I am a huge fan of Nassim Taleb and his book Fooled By Randomness really impacted the way I look at a lot of doom and gloom scenarios. His notion of fat tailed events/tail risks along with survivors confirmation bias is a central theme of many of the risks he describes.
So as an example, if in October 2019 someone said a virus outbreak that could be largely prevented would be lead cause of over 100k deaths over climate change, you would be laughed at. Yet here we are. The largest hidden risk is often what is right in front of our eyes that we don’t acknowledge as a risk.
For example if there is a >9 magnitude earthquake due to San Andreas fault, I have zero doubt California has any preparedness and if will even be able to airlift millions of people even though everyone knows it’s a ticking time bomb.
>For example if there is a >9 magnitude earthquake due to San Andreas fault, I have zero doubt California has any preparedness and if will even be able to airlift millions of people even though everyone knows it’s a ticking time bomb.
At least people are retrofitting buildings in CA to prepare for the San Andreas.
On top of this, there are usually two Cascade Range eruptions a century. We've had 0 so far in the 21st. Could Rainier go?
A new virus isn't any less likely to occur tomorrow just because covid emerged. Expect another in your great-grandchild's lifetime, or sooner.
20% of USA children are obese and +75% of USA adults are overweight/obese. Expect heart disease complications (and death from diseases that take advantage of it as a comorbidity) to be more common. Yet people refuse to acknowledge what they're doing to themselves.
Expect plastic to be a collective hangover for our species in the near future.
Nothing lasts forever, and the past 100 years is just a single lifetime for some tortoises. We swirl and float in a chaotic world with the collective memory of a goldfish, and our conversations revolve around fears of interpersonal violence.
I wish we could be frank and seek an honest understanding of ourselves, our world, and its risks, but I've made my peace (I'm only a human as well). May we live in boring times, and roll with the changes!
thanks for the article, it was a great read. I wonder what new research on the cascadia subduction zone had happened since 2015 when it was published - and what changes in the forecasts might have to be made post-COVID-19, given new data on disaster preparedness.
> if in October 2019 someone said a virus outbreak that could be largely prevented would be lead cause of over 100k deaths over climate change, you would be laughed at.
Firstly, why would someone laugh? Pandemics with a 100k death toll are a fairly regular occurrence, even in modern society. OTOH if you said 1M + most of the world under some form of home quarantine, lockdown or travel restrictions for well over a year, that would have been laughed at.
Second, it's hard to attribute deaths to climate change directly. Natural disasters kill people every year. Who can say with absolute certainty that the death toll in this or that incident would have been lower if not for climate change?
Third, on a longer timescale climate change absolutely has the potential to kill more people than Covid.
Well, we see people and even political groups laughing at the idea of a virus outbreak that kills 100k even today, isn't it?
Now picture it without the benefit of hindsight.
Why did western society failed so hard at containing the virus when countries like South Korea were already leading by example at the start of Q1 2020.
A few people, sure, but for the most part what I've seen people attacking is the idea that the Covid pandemic is some kind of unique crisis that demands an aggressive response.
Also, South Korea has very much not contained Covid. They've relied on fairly strict social distancing measures to stop cases outright going exponential, but those cases are still there and all indications are that an increasing proportion of infections have been going undetected since the start of the pandemic. (There's no way of knowing the exact number because they don't seem to have any program to measure the actual infection rate, unlike some other countries, and their level of testing is frankly pretty poor compared to the western world these days.) Those measures are also no longer sufficient, with cases reaching new record highs most days for the last week or so.
It means if one was asked to bet on an event between 100k death from a virus outbreak and 100k death from climate change, one would place their bet largely on climate change. Even though we have been warned the hidden systemic risk of pandemic preparedness l.
Virus / bacteria outbreaks have been common throughout history. They come quickly and often enough. About 3 or 4 come every 100 years. So you can expect one every 30 years.
Our last 4:
"Spanish Flu" in 1918-1919
"Asian Flu" in 1957-1958
"Hong Kong Flu" in 1968-1969
"Swine Flu" (H1N1) in 2009-2010
History teaches us to bet on viruses happening at anytime. Climate change deaths will be much slowier
Source? A quick google search would suggest that around 70% of Americans agree that climate change is real. That's way too low, but still a solid majority.
According to an UN poll, 65% of Americans and 64% of the world think that climate change is a global emergency [1]. In every questioned country, a majority said it's a global emergency.
Did these UN polls consider that people holding these views might not answer to UN polls? I encourage you to try looking for how these questions were answered in polls done by local researchers. At least in Europe, the ratios are the other way around all around the eastern half. In my own country, less than 30% believe climate change is a risk, and even less believe it's caused and/or resolvable by humans - I'm surprised the UN polls say otherwise as not even the EU dares to claim these amounts of approval. Perhaps the UN asked for "any climate change whatsoever" as opposed to "human-driven climate change" - a significant difference...
So as an example, if in October 2019 someone said a virus outbreak that could be largely prevented would be lead cause of over 100k deaths over climate change, you would be laughed at. Yet here we are. The largest hidden risk is often what is right in front of our eyes that we don’t acknowledge as a risk.
For example if there is a >9 magnitude earthquake due to San Andreas fault, I have zero doubt California has any preparedness and if will even be able to airlift millions of people even though everyone knows it’s a ticking time bomb.