Risk, denial and consequence
Disaster is coming. Why don’t we do something about it?
This week’s earthquakes in California, two journal articles and a series of articles by @kathrynschulz on earthquake & tsunami risk in the Pacific Northwest put me in mind of the similarity in how we don’t deal with predictable future disasters.
Climate change is one of these. We have overwhelming evidence of the changes that are already here and are certainly coming within a single human lifespan (an itsy-bitsy geological time span.) <Cue comments doubting the science, a different point than I wish to make here.>
A new article in @nature this week is bleak. “Committed emissions from existing and proposed energy infrastructure thus represent more than the entire remaining carbon budget if mean warming is to be limited to 1.5 °C” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1364-3
The implication is more rapid than normal phase-out of these emission sources and replacement with non-emitting alternatives is necessary to plausibly meet the 1.5°C target. As a pessimist I think that unlikely though I admit to some optimism from recent solar & wind growth.
While some trends are encouraging, see chart, government action, even aspirational actions such as the Paris Accords, offer little optimism that policy change will precede consequences. Now the question is simply how great the consequences will be.
We clean up after the hurricane or the earthquake or the flood, but we seldom rebuild in new, less hazardous sites. So the question is not one of prevention or avoidance but rather of mitigation and reconstruction.
Which brings us to the second, and more hopeful, article of the week. Plant trees to mitigate carbon release. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/07/adding-1-billion-hectares-forest-could-help-check-global-warming
Compared to other approaches, trees are cheap. “Estimates of how much forest restoration on this scale would cost vary, but based on prices of about $0.30 a tree,… it could be roughly $300 billion.” Still a bargain at twice the cost.
But will we try this? It is attractive because less disruptive of existing interests and economic costs, but not trivial as a collective action problem.
One difference between climate change and the earthquake and tsunami risks to which I’ll turn is that we get to see climate change as it progresses. Granted we may not respond, but the change is apparent as is its growth. Earthquakes aren’t consequential until they occur.
That difference is perhaps not encouraging. If we have seen consequences of climate change, and strong estimates of future consequences, and yet have still failed to act to prevent those consequences, how much less likely to respond to the earthquake we can’t see yet.
Which brings us to the “big one.” We all know of the risk in California. This week’s substantial quakes provide the obvious evidence that the earth will move sometime. And to contradict my premise above, there have been substantial measures to anticipate the San Andreas.
Building codes, disaster planning and even early warning systems are all costly actions to mitigate the consequences of a large California quake. The frequent and recent history of major quakes provide, perhaps, the evidence to overcome reluctance to prepare for bad outcomes.
But the other “big one” is further north, and wonderfully described by @kathrynschulz in a series of @newyorker articles beginning with a Pulitzer Prize winner in 2015. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one
(Note color scales differ between the maps, but you get the idea.)
This is a great story of geology and the research that identified “nine o’ clock at night on January 26, 1700, [when] a magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck the Pacific Northwest”.
This article discusses how unprepared the Pacific Northwest is for this risk (by one estimate 30% over the next 50 years, or about Trump’s chance of winning in 2016.) Subsequent articles by @kathrynschulz detail the continued reluctance to address the risk.
Links:
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-to-stay-safe-when-the-big-one-comes
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-really-small-ones
And most recently “Last week, the governor of Oregon signed a law that, among other things, overturns a 1995 prohibition on constructing new public facilities within the tsunami-inundation zone.”
I leave it to the interested reader to appreciate these articles, which I highly recommend. I also leave it to the reader to consider our ability as a species to ignore future risk to avoid current costs. We can pay now or pay later, but almost always we choose “later.” /end
