Tag Archives: risk

2018 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: Cape Town, South Africa looked to be in imminent danger of running out of water. They got lucky, but the question is whether this was a case of serious mismanagement or an early warning sign of water supply risk due to climate change. Probably a case of serious mismanagement of the water supply while ignoring the added risk due to climate change. Longer term, there are serious concerns about snowpack-dependent water supplies serving large urban populations in Asia and western North America.
  • FEBRUARY: Cape Town will probably not be the last major city to run out of water. The other cities at risk mentioned in this article include Sao Paulo, Bangalore, Beijing, Cairo, Jakarta, Moscow, Istanbul, Mexico City, London, Tokyo, and Miami.
  • MARCH: One reason propaganda works is that even knowledgeable people are more likely to believe a statement the more often it is repeated.
  • APRIL: That big California earthquake is still coming.
  • MAY: The idea of a soft landing where absolute dematerialization of the economy reduces our ecological footprint and sidesteps the consequences of climate change through innovation without serious pain may be wishful thinking.
  • JUNE: The Trump administration is proposing to subsidize coal-burning power plants. Meanwhile the long-term economic damage expected from climate change appears to be substantial. For one thing, Hurricanes are slowing down, which  means they can do more damage in any one place. The rate of melting in Antarctic ice sheets is accelerating.
  • JULY: The UN is warning as many as 10 million people in Yemen could face starvation by the end of 2018 due to the military action by Saudi Arabia and the U.S. The U.S. military is involved in combat in at least 8 African countries. And Trump apparently wants to invade Venezuela.
  • AUGUST: Noam Chomsky doesn’t love Trump, but points out that climate change and/or nuclear weapons are still existential threats and that more mainstream leaders and media outlets have failed just as miserably to address them as Trump has. In related news, the climate may be headed for a catastrophic tipping point and while attention is mostly elsewhere, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is still one of the more serious risks out there.
  • SEPTEMBER: A huge earthquake in the Pacific Northwest could be by far the worst natural disaster ever seen.
  • OCTOBER: The Trump administration has slashed funding to help the U.S. prepare for the next pandemic.
  • NOVEMBER: About half a million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan since the U.S. invasions starting in 2001. This includes only people killed directly by violence, not disease, hunger, thirst, etc.
  • DECEMBER: Climate change is just bad, and the experts seem to keep revising their estimates from bad to worse. The Fourth National Climate Assessment produced by the U.S. government is not an uplifting publication. In addition to the impacts of droughts, storms, and fires, it casts some doubt on the long-term security of the food supply. An article in Nature was also not uplifting, arguing that climate change is happening faster than expected due to a combination of manmade and natural trends.

Climate change, nuclear weapons, and pandemics. If I go back and look at last year’s post, this list of existential threats is going to be pretty much the same. Add to this the depressing grind of permanent war which magnifies these risks and diverts resources that could be used to deal with them. True, we could say that we got through 2018 without a nuclear detonation, pandemic, or ecological collapse, and under the circumstances we should sit back, count our blessings, and wait for better leadership. And while our leadership is particularly inept at the moment, I think Noam Chomsky has a point that political administration after political administration has failed to solve these problems and this seems unlikely to improve. The earthquake risk is particularly troublesome. Think about the shock we felt over the inept response to Katrina, and now think about how essentially the same thing happened in Puerto Rico, we are not really dealing with it in an acceptable way, and the public and news media have essentially just shrugged it off and moved on. If the hurricanes, floods, fires and droughts just keep hitting harder and more often, and we don’t fully respond to one before the next hits, it could mean a slow downward spiral. And if that means we gradually lose our ability to bounce back fully from small and medium size disasters, a truly huge disaster like an epic earthquake on the west coast might be the one that pushes our society to a breaking point.

Most hopeful stories:

I believe our children are our future…ya ya blahda blahda. It’s a huge cliche, and yet to be hopeful about our world I have to have some hope that future generations can be better system thinkers and problem solvers and ethical actors than recent generations have been. Because despite identifying problems and even potential solutions we are consistently failing to make choices as a society that could divert us from the current failure path. And so I highlighted a few stories above about ideas for better preparing future generations, ranging from traditional school subjects like reading and music, to more innovative ones like meditation and general system theory, and just maybe we should be open to the idea that the right amount of the right drugs can help.

Fossil fuels just might be on their way out, as alternatives start to become economical and public outrage slowly, almost imperceptibly continues to build.

There is real progress in the fight against disease, which alleviates enormous quantities of human suffering. I mention AIDS, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease above. We can be happy about that, of course. There are ideas about how to grow more food, which is going to be necessary to avoid enormous quantities of human suffering. Lest anyone think otherwise, my position is that we desperately need to reduce our ecological footprint, but human life is precious and nobody deserves to suffer illness or hunger.

Good street design that lets people get around using mostly their own muscle power. It might not be sexy, but it is one of the keys to physical and mental health, clean air and water, biodiversity, social and economic vibrancy in our cities. Come to think of it, I take that back, it can be sexy if done well.

Good street design and general systems theory – proof that solutions exist and we just don’t recognize or make use of them. Here’s where I want to insert a positive sentence about how 2019 is the year this all changes for the better. Well, sorry, you’ll have to find someone less cynical than me, and/or with much better powers of communication and persuasion than me to get the ball rolling. On the off chance I have persuaded you, and you have communication and/or persuasion super powers, let me know.

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

Whatever else happens, technology and accumulation of human knowledge in general march on, of course. Computer, robotics, and surveillence technology march on. The human move into space is much slower and painful than many would have predicted half a century ago, and yet it is proceeding.

I’ll never drop the waterless sanitation thing, no matter how much others make fun of me. It’s going to happen, eventually. I don’t know whether we will colonize Mars or stop defecating in our water supply first, but both will happen.

The gene drive thing is really wild the more I think about it. This means we now have the ability to identify a species or group of species we don’t want to exist, then cause it not to exist in relatively short order. This seems like it could be terrifying in the wrong hands, doesn’t it? I’m not even sure I buy into the idea that rats and mosquitoes have no positive ecological functions at all. Aren’t there bats and birds that rely on mosquitoes as a food source? Okay, I’m really not sure what redeeming features rats have, although I did read a few years ago that in a serious food crunch farming rats would be a much more efficient way of turning very marginal materials into edible protein than chicken.

The universe in a bottle thing is mind blowing if you spend too much time thinking about it. It could just be bottles all the way down. It’s best not to spend too much time thinking about it.

That’s it, Happy 2019!

Fourth National Climate Assessment

Another week, another massive and massively depressing climate report. This one is the Fourth National Climate Assessment from basically all U.S. government agencies that have anything to do with climate science. A lot of it seems to have to do with the impacts of severe storms, droughts, and fires, which are already being felt and costing lives and money. I focused in on this paragraph from the executive summary about impacts on agriculture, and I’d like to dig more into the chapter on the subject if I can find the time.

Climate change presents numerous challenges to sustaining and enhancing crop productivity, livestock health, and the economic vitality of rural communities. While some regions (such as the Northern Great Plains) may see conditions conducive to expanded or alternative crop productivity over the next few decades, overall, yields from major U.S. crops are expected to decline as a consequence of increases in temperatures and possibly changes in water availability, soil erosion, and disease and pest outbreaks. Increases in temperatures during the growing season in the Midwest are projected to be the largest contributing factor to declines in the productivity of U.S. agriculture. Projected increases in extreme heat conditions are expected to lead to further heat stress for livestock, which can result in large economic losses for producers. Climate change is also expected to lead to large-scale shifts in the availability and prices of many agricultural products across the world, with corresponding impacts on U.S. agricultural producers and the U.S. economy. These changes threaten future gains in commodity crop production and put rural livelihoods at risk. Numerous adaptation strategies are available to cope with adverse impacts of climate variability and change on agricultural production. These include altering what is produced, modifying the inputs used for production, adopting new technologies, and adjusting management strategies. However, these strategies have limits under severe climate change impacts and would require sufficient long- and short-term investment in changing practices.

in praise of Richard Nixon

This post on History News Network makes a case that Richard Nixon looks great if you compare him to Donald Trump.

Richard Nixon did not set out to destroy our foreign policy, and in fact, improved it dramatically with the promotion of détente with the Soviet Union, the overture to the People’s Republic of China, and the nurturing of close ties with America’s allies in NATO. He had a mastery of foreign policy based on great experience from his Vice Presidential years onward for which he is often remembered aside from Watergate. This does not excuse the lengthening of the Vietnam War, or the terrible decisions on foreign policy regarding Chile, Greece, and the issue of the Indo-Pakistan War (which is associated with the creation of the nation of Bangladesh). But Donald Trump has been totally destructive in foreign affairs, alienating our allies in NATO, antagonizing all nations with his protectionist tariff policies, and consorting with authoritarian dictators including Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and the leaders of such other nations, as the Philippines, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Trump has also worsened relations with Iran and Cuba, based upon extremist right wing influences of John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. The Middle East has become much more unstable. The US Foreign Service itself has been badly damaged by the inconsistencies and instability of Donald Trump.

Richard Nixon had many battles and conflicts with the Democratic-controlled Congress during his years in the Presidency, and yet managed to sign into law many signature measures that built upon the accomplishments of the Great Society of his predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson. These included the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the enactment of Affirmative Action in employment and education. Donald Trump, in contrast, has been backtracking, destroying environmental protections, undermining consumer agencies, rolling back labor rights, ignoring scientific advancements, and curtailing civil rights. The Republican Party itself has become a willing participant in the destruction of these major domestic accomplishments of Richard Nixon.

Richard Nixon also promoted the concept of welfare reform, including the expansion of the Food Stamp Program, and attempted, though he failed, to advance health care reform. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has wished to destroy the health care plan represented by ObamaCare, stranding millions of people without health care, and offering no alternative, in collusion with a Republican Party far to the Right of what it was in Nixon’s time in the Oval Office. Additionally, Richard Nixon expanded Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and initiated Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for the elderly and disabled, all programs now in danger from Trump and the GOP.

Trump has added to the long-term existential risks to our civilization posed by climate change and nuclear weapons. But so far, we’re incredibly lucky he has not been faced with a major global economic or geopolitical crisis. My apologies to people in Puerto Rico and Yemen, among other places, when I say that. These are horrible crises for limited geographic areas and limited numbers of people (millions, in the case of Yemen) and the U.S. administration has blood on its hands. But think about the world-wide suffering caused by the financial crisis of 2008 or the world at the brink of nuclear war in 1962, and now imagine Trump in charge at those moments. Two years down, two to go.

October 2018 in Review

Most frightening stories:

  • The Trump administration has slashed funding to help the U.S. prepare for the next pandemic.
  • I read more gloomy expert opinions on the stability and resilience of the global financial system.
  • A new depressing IPCC report came out. Basically, implementing the Paris agreement is too little, too late, and we are not even implementing it. There is at least some movement towards a carbon tax in the U.S. – a hopeful development, except that oil companies are in favor of it which makes it suspicious. There is a carbon tax initiative on the ballot in Washington State this November that the oil companies appear to be terrified of, so comparing the two could be instructive, and the industry strategy may be to get a weaker law at the federal level as protection against a patchwork of tough laws at the state and local levels.

Most hopeful stories:

  • There is no evidence that kids in U.S. private schools do any better than kids in U.S. public schools, once you control for family income. (Okay – I admit I put this in the hopeful column because I have kids in public school.)
  • Regenerative agriculture is an idea to sequester carbon by restoring soil and  protecting biodiversity on a global scale.
  • Applying nitrogen fixing bacteria to plants that do not naturally have them may be a viable way to reduce nitrogen fertilizer use and water pollution.

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

  • New tech roundup: Artificial spider silk is an alternative to carbon fiber. Certain types of science, like drug and DNA experiments, can be largely automated. A “quantum internet” could mean essentially unbreakable encryption.
  • Modern monetary theory suggests governments might be able to print (okay, “create”) and spend a lot more money without serious repercussions. What I find odd about these discussions is they focus almost entirely on inflation and currency exchange values, while barely acknowledging that money has some relationship actual physical constraints. To me, it has always seemed that one function of the financial system is to start flashing warning lights and make us face the realities of how much we can do before we are all actually starving and freezing in the dark. It could be that we are in the midst of a long, slow slide in our ability to improve our physical quality of life, but instead of that manifesting itself as a long slow slide, it comes as a series of random shocks where one gets a little harder to recover from.
  • I read some interesting ideas on fair and unfair inequality. Conservative politicians encourage people not to make a distinction between alleviating poverty and the idea of making everybody equal. These are not the same thing at all because living just above the poverty line is no picnic and is not the same thing as being average. There is a strong moral case to be made that nobody “deserves” to live in poverty even if they have made some mistakes. And simply “creating jobs” in high-poverty areas sounds like a nice conservative alternative to handouts, except that there isn’t much evidence that it works.

detecting submarines with satellite lasers

The latest idea in detecting submarines involves using powerful lasers mounted on satellites to penetrate to much greater depths than previously thought possible. As far as I can tell, the lasers don’t actually zap the submarines, they just tell you where they are. This could still be a big deal because undetectable submarines with nuclear weapons are the ultimate deterrent. A first strike on an opponent’s land- and air-based nuclear forces can never succeed in wiping out the ability to retaliate, as long as the subs are out there. There is even a solid argument that a few submarine-based weapons are all the nuclear weapons a country really needs strategically. So if someone gets ahead in the sub-detection game, a first strike could become more thinkable.

The Economist on the next financial crisis

The Economist joins the chorus warning that another financial crisis could be in the cards. They offer three reasons:

  1. There is too much lending against real estate and not enough to businesses that generate real value.
  2. The U.S. dollar is still the world’s reserve currency, but political pressure may prevent the Federal Reserve from flooding the world with dollars in a future crisis like it has in the past.
  3. The Euro is still dangerously unstable.

the Cascadia subduction zone

A major earthquake in the Pacific Northwest could be really ugly, according to the New Yorker.

When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater… The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable…

In the Pacific Northwest, the area of impact will cover* some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America. Roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. fema projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million.

…we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten.

disaster kits

We all know we are supposed to have a disaster kit with 3 gallons of water per person, extra prescription drugs, a jar of peanut butter and whatnot. I admit, I have never really done that. I figure I can drink the water in the toilet tank if I am desperate, followed by the water in the toilet bowl, and then I don’t really have a good plan after that. This Wired article says there is not a whole lot of science or evidence behind the government recommendations.

Recommendations for what’s supposed to go in these kits vary, but basically it’s a gallon of water per person per day and food, too, plus medicines, blankets and sleeping bags, maybe a tent, extra eyeglasses, lots of batteries, something to make light with, something to make fire with, maybe a hand-cranked radio…

Here’s the worst part: Nobody knows if disaster preparedness kits actually help. They might! You should still have a kit, if you can do it…

Is there stuff you should probably definitely have access to in your home? Sure. Copies of personal identification documents. Prescription medications. A good whistle. Lightsticks. Water purification tech. A crowbar. (The time you need a crowbar is the time you really, really need a crowbar.)

the body count from Fukushima

This article has some stats on casualties from the tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan following the 2011 tsunami. I don’t want to trivialize the tragic loss of life here, just highlight some stats that were surprising to me.

  • deaths from cancer linked to radiation: 1, a worker responding to the disaster on the Fukushima site as it was occurring
  • suicides: 1 (mentioned in this article)
  • radiation-related illnesses not resulting in death: 4
  • deaths while being evacuated from hospitals near the disaster: 40
  • deaths caused by the tsunami: 18,000
  • people displaces from their homes by the disaster: 160,000

Overall you have to say it is great that people did not die in large numbers from radiation poisoning or cancer. People probably contracted cancer from smoking and not wearing enough sunscreen in greater numbers during the disaster. But if you want a gloomy way to look at it, at least for me a nuclear meltdown is now a less scary thing and a “thinkable” event, and that might not be good.

August 2018 in Review

Most frightening stories:

  • In certain provinces with insurgent activity, the Chinese government is reportedly combining surveillance and social media technologies to score people and send those with low scores to re-education camps, from which it is unclear if anyone returns.
  • Noam Chomsky doesn’t love Trump, but points out that climate change and/or nuclear weapons are still existential threats and that more mainstream leaders and media outlets have failed just as miserably to address them as Trump has. In related news, the climate may be headed for a catastrophic tipping point and while attention is mostly elsewhere, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is still one of the more serious risks out there.
  • The U.S. government is apparently very worried about a severe cyber attack. Also, a talented 11-year-old can hack a voting machine.

Most hopeful stories:

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