Catastrophe: Risk and Response
We humans don’t do catastrophe well until one hits us, if then. After all, our ancestors didn’t survive by planning a century ahead; they survived by spotting predators fast and stretching one harvest until the next. Times have changed, say two prolific polymaths–Judge Richard Posner of the federal court of appeals in Chicago and best-selling uberhistorian Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel)–and we need to change too.
“If anything” is pure Posner. We can’t possibly prepare for every imaginable calamity, so we need to rank them somehow. How likely is each, and how bad would things get if it happened? Crudely put, the impact equals the probability times the cost. There’s said to be a 1 percent chance that an asteroid a kilometer wide will hit the earth every millennium, and such a hit would kill about a billion people. Multiplying one-thousandth of 1 percent times one billion, Posner comes up with an “expected annual death rate” of 10,000. Where do other potential catastrophes rank relative to that? Unfortunately he has to guess. Nobody knows the probability of abrupt global warming or what it might cost, and bioterrorist attacks are even harder to gauge.
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In short, he concludes that most people are parroting ideology without thinking. “Conservatives seize on the existence of doubt about the magnitude or causality of global warming to oppose emissions controls,” he writes, “while liberals seize on doubt concerning the likelihood of bioterrorism to oppose limitations on granting visas to foreigners to do research on lethal pathogens. In neither case is the existence of doubt a valid ground for rejecting expert opinion.”
Long as Diamond’s book is, there are some stories he doesn’t tell, presumably because they don’t teach the lesson he has in mind. British economist W. Stanley Jevons warned in 1865 that his country was running out of coal and would have to choose either a brief golden age followed by a crash or long-term mediocrity. Neither happened. Britain’s imperial power and standard of living survived this “crisis,” but not because people started conserving or rethought their basic values. Instead they were saved by the serendipitous discovery of oil, which in many cases could be substituted for coal.
One of Diamond’s best examples is Greenland, where about 5,000 Norse lived for more than 400 years–longer than there’ve been English-speaking settlers in North America. Their beef-eating, farming, hunting, eye-for-an-eye Christian culture kept them together for ages, even though it ultimately contributed to their demise.
