Tag Archives: risk

Don’t forget to worry about volcanoes!

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Amid all the many choices of things to worry about, we sometimes forget volcanoes! But actually, they can be quite dangerous and are not as uncommon or far away as one might think. This article from Cambridge has some numbers on how common and damaging they actually are, and how we seem to pay them less attention than some other types of disasters that are actually less disastrous.

“Data gathered from ice cores on the frequency of eruptions over deep time suggests there is a one-in-six chance of a magnitude seven explosion in the next one hundred years…

Mani compares the risk of a giant eruption to that of a 1km-wide asteroid crashing into Earth. Such events would have similar climatic consequences, but the likelihood of a volcanic catastrophe is hundreds of times higher than the combined chances of an asteroid or comet collision…

“The last magnitude seven eruption was in 1815 in Indonesia,” said co-author Dr Mike Cassidy, a volcano expert and visiting CSER researcher, now based at the University of Birmingham.

“An estimated 100,000 people died locally, and global temperatures dropped by a degree on average, causing mass crop failures that led to famine, violent uprisings and epidemics in what was known as the year without summer,” he said.

Cambridge University

So we are not necessarily matching our money and effort to the greatest risks. Then again, I’ve heard it suggested that a small-ish nuclear winter would not be as damaging in the future as it could have been because the cooling effect would be partially offset by climate change.

August 2022 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: The fossil fuel industry intentionally used immoral, evil propaganda techniques for decades to cast doubt on climate science and make short-term profits, probably dooming us, our children, and our children’s children. Also, and because that is apparently not enough, nuclear proliferation.

Most hopeful story: “Effective altruism” may give us some new metrics to benchmark the performance of non-profit organizations and give us some insights on dealing with existential risks (like the ones I mention above).

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Japanese raccoon dogs are cute despite their unusually large scrota, which are traditionally thought to bring good luck.

effective altruism and existential risk

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In my recent “effective altruism” post, I promised to follow up on the idea of existential risk. Basically, there is a debate, bogus in my opinion, between whether an altruist should try to reduce suffering today or make sure humanity has a long term future. The argument goes that the 8 billion or so human souls alive now are only a tiny fraction of the potential trillions that could ultimately exist, so making sure we don’t wipe ourselves out should be top priority. I call this bogus because we have the intelligence, ingenuity, and energy to work on all these problems. Just divide and conquer as they say.

Anyway, here is another existential risk article. Nuclear weapons have been and probably still are the largest existential threat. But biological weapons and mishaps may now or soon will present an equal or greater threat (which doesn’t make nuclear weapons better, it doubles the threat). Artificial intelligence is an unknown unknown, potentially catastrophic medium term threat, and opinions vary from years to decades to never. Nanotechnology is a theoretical long-term threat.

My take is that we need to get on top of the biological threat fast with some kind of treaty and inspection regime we can all live with. In the US, we need a damn health care system. And at least get the nuclear threat back to where it was. Courageous political leadership could make these a priority.

Iran has “technical capacity” to build a bomb

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This article in Intercept says Iran has achieved its goal of being able to build a bomb. The U.S. has the “technical capacity” to invade and occupy Iran, but that is not going to happen. Prominent Israelis including Ehud Barak say that “Iran’s uranium enrichment program had now advanced to a point where it could be no longer be set back with military strikes or sabotage.”

The article blames Biden. I do think Biden should have tried harder to make a return to the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal happen, but the blame for pulling out of the deal falls squarely on Trump. For all the stupid things Trump said and did, taking the world backwards on nuclear proliferation and climate change are the two that I find unforgivable because these are the two biggest existential threats to our planetary civilization. But even going a step beyond Trump, if the U.S. Congress and executive branch both stood firmly behind international agreements on these issues, the world would be able to trust us more to keep our word instead of flip-flopping with each new administration.

So now Israel, Pakistan, and India are confirmed nuclear states, and Saudi Arabia and Iran can quickly become nuclear states if a conflict arises. Farther north, China and North Korea is a confirmed nuclear state, and Japan and Taiwan supposedly have the ability to quickly convert civilian nuclear plants to weapons production. I haven’t heard anything about a renewed nuclear weapons push in South Korea, but it seems quite plausible that they might if they do not think the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” is reliable. And then we have the thinly veiled proxy war between nuclear-armed-to-the-teeth NATO and Russia in eastern Europe. We live in a dangerous world.

Taiwan and nuclear weapons

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According to The Strategist, Taiwan had an overt nuclear weapons program until 1976 and a covert one into the 1980s. It has nuclear reactors similar to the ones in Japan that can be converted to produce weapons-grade plutonium in short order if that decision is made.

Weak security guarantees from the United States, coupled with escalating aggression from China, may soon present Biden [this article is from December 2020] with a Taiwan that believes its only option for survival is to take a page from the Israeli playbook and restart a covert nuclear weapons program. When Taiwan went down that path between 1967 and the late 1980s, the government in Taipei ultimately backed away from nuclear weapons because it appeared China was liberalising and heading toward democratisation…

According to China expert Michael Pillsbury, author of The hundred-year marathon, the Chinese Communist Party intends to integrate Hong Kong and Taiwan back into China in time to achieve ‘Middle Kingdom’ status by 2049—the centennial of the CCP’s victory over the Guomindang in the Chinese civil war…

Taiwan already has two operational nuclear power plants on opposite ends of the island that could produce plutonium. It could use a ‘Japan option’ of enriching its radioactive materials for weaponisation in a short timeframe.

The Strategist

I think we take it for granted that nuclear proliferation is driven by a few rogue states. But this does not appear to be the case. The world appears to be on the verge of getting much more dangerous. Every country with nuclear weapons increases the odds (depressingly, the certainty, given enough time) of a nuclear detonation somewhere, sometime.

The Cuban Missile Crisis would seem to offer a cautionary tale. Put some nuclear missiles on an island near an aggressive nuclear superpower, and bad things can happen. We give our (U.S.) democratically elected leader at the time for avoiding catastrophe by acting tough and making the authoritarian leader “blink”. How much of that was luck, and how long until our world’s luck runs out if we keep taking risks like that? Another cautionary tale would be China’s invasion of Korea in the 1950s. They did not have nuclear weapons at the time, the U.S. not only had them but had recently used them, and China did not “blink”.

the numbers on shark attacks

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This article in Grid says there are about 70 shark attacks on humans per year, worldwide. That’s attacks, not deaths. This article doesn’t have the death numbers, but I recall seeing elsewhere that it is typically single digits. And it’s not because sharks are not around where people are swimming – they are.

Humans are pathetic in the water. If sharks wanted to eat them, it would be so easy for them. If they tasted good and a shark were like, “Oh, my goodness, there is a human, let me have a bite,” there would be between 10,000 and 50,000 bites a day. There’s a lot of sharks in the ocean and a lot of people that are recreating there.

We don’t see that. We see very few, about 70 a year. And although there are 70, more than half of them are in poor visibility water where the shark makes a mistake. So the fact that the bites that we do see are where conditions are turbid and where people happen to be intersecting with where there are sharks sort of underscores the notion that sharks do not eat people — we aren’t on the menu.

Grid

So if we are trying to be rational, we shouldn’t even worry about sharks, even compared to other things that can and do go wrong in the water, most obviously drowning.

linking climate change to inflation?

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This book review in the Guardian tries to link climate change to inflation. It talks about the costs of storms, fires, and insurance, and impacts of heat on worker productivity. I’m not convinced it is exactly on the mark. Cleaning up from storms can actually stimulate the economy, if they have only local impacts and don’t happen too often. One area’s cost of cleanup creates business and jobs for another area of the economy. The larger economy should be able to absorb these costs if it is healthy. Maybe this is the issue – are the impacts of storms, fires, and floods become geographically widespread and frequent enough that they are taking up a significant amount of our economy’s productive capacity that could be better spent elsewhere? Maybe that is the case, but this article doesn’t address it. I can certainly imagine this being the case if and when major population centers (and economic drivers of our economy) start to be impacted on a regular basis by a combination of severe storms and sea level rise. A major earthquake or volcano could have similar impacts, and while it would have nothing to do with climate change directly, it would happen on top of climate change and we need to be ready for the known risks let alone the unknown ones.

The article doesn’t talk much about food, but along with impacts on coastal cities, a tightening of the food supply relative to population seems like the most obvious and immediate impact of climate change on people. While climate change didn’t cause the Russia-Ukraine war, removing food exports from those two countries from the system has taught us something about how tight the food supply is. Climate change could add up to a similar tightening over a period of time, and remove that slack that we currently have in the system. And then shocks can and will happen on top of the long term trend. It really does not seem like the world is ready.

Project Syndicate Predictions for 2022

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Wow, a dozen or more famous people asked to weigh in and it is almost 100% doom and gloom. To grossly summarize:

  • Carbon emissions will just keep getting worse, and not much will be done. About the most positive thing anyone can say is that pressure for change will increase and the “corporate and financial sectors” will get more serious about it. We are the corporate and financial sectors, and we are here to help!
  • Political dysfunction and polarization in the US and EU. Republicans will retake the US Congress (and both sides will say they knew it all along).
  • US vs. Russia, China vs. US, Iran vs. the US and/or Israel. Several commentators predict one more attempt to revive the Obama nuclear deal, which will fail, which will be followed by more uranium enrichment, which will be followed by a military strike by the US and/or Israel.
  • Bees will continue to decline. Does this seem less important than the other things? Bees pollinate around a third of crops, and even if we find other ways to pollinate crops or grow crops that don’t need pollination, we can look forward to:

Given that heatwaves, droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events prevent people from engaging in agricultural work, and that bees and other pollinators affect 35% of the world’s agricultural land and support the production of 87 of the leading food crops, we will see an increase of global insecurity, even in developed economies. Unable to sustain the production of the food they need, many of the world’s poor will be pushed into extreme poverty, suffer malnutrition, and migrate.

Agnes Binagwaho, Project Syndicate
  • Several point to mass migration as a big issue for 2022. Not a long term issue, but an issue that will come to a head in the next year.
  • On the Covid front, most people think it will just become another disease that kills us some times but we will get used to that.
  • Many commentators think inflation will tone down, and that the bigger risk is governments overreacting to it. Some predict a sharp decline in the US dollar (is this bad for the average Joe? hard to say), and there is already a real estate crash happening in China.
  • A few are optimistic that social safety nets may improve here and there.
  • On the technology front? “One hopes for more demonstrations of the power of recent biomedical and genetic research, amply validated by the rapid development of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines. There also may be new leaps in additive manufacturing and machine learning.” (Diane Coyle) There may be some progress on “green hydrogen and an overhaul of mobility and transportation systems”.

I’m not known for unbridled optimism, but let me think of a few positive things that could happen in 2022. Electric vehicles could finally emerge in the public consciousness in the US. We will all be surprised if that happens, and then one day later we will all have known it all along. The US could make some progress on the childcare crisis that is holding our country back (see this Fresh Air interview if you don’t believe me). Covid will be annoying and disruptive, but I am predicting it will be less annoying and disruptive on December 31, 2022 than on January 1.

In a way, a good year at this point will be one in which nothing really catastrophic happens and we have some breathing room to chip away at the many challenges already on our plates. We have to hope there will not be a major war, nuclear detonation, epic new plague, major food crisis, catastrophic meltdown of the internet or financial system. Hoping is about all us average citizens can do about the latter list, but if you are one of the movers and shakers out there with the power to help manage these risks, WHAT ARE YOU DOING???

I tried to talk myself into being optimistic just now, and failed, oh well.

clean up that air and get those fat asses moving!

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Max Roser has one of his nice data-based articles focused on air pollution. There are a variety of estimates, but they fall within a fairly narrow range (considering the population of the world) of about 7-9 million people per year. Something like 2-4 million of this is estimated to be due to indoor air pollution, which is a big problem in the developing world. The biggest source of the problem is…wait for it…particulates from burning fossil fuels.

He compares these numbers to around 75,000 deaths per year from terrorism and war combined, 500,000 from homicide (I’m rounding to the nearest 100,000, and he doesn’t provide numbers for suicide which I would guess could be similar or higher), 1.3 million for road accidents, and 2.8 million for obesity.

So if you were a politician (or emperor) who wanted to help the most people, you would make this a big priority, along with reducing deaths in and around motor vehicles and deaths from all the sitting around we do. What do these all have in common? We need to work toward electrification and clean energy, sure – but using 100% existing knowledge and technology, we can design safer streets and roads using the designs we (okay, a few Europeans, at least) already know work, and encourage people to live near work and shopping where they can mostly get around by their own muscle power, supplemented by good public transportation. Or to be much more crude, get those fat asses moving and those lungs out in the healthy, fresh air! Every dollar transferred from the defense/security budget to these things would pay off something like 8:1. And that is in the short term, if a thing called global warming caused by burning fossil fuels did not even exist.