Supplemental section of the file (for printing purposes, starts at p. 102)

Resource scarcity means we won’t be able to recover from a NEO strike

However, even if we imagine a relatively peaceful world with a well-connected and well-financed international disaster response mechanism, would that be enough to cope with a CAI? The answer is probably no. The scale of urban destruction would be great. It would include the obliteration of port facilities that are the still the heart of international trade. International financial transactions would be disrupted for a period. The cost and logistical requirements to meet the needs of displaced persons would be great, but that is not the main problem. The Marshall Plan dispensed $ 13 billion between 1947–1953 to feed and clothe a large part of the European population following World War II and to begin to rebuild livelihoods (US Department of State 2004). This is approximately $ 238 billion in the value of 2004 dollars, a considerable investment by the Marshall Plan in a kind of disaster response. The problem is that now, and certainly by the time we suffer a CAI, the urban industrial system will be (a) larger and more mutually interdependent and (b) already stressed during the final decades of petroleum availability (Heinberg 2003; Shah 2004). One estimate of the impact of a recurrence of the 1923 earthquake in Tokyo produced by the consulting firm Risk Management Solutions considers the cost of disrupted markets plus the cost of the physical damage to a much larger metro area. The number they got was $ 2.1–3.3 trillion (Stanford 1996). The knock on effect of such an event – a simple earthquake of known size and location – would be world wide. This loss estimate dwarfs even the considerable economic destruction caused by the 26 December 2004 tsunami that affected 11 countries in Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Indian Ocean and coastal East Africa. Even a very rich country such as the U.S. has a hard time absorbing the economic shock of a single large hurricane when it hits the heart of one of its main petroleum production regions and a major city. Hurricane Katrina, which flooded New Orleans and did catastrophic damage to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, is at the time of writing likely to be the most costly disaster triggered by a natural event in U.S. history, surpassing the $ 48.4 billion cost of hurricane Andrew that devastated Miami in 1992 (Fields and Rogers 2005).

Environmental stresses mean no recovery possible

MacCracken ‘7 < Michael C., Climate Institute, Comet/Asteroid Impacts and Human Society, The Climatic Effects of Asteroid and Comet Impacts: Consequences for an Increasingly Interconnected Society. pg 277

Four trends, however, are likely actually increasing the vulnerability of society to environmental stresses. First, the world population is increasing, with projections being that over the 21st century the number of people spread across the Earth will rise from about 6 billion to 8 to 12 billion. A result of this is that there is less and less unoccupied arable land, thereby restricting relocation as an adaptation option. Native Americans used to adapt to climate fluctuations by following the buffalo to non-impacted regions and large numbers of north eastern Brazilians relocated to avoid El Niño-induced droughts. Now the areas to which they formerly moved hold other people or are being used to provide resources to take care of others, and many regions are now so populated that transportation routes are not adequate for full evacuation. For example, even with a few days warning, there is no way that Long Island, New Orleans, or Haiti can be evacuated when a major hurricane is imminent. And the situation is no better for non-human species, which have become increasingly isolated in smaller and smaller domains that can more and more easily be disrupted, meaning that smaller and smaller stresses could adversely impact biodiversity and ecologically provided resources. Second, the push to optimize the global market economy has led to lower and lower reserves of food, seeds, medicine, and other necessary resources. Global grain reserves have been continuing to decline and now amount to less than a two month supply. This amount is less than the amount produced during a typical growing season, and is certainly much less than the amount by which production could be increased in the next growing season to replace the loss of a season or year’s production. While the standard-of-living globally is rising for many people, this is often a result of dependence upon a continuing and growing stream of “necessities;” we have all become dependent on the routine functioning of more and more nodes and channels, and so the range of possibilities that could lead to disruption seems to be actually increasing.’ No longer is it really small changes in the multi-year statistical-average climate that is the main concern; with the economic system so tightly interconnected, disruption of the weather over a month or season is all that is needed to create significant economic disruption. Although survival might not be immediately threatened, extreme events such as El Niño episodes can cause not only regional environmental problems (e.g. the drought in Indonesia and Southeast Asia several years ago caused both local and international economic impacts), but also can affect nations around the world. Third, as the market economy has developed, there has been a tendency for particular locations to each become specialized in particular economic activities. For example, virtually all of the grain traded internationally (and so the supplies needed to sustain peoples in many nations around the world) comes from only a few regions (i.e. U.S., Russia, China, Australia, Argentina and India), and failures in even one region can cause a significant disturbance in world prices; clearly, simultaneous crop failures in more than one region could significantly increase prices, exposing large populations to reduced food supplies. The specialized seeds that underpin the green revolution and the needed fertilizers also come from a relatively few locations. As pursuit of economic efficiency has driven the international economic system to become more concentrated, interdependencies have increased and few regions remain independent of vital services and supplies from other regions. Just as wider groups of people in a community became more vulnerable to disruption due to floods when modern sewage treatment plants near rivers and coastlines replaced personal outhouses, society has become more vulnerable because activities are now much more concentrated in our interdependent world. Fourth, due to an unusual geological roll of the dice, the natural environment to which we have become adapted has been unusually stable over recent centuries. As a result, society is not particularly well prepared for the wider range of possible conditions that have occurred naturally or for the increasing intensity of extreme events being brought on by anthropogenic climate change. Natural oscillations, such as the El Nifio/Southern Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation, already demonstrate that relatively limited changes in climate in particular regions can influence seasonal to decadal weather patterns in significant ways over large regions. While the Holocene as a whole has been a time of unusually low climatic variability, records for the last 100, 000 years (and longer) from the Greenland ice core (NRC 2002) provide indications of large shifts in temperature that were comparable in their mid-latitude effects to going from interglacial to glacial conditions (or at least for the atmospheric and oceanic circulations that over time have created the climate). It is thought that these interglacial to glacial transitions, which occurred over a few years and typically lasted several centuries, resulted from an outbreak of glacial meltwater into the North Atlantic, but whatever the cause, the lesson is that a stable climate cannot be taken for granted, and that relatively modest events have the potential, if they occur in the right location, to prompt rather large, persistent shifts in climatic conditions over very large regions. What is particularly disturbing is that all of these factors are increasing societal vulnerability at the same time. More and more people are crowding into vulnerable coastal areas, and more and more people are dependent on the well-timed, long-distance transmission of critical resources (e.g. water, food, fuel, electricity, etc.). In addition, the range of climatic extremes is increasing as the world warms, with, for example, more intense precipitation events already documented and more intense tropical cyclones projected (e.g. see Sect. 2.7 in IPCC 2001).

Directory: files
files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2
files -> Integer programming and game theory
files -> 4 Integer Programming
files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective
files -> Pop Warner History
files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose
files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d
files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal
files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations

Download 1.03 Mb.

Share with your friends: