NASA is planning to intentionally ram an asteroid to see if it can change its trajectory. This particular asteroid is not a threat to Earth, they say. The chances of an asteroid threatening Earth “are pretty slim in our lifetimes”, they say, and this is just “an insurance policy”, they say.
I have been putting asteroid strikes in the category of potentially catastrophic but so rare as to not worry about. I have also assumed we would see a really big one coming for decades if not centuries and would at least have a chance to get organized and do something about it (a big if, given the lack of coordinated international response to climate change and the pandemic.) But according to this Jerusalem Post article, a fairly sizable asteroid could sneak up on us by passing close to the sun on its way to us. This happened on September 16, 2021 with an asteroid somewhere in the 50-100 m diameter range. The article doesn’t do the math on what size conventional or nuclear weapon this would be the equivalent of if it hit. I thought that was pretty standard…
The article has an interesting (and chilling) photo of the 2013 Chelyabinsk asteroid streaking in, which was about 17 m wide. The article says that on April 13, 2029, a 340 m asteroid is supposed to “safely pass by” the earth at a distance of “under 32,000 km”. Assuming the article has the number right, that is only about one-tenth the distance from the Earth to the moon. This sounds like one to watch.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: The U.S. is not prepared for megadisasters. Pandemics, just to cite one example. War and climate change tipping points, just to cite two others. Solutions or at least risk mitigation measures exist, such as getting a health care system, joining the worldwide effort to deal with carbon emissions, and as for war, how about just try to avoid it?
Most hopeful story: The Nordic welfare model works by providing excellent benefits to the middle class, which builds the public and political support to collect sufficient taxes to provide the benefits, and so on in a virtuous cycle. This is not a hopeful story for the U.S., where wealthy and powerful interests easily break the cycle with anti-tax propaganda, which ensure benefits are underfunded, inadequate, available only to the poor, and resented by middle class tax payers.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Ectogenesis is an idea for colonizing other planets that involves freezing embryos and putting them on a spaceship along with robots to thaw them out and raise them. Fungi could also be very useful in space, providing food, medicine, and building materials.
The description for this 2006 book Americans at Risk: Why We Are Not Prepared for Megadisasters and What We Can Do is eerily prophetic. Then again, I can’t rule out the possibility that it was updated in the last year or so to appear eerily prophetic in hindsight.
Five years after 9/11 and one year after Hurricane Katrina, it is painfully clear that the government’s emergency response capacity is plagued by incompetence and a paralyzing bureaucracy. Irwin Redlener, who founded and directs the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, brings his years of experience with disasters and health care crises, national and international, to an incisive analysis of why our health care system, our infrastructure, and our overall approach to disaster readiness have left the nation vulnerable, virtually unable to respond effectively to catastrophic events…
As a doctor, Redlener is especially concerned about America’s increasingly dysfunctional and expensive health care system, incapable of handling a large-scale public health emergency, such as pandemic flu or widespread bioterrorism. And he also looks at the serious problem of a disengaged, uninformed citizenry—one of the most important obstacles to assuring optimal readiness for any major crisis.
Amazon
I thought we responded okay to 9/11 in terms of the actual local area where it happened. Obviously we didn’t prevent it or prepare for it, and starting two wars with countries that were mostly uninvolved can’t really be considered a response at all. Katrina is another story. When I look back, that failure on a regional scale was a harbinger of our coronavirus failure on a national scale. And coronavirus, awful as it has been, is marginal in terms of what a megadisaster could really unleash – think a disease that kills 99% instead or 1% of people infected, even a limited nuclear war, an earthquake or volcano large enough to devastate an entire densely populated region, sudden ice sheet collapse, or a catastrophic collapse of the food and/or energy systems.
It seems to me that surviving the medium-term future as a nation and civilization requires us to address both the slow and steady long-term trends like global warming, and to be prepared for the sudden catastrophic events we are going to have to deal with. The two are clearly related – dealing with the long term trends can lessen the frequency and severity of some of the short-term events, but not eliminate them.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
Goodbye summer, hello fall (or do you prefer to say autumn?) in this weird and consequential year.
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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.
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The Earth faces something-less-than-one-in-a-million chance of a serious asteroid strike in 2029 and again in 2068. We should be able to tell by its path in 2029 what the odds are in 2068. This is from the always reliable Russia Times.