The Bear's Lair: Dinosaur tail risks

[unhappycamper]

http://www.prudentbear.com/2014/01/the-bears-lair-dinosaur-tail-risks.html

The Bear's Lair: Dinosaur tail risks
January 27, 2014 posted by Martin Hutchinson

~snip~

A lot of it was fashionable pap—for example, even if global warming is real, it doesn't have time to get up much momentum or do much real damage in the next decade. Still, the report highlighted some risks that, while unlikely, are nevertheless real, and there appear to be more such "tail risks" than 50 or 100 years ago. So I thought it worth examining the question: is our civilization now so complex that it accumulates tail risks as an overly complex computer program does bugs? And are we therefore destined to succumb to one within the next few decades, causing a very unpleasant and unexpected collapse?

The Global Risks Report highlights and ranks the risks thought to be most critical over the next decade. In practice this process produces a mixture of serious possible problems, such as mismanaged urbanization, that have only moderate downside, fashionable worries, such as global warming, that will have little effect in the next decade and true global-scale civilizational risks. Such risks are low-probability but sufficiently catastrophic to destroy our civilization's coping mechanisms. An extreme example is impact by a jumbo meteorite, which has very low but not zero probability and is probably one of the few tail risks that hasn't increased in probability/damage over the last 200 years.

The key to whether disasters matter is their ability to overwhelm our coping mechanisms. An ordinary flood, earthquake or epidemic is very tragic if it kills many people, but we have mechanisms to cope with its effects, so that even if civilization is overwhelmed locally, it can quickly be rebuilt and life in the rest of the world is little affected. Sufficiently large disasters, or disasters of a nature we haven't learned to deal with, can overwhelm our coping mechanisms and cause our complex global economic system to fall apart. Even a major catastrophe such as the 1348-49 Black Death, which probably killed about a quarter of the population of Europe, caused only a moderate disruption of the simple mediaeval economy. Indeed it resulted in a century-long rise in living standards as labor became scarce. An equivalent disaster today, killing say 2 billion people, would do much more long-term damage both directly and indirectly. We simply do not have the mechanisms to handle such an event.

The report groups risks into five categories, technological, societal, geopolitical, environmental and economic. Of the five categories, environmental risks are the least worrying on a 10-year view. Global warming isn't going to happen before 2024 (and probably isn't going to happen at all to more than a modest extent that we can easily cope with.) There seems to me no reason why extreme weather should become any more extreme, or why we should expect an above-normal incidence of such natural disasters as earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis. I think water is an increasingly worrying resource problem, largely because of the inexorable increase in population. It raises the salience of all resource limitations, but it probably won't become critical in the next decade, except possibly in a few areas.

[pscot]

1. Very sensible

Same as it ever was with incremental variations. Tunnel vision.