Bjorn Lomborg - Tsunami Warning System Bad Idea - Reuters

[hatrack]

COPENHAGEN - "Money that world leaders plan to spend on a warning system against the kind of tsunami that killed 150,000 on Dec. 26 would be better spent fighting everyday diseases, academic Bjorn Lomborg said on Thursday.

Lomborg, the 40-year-old enfant terrible of the environmental movement, said the desire to build a system was understandable -- and reasonably cheap at an estimated $20 million initially -- but that its benefits were uncertain given the lack of necessary supporting infrastructure in many places.

He added that 100 years or more could pass before the next tsunami struck.

"On the other hand, we would certainly save many lives by investing that money in clean drinking water, disease prevention and basic education," Lomborg told Reuters."

EDIT

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/28844/story.htm

[SariesNightly]

1. But does the easing of that particular..

.. tectonic spot represent the entire 2000 mile radius?

[Viking12]

2. Or we could...

Invest $20m in an early warning system AND invest money in clean drinking water, disease prevention and basic education. Typical Lomborg false dilemma.

Heck $40m would be less than what his corporate cronies spend on PR disinfo campaigns.

[Coastie for Truth]

3. Much of the system is in place

Our good old "military-industrial complex" occasionally does some good (albeit inadvertently) - mostly in the development of "dual use technology" like the internet, GPSS, etc.

One of these "dual use technologies" is the rough integration of some advanced ocean imaging techniques with weather buoys and weather satellites to yield a "coarse" tsunami warning system.

During the Cold War we built a network of underwater sensors (pressure, magnetic anomaly, sound) that when integrated with the weather buoys and weather satellites and with published software yield a "fine" tsunami warning system.

As to the software - I think you can scrounge up either source code or flow charts and high level pseudo code on the NOAA web site.

Any reasonably competent oceanographers, meteorologists, and (ocean floor) geologists with reasonable computer literacy and intellectual curiosity can work with the system.

[NNadir]

4. This may get me in trouble, but I happen to agree with this statement.

For the record, well over 100,000 people have been killed in the Iraq war. Not only have Americans and the rest of the world ignored these people, they are actually spending huge sums to see that even more are killed.

Three hundred million Chinese have almost no access to clean drinking water...

Nobody can tell how many dead there are in Dafur this, but it probably dwarfs the Tsunami...

The Tsunami was a terrible event, but I very much doubt that there was anyway of preventing this tragedy, any more than there was a way of preventing the Tangshan earthquake in China in 1976 that probably killed as many as three times the number of people killed in this event.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/28/newsid_4132000/4132109.stm

If this system were built, it would most likely rot and be forgotten before it was ever needed again. The fact is that there are hugely important matters on which we can have a real and measurable effect. Tsunamis are not among them.

As terrible as the Tsunami was, the response to it is pure Hollywood. It's like a big fucking disaster movie that gives an increasingly criminal world a chance to pretend that it maintains a semblence of humanity. Bullshit. I'll believe that the world gives a shit when we see the pictures of the dead Iraqi kids and the dead African kids as baldly displayed as the dead Indonesians and Thais.

[Coastie for Truth]

5. Actually

a first order tsunami warning system would involve little more then the existing system of weather satellites and weather buoys, and the telecommunications system to link the various and sundry national weather forecasting ministries (i.e., voice over internet - I know they have that in all of the nations hit by the tsunami).

I guess I am just an over-the-hill "Sputnik" era and "Cold War" era techno-geek - back when the "cool guys" in urban high schools took AP science and AP math -- and 25% of students took science/engineering in college. A dinosaur from another era.

:-(

)

[NNadir]

6. If it is an existing system, it certainly didn't function very well.

In any case, it is difficult to imagine what an early warning system might have accomplished. Granted it may have lowered the death toll in some places, but I really question where the citizens of the Maldives, for instance, would have gone, since the maximum elevation in the entire nation is about 3 meters. I don't think we could have sent a fleet of 747's sufficient to have evacuated the entire country (of 300,000 people) to the country even if we'd had a full eight hour's notice.

I also doubt that there was an evacuation system in place on remote coastal communities in Indonesia. Such a system is hardly "existing."

[Coastie for Truth]

7. Shattuck Avenue logic - applied by some one far, far from Shattuck Avenue

because a Pacific Tsunami would come roaring through the narrows under the Golden Gate Bridge - suffer "Bernoulli Acceleration" and charge across "The Bay" like a projectile and right up "The Hill" to Shattuck Avenue and Bancroft and Telegraph and the clock tower.

But, then again, even the most neo- of the Shattuck Avenue neo-libs support a world wide tsunami early warning system -- they just want the money taken out of the defense budget (which I agree with ;-) ).

You really ought to go into a Telegraph Ave bookshop and get a used book on seismology and tsunamis, sit on the grass in Sproull Plaza, light up, and read the book -- and look west where that tsunami will come from, and above you towards the stadium where the Hayward-Calaveras Fault is underfoot.

(My secretary's son and brother survived in Sri Lanka - about 50 feet above the innundation plane (look that one up) -- a lot of people fld up to the hills above the when they heard about the original quake.)

---From Tsunami and Earthquake Country --- the bluest college town in the bluest state in the Union. Our junior senator stood up to the GOP on 1/6.

[Coastie for Truth]

8. Sorry to be so nasty, but

I guess it's just the arrogance of having a scientific and engineering background, and having lived in the Lake Erie-Lake Ontario blizzard belt, and in the mid-western tornado alley, and living between two major earthquake fault lines, in the flood plain between two rivers, and in the Pacific tsunami inundation plain.

More to the point - where the people had the most minimal "advance knowledge" (i.e., "There has been a 9.6 earthquake off of Indonesia, could be a tsunami" ), or a bit more "advance knowledge" (i.e., "There has been a 9.6 earthquake off of Indonesia, and a tsunami had been reported striking Indonesia" or "There has been a 9.6 earthquake off of Indonesia, and tsunami type behavior has been detected by weather satellites and weather buoys" ) the number killed was much lower.

Very simple solution could have saved thousands - like the tornado sirens we have in tornado alley or or the awful buzzing followed by a "weather bulletin".

And that is without the more costly retrofitting of satellites and buoys.