Tag: disaster

Atmospheric rivers

the solution to the california drought: atmospheric rivers:

Geologic evidence shows that truly massive floods, caused by rainfall alone, have occurred in California every 100 to 200 years. Such floods are likely caused by atmospheric rivers: narrow bands of water vapor 2 km above the ocean that extend for 1000s of km.

in fact, this happened in 1862

The cataclysm cut off telegraph communication with the East Coast, swamped the state’s new capital, and submerged the entire Central Valley under 4.5m of water.

2023-05-05: Also known as an Arkstorm.

Climate change is expected to increase the risk of severe flooding from a hypothetical ARkStorm, with runoff 200 to 400% above historical values for the Sierra Nevada in part due to a decrease in the portion of precipitation that falls as snow, as well as an increase in the amount of water that storms can carry. The likelihood of the event outlined in the ARkStorm scenario is now once every 25-50 years, with projected economic losses of over $1 trillion

Rust, enemy of Civilization

Hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis and other dramatic natural disasters can leave mounds of wreckage in a matter of seconds. Rust is different. It is insidious and slow-moving. It takes years for it to discolor buildings, thin steel pipelines and tankers carrying oil, and weaken bridges to the point of spontaneous collapse. Rust, the oxidation that turns aluminum white, copper green and steel brown, “is costlier than all other natural disasters combined,” amounting in the US alone to $437B a year, which approaches 3% of our nation’s GDP. By comparison, the damage done to property by hurricanes Katrina, Sandy and Andrew was, in 2012 $, $128B, $50B and $44B, respectively.

Rebooting civilization

Could we? most likely not, but if so:

For a society to stand any chance of industrialising, it would have to focus its efforts in certain, very favorable natural environments: not the coal-island of 18th-century Britain, but perhaps areas of Scandinavia or Canada that combine fast-flowing streams for hydroelectric power and large areas of forest that can be harvested sustainably for thermal energy

2015-08-31:

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? While Feynman’s sentence is all good and true, it isn’t particularly useful in an immediate pragmatic sense. I wrote a book recently which was intended as a guidebook for rebooting civilization after an apocalypse, looking at the key technologies and central scientific principles that underpin our lives – the behind-the-scenes fundamentals that we all just take for granted today – and what enabled society to progress through the centuries of history. I argue how the greatest invention of history is the scientific method itself – the knowledge-generation machinery that we have been using for over 350 years now to come to understand how the world works. So if you could preserve only one single sentence, I would push for: ‘The natural world is not governed by whimsical gods, but is essentially mechanical and can therefore be understood and then predicted by people, using careful observation, experimentation, and measurement, and importantly by testing your explanations to try to refute them.’ It’s this reiterative process of refinement that sets science apart from any other system for explaining how the world works.

Global risks

This report has created the first list of global risks with impacts that for all practical purposes can be called infinite. It is also the first structured overview of key events related to such challenges and has tried to provide initial rough quantifications for the probabilities of these impacts