maybe the cost of these is such that they should be on the list above some of the existential threats.

Elect me and I won’t promise to solve all these problems, but I will promise to at least make a list of them! Then I’ll figure out how to attack the top 2 or 3, and maybe add one each year for the duration of my administration. I’ll also work on health care, child care, education, infrastructure, research and development. Doesn’t that all sound pretty good?

2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: Writing in 1984, Isaac Asimov thought we would be approaching world peace, living lives of leisure, children would love school, and we would be mining the moon and manufacturing things in orbital factories by now.
  • FEBRUARY: Cyber-attacking may be a lot easier than cyber-defending. Also, nuclear proliferation is back partly thanks to diplomatic unforced errors by the United States.
  • MARCH: Invoking of emergency powers was the first step down the slippery slope for the democratic Weimar Republic. New research suggests that climate change can be the trigger that pushes a society over the edge.
  • APRIL: The most frightening and/or depressing story often involves nuclear weapons and/or climate change, because these are the near-term existential threats we face. Oliver Stone has added a new chapter to his 2012 book The Untold History of the United States making a case that we have lost serious ground on both these issues since then. In a somewhat related depressing story, the massive New Orleans levy redesign in response to Hurricane Katrina does not appear to have made use of the latest climate science.
  • MAY: Without improvements in battery design, the demand for materials needed to make the batteries might negate the environmental benefits of the batteries. I’m not really all that frightened or depressed about this because I assume designs will improve. Like I said, it was slim pickings this month.
  • JUNE: The world economy appears to be slowing, even though U.S. GDP is growing as the result of the post-2007 recovery finally taking hold, juiced by a heavy dose of pro-cyclical government spending. The worry is that if and when there is eventually a shock to the system, there will be little room for either fiscal or monetary policy to respond. Personally, the partisan in me is thinking any time before November 2020 is as good a time for any for a recession to hit the U.S. I am a couple decades from retirement, and picturing that bumper sticker “Lord, Just Give Me One More Bubble”. Of course, this is selfish thinking when there are many people close to retirement and many families struggling to get by out there. And short-term GDP growth is not the only metric. The U.S. is falling behind its developed peers on a wide range of metrics that matter to people lives, including infrastructure, health care costs and outcomes, life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, addiction, suicide, poverty, and hunger. And it’s not just that we are no longer in the lead on these metrics, we are below average and falling. Which is why I am leading the charge to Make America Average Again!
  • JULY: The water situation in India, and the major city of Chennai in particular, sounds really bad.
  • AUGUST: Drought is a significant factor causing migration from Central America to the United States. Drought in the Mekong basin may put the food supply for a billion people in tropical Asia at risk. One thing that can cause drought is deliberately lying to the public for 50 years while materially changing the atmosphere in a way that enriches a wealthy few at everyone else’s expense. Burning what is left of the Amazon can’t help. 
  • SEPTEMBER: Being a TSA air marshal may be the worst job ever.
  • OCTOBER: A third of all of North America’s birds may have disappeared since the 1970s. (Truth be told, it was hard to pick a single most depressing story line in a month when I covered propaganda, pandemic, new class divisions created by genetic engineering, and nuclear war. But while those are scary risks for the near future, it appears the world is right in the middle of an ongoing and obvious ecological collapse, and not talking much about it.)
  • NOVEMBER: The Darling, a major river system in Australia, has essentially dried up.
  • DECEMBER: Pilots occasionally go crazy and crash planes on purpose.

Most hopeful stories:

  • JANUARY: The dream of fusion power is not dead. There is even some hope of new advancements in fission power.
  • FEBRUARY: Here is the boringly simple western European formula for social and economic success: “public health care, nearly free university education, stronger progressive taxation, higher minimum wages, and inclusion of trade unions in corporate decision-making.” There’s even a glimmer of hope that U.S. politicians could manage to put some of these ideas into action. Seriously, I’m trying hard not to be cynical.
  • MARCH: The Green New Deal, if fleshed out into a serious plan, has potential to slow or reverse the decline of the United States.
  • APRIL: There is forward progress on a male birth control pill.
  • MAY: Planting native plants in your garden really can make a difference for biodiversity.
  • JUNE: There have been a number of serious proposals and plans for disarmament and world peace in the past, even since World War II. We have just forgotten about them or never heard of them.
  • JULY: Deliberate practice is how you get better at something.
  • AUGUST: I explored an idea for automatic fiscal stabilizers as part of a bold infrastructure investment plan. I’m not all that hopeful but a person can dream.
  • SEPTEMBER: I think Elizabeth Warren has a shot at becoming the U.S. President, and of the candidates she and Bernie Sanders understand the climate change problem best. This could be a plus for the world. I suggested an emergency plan for the U.S. to deal with climate change: Focus on disaster preparedness and disaster response capabilities, the long term reliability and stability of the food system, and tackle our systemic corruption problems. I forgot to mention coming up with a plan to save our coastal cities, or possibly save most of them while abandoning portions of some of them in a gradual, orderly fashion. By the way, we should reduce carbon emissions and move to clean energy, but these are more doing our part to try to make sure the planet is habitable a century from now, while the other measures I am suggesting are true emergency measures that have to start now if we are going to get through the next few decades.
  • OCTOBER: I’ll go with hard shell tacos. They are one of the good things in this life, whether they are authentic Mexican food or “trailer park cuisine” as I tagged the story! 
  • NOVEMBER: There is progress on carbon capture technology. Also, just restoring soil on previously degraded farm and grazing land could provide large benefits worldwide. There may also be real progress on fusion power.
  • DECEMBER: Deep inside me is a little boy who still likes bugs, and I spotted some cool bugs in my 2019 garden, including endangered Monarch butterflies. So at least I made that small difference for biodiversity in a small urban garden, and others can do the same.

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

  • JANUARY: Some in the U.S. Senate and military take UFOs seriously.
  • FEBRUARY: We could theoretically create a race of humans with Einstein-level intelligence using in-vitro fertilization techniques available today. They might use their intelligence to create even smarter artificial intelligence which would quickly render them (not to mention, any ordinary average intelligence humans) obsolete.
  • MARCH: China is looking into space-based solar arrays. Also, injecting sulfate dust into the atmosphere could actually boost rice yields because rice is more sensitive to temperature than light, at least within the ranges studied. This all suggests that solutions to climate change that do not necessarily involve an end to fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions are possible with existing or very near future technology.
  • APRIL: Genetic engineering of humans might have to play a big role in eventual colonization of other planets, because the human body as it now exists may just not be cut out for long space journeys. In farther future space colonization news, I linked to a video about the concept of a “Dyson swarm“.
  • MAY: Joseph Stiglitz suggested an idea for a “free college” program where college is funded by a progressive tax on post-graduation earnings.
  • JUNE: In technology news, Elon Musk is planning to launch thousands of satellites. And I learned a new acronym, DARQ: “distributed ledger technology (DLT), artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR) and quantum computing”. And in urban planning news, I am sick and tired of the Dutch just doing everything right.
  • JULY: I laid out the platform for my non-existent Presidential campaign.
  • AUGUST: Liquid hydrogen could theoretically be used as a jet fuel.
  • SEPTEMBER: I mentioned an article by a Marine special operator (I didn’t even know those existed) on how to fix a broken organizational culture: acknowledge the problem, employ trusted agents, rein in cultural power brokers, win the population.
  • OCTOBER: A list of “jobs of the future” includes algorithms, automation, and AI; customer experience; environmental; fitness and wellness; health care; legal and financial services; transportation; and work culture. I’ll oversimplify this list as computer scientist, engineer, doctor, lawyer, banker, which don’t sound all that different than the jobs of the past. But it occurs to me that these are jobs where the actual tools people are using and day-to-day work tasks evolve with the times, even if the intended outcomes are basically the same. What might be new is that even in these jobs, you need to make an effort to keep learning every day throughout your career and life if you want to keep up.
  • NOVEMBER: Google claims to have achieved “quantum supremacy“. This may allow us all to live lives of Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
  • DECEMBER: Estonia is supposedly the most digitally advanced country in the world. Finland has posted a free AI literacy course.

I want to give the reader some brilliant synthesis of all that, but you could probably go back to my past year in review posts and find that I am saying pretty much the same things each year. Well, here goes.

There is a list of serious risks that are being acknowledged but not effectively addressed. These include climate change, nuclear war, drought, rainforest loss, loss of freedom and human rights, economic recession, cyberwarfare, and automation leading to job loss. Climate change, drought, and rainforest loss are clearly intertwined. Solutions are largely known and just not being implemented due to dysfunctional politics at the national level and lack of international cooperation. These trends seem to be going in the wrong direction at the moment unfortunately.

Other than rainforest loss, the ongoing catastrophic loss of biodiversity, biomass and ecosystem function is mostly not even being acknowledged, let alone addressed. Biodiversity is a somewhat esoteric concept to most people, but hearing about mammals and birds and even insects just vanishing on a mass scale really starts to get to me emotionally. I don’t hear others in my social circles talking about these issues much, so I wonder if they just haven’t heard the same facts and figures I have or if they just don’t have the same response. Politicians are certainly not talking about these issues.

The risk of catastrophic war is very real. The world is in a very cynical place right now, but we have made progress on this before and we can do it again.

Recession and automation have an interesting relationship, where recession is a short- to medium-term reversal of economic growth, and automation, at least in theory, should lead to a longer-term acceleration of it. Of course, even if the acceleration happens it will benefit the majority of workers only if the wealth is shared. I’ll just repeat what I said above: “Here is the boringly simple western European formula for social and economic success: “public health care, nearly free university education, stronger progressive taxation, higher minimum wages, and inclusion of trade unions in corporate decision-making.” Or just copy the Dutch because they seem to know what they’re doing, the smug bastards.

You could accuse my blog of being US-centric, and I would accept that criticism. I am living in the US after all. I’ve lived and worked abroad though, and came to appreciate the strengths of my country more when I spent some time away from it. The US is still a good country to live in as a middle class professional person, but we are cruising along on the momentum of our past extraordinary success. We have lost momentum and begun to slip not only out of the leadership position among our developed country peers, but below the middle of the pack. The hard evidence on this is clear. We have politicians that just tell us that we are “great again”, because that is what we want to hear, without taking any necessary steps that would at least help us to keep up. 2020 is an election year and we have a chance to make some changes. We need to deal first and foremost with our systemic corruption problem which causes our government to respond to wealthy and powerful interests rather than citizens. We need real, inspiring, once-in-a-generation leadership to make this happen. I have decided to support Bernie Sanders for this reason, even though I don’t agree with every one of his stated policy positions.

There are some interesting and even astonishing technologies in the list above, from fusion power to micro-satellites to quantum computing to genetic engineering. It is 2020 after all.

And finally, when I’m not thinking and worrying about the world at large, I’ll be tending to my garden and my family and eating my hard shell tacos, and reminding myself that life here in the United States on the planet Earth is actually pretty good.

how bad would a flu pandemic be?

This episode of the Science Vs. podcast dramatizes what a global flu pandemic could look like? The good news? that the most plausible scenario might kill “only” 2% of the world’s population. That means you might survive. But hospitals would be overwhelmed, the economy would be devastated, and some people you know and love would almost certainly be dead.

African swine fever

A nasty virus called African swine fever has spread from pig farms in Africa to China.

The number of pigs China will fatten this year is predicted to fall by 134 million, or 20%, from 2018—the worst annual slump since the U.S. Department of Agriculture began counting China’s pigs in the mid-1970s. While the pig virus doesn’t harm humans even if they eat tainted pork, the fatality rate in pigs means it could destroy the region’s pork industry.

New Orleans levees are upgraded, but did not take climate change into account

A $14 billion upgrade to New Orleans’s flood protection system has been completed, as recommended following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. For the U.S., this is a pretty massive and fast public works project. I haven’t delved into any technical details and am only going on this Scientific American article, but it sounds like it will not provide the level of protection originally envisioned.

The agency’s projection that the system will “no longer provide [required] risk reduction as early as 2023” illustrates the rapidly changing conditions being experienced both globally as sea levels rise faster than expected and locally as erosion wipes out protective barrier islands and marshlands in southeastern Louisiana….

Sea-level rise raises questions about whether the protective system—known officially as the Greater New Orleans Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction System—should be built to a higher standard.
When Congress approved funding after Katrina, it required the system to protect against a so-called 100-year flood, which has a 1% likelihood of occurring in any year.

That’s a laudable attempt to communicate probability to the public. But if the Army Corps is really using the “100-year flood” as its design standard, and if it’s doing that because Congress prescribed it, and if they did not consider coastal erosion or adequately consider sea level rise, this may be yet another sign the U.S. is slipping behind its peer group of advanced nations. The Dutch are not doing this, they are providing a much higher level of protection to coastal population centers based on the economic value of doing so. I want to believe Congress will do the right thing and protect our coastal population centers when push comes to shove, but I am not encouraged.

Of course, if it protects from a 1-chance-in-50 event rather than a 1-chance-in-100 event, this is not nothing. Each year, and over the course of several decades or a century, your city and personal property either floods or it doesn’t. When it does, you either have practical and financial plans in place to help you bounce back, or you don’t. So good planning, good public works design, good building codes and land use controls, insurance and disaster resilience planning all matter. Some academics, professionals and bureaucrats within the U.S. might be talking about these things, but our political system is certainly not on the cutting edge when it comes to putting them into practice.

this year’s doomsday clock

The good news is the clock has not been moved any closer to midnight. The bad news there are only two minutes to go, which is as close as they put it at any point during the cold war. The reasons they give are climate change and, yes, good old nuclear weapons.

In the nuclear realm, the United States abandoned the Iran nuclear deal and announced it would withdraw from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), grave steps towards a complete dismantlement of the global arms control process. Although the United States and North Korea moved away from the bellicose rhetoric of 2017, the urgent North Korean nuclear dilemma remains unresolved. Meanwhile, the world’s nuclear nations proceeded with programs of “nuclear modernization” that are all but indistinguishable from a worldwide arms race, and the military doctrines of Russia and the United States have increasingly eroded the long-held taboo against the use of nuclear weapons.

Guaranteeing AI Robustness against Deception

DARPA is funding research into defense against AI attacks.

The growing sophistication and ubiquity of ML components in advanced systems dramatically increases capabilities, but as a byproduct, increases opportunities for new, potentially unidentified vulnerabilities. The acceleration in ML attack capabilities has promoted an arms race: As defenses are developed to address new attack strategies and vulnerabilities, improved attack methodologies capable of bypassing the defense algorithms are created. The field now appears increasingly pessimistic, sensing that developing effective ML defenses may prove significantly more difficult than designing new attacks, leaving advanced systems vulnerable and exposed. Further, the lack of a comprehensive theoretical understanding of ML vulnerabilities in the “Adversarial Examples” field leaves significant exploitable blind spots in advanced systems and limits efforts to develop effective defenses.