No event is so unlikely that it won’t happen for certain. Statisticians (and insurers) have a name for this sort of thing: tail risks. Things which, although unlikely, would have catastrophic consequences. We’ve looked at a few before here (LSS passim); but by general consensus, the top six include: a sudden volcanic eruption (think Yellowstone or Campi Flegrei); an asteroid impact (think dinosaurs);a geomagnetic pole flip which would bring down all power, communication and navigation systems; a sudden solar flare which would do all of the proceeding and more; a gamma ray burst from a nearby star which would blow away the ozone layer: and a possible megatsunami caused perhaps by the collapse of the Cumbre Viejas formation in the island of La Palma in the Canary islands.
If you are going to plan for these things you want your plan to be optimal and your outcomes to have maximum success. You want your numbers of survivors to be as high as it could be, and your numbers of dead, injured, pandemic and starvation victims to be as low as you can get them. The problem is that catastrophes on a planetary scale expose a profound structural mismatch: the hazard is global, but the response will be fragmented. Each government plans for its own survival and has no incentive to think about its neighbours. In fact, it has no remit,so why should it? Yet if such an event did occur, the price will be paid in extra but wholly avoidable deaths, injuries epidemics and famines.
Ok, these events sit far out on the probability tails. Humanity has been lucky-for now. But we make a prediction: if such an event occurs the response of a planet organised into nation states will be far less effective than it otherwise would have been. Time will tell.
Coda: On completing this piece someone in the office suggested another and more likely catastrophe: the release of a deadly pathogen, such as engineered forms of bubonic plague, ebola or smallpox from a secret weapons laboratory. But that would mean a pandemic, gentle readers: and we are planning to deal with those in the next instalment of this series
#catastrophe #asteroid impact #tsunami #volcano #caldera #magnetic flip #solar flare
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