![Disaster-Recovery-Dilbert[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/disaster-recovery-dilbert1.jpeg?quality=83)
From Scott Adams (creator of the Dilbert comic strip) blog, who seems to have stumbled across an interview with the author of this video we recently highlighted at WUWT. Scott Adams writes:
=================================
Fact Checking: Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters
I was watching Real Time with Bill Maher the other day. He had a professor on the show who said climate change can be fixed by making well-understood adjustments to how farmers raise cattle plus some other fairly ordinary changes. Apparently this is all explained in a documentary called Carbon Nation.
I’m skeptical of any claim so big and contrarian, but it does fit with The Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters. Simply stated, my observation is that whenever humanity can see a slow-moving disaster coming, we find a way to avoid it. Let’s run through some examples:
Thomas Malthus famously predicted that the world would run out of food as the population grew. Instead, humans improved their farming technology.
When I was a kid, it was generally assumed that the world would be destroyed by a global nuclear war. The world has been close to nuclear disaster a few times, but so far we’ve avoided all-out nuclear war.
The world was supposed to run out of oil by now, but instead we keep finding new ways to extract it from the ground. The United States has unexpectedly become a net provider of energy.
….
(he continues with more items in the list)
…
In California, predicted ongoing droughts were supposed decimate the state. Instead, it rained.
Can anyone give me an example of a potential global disaster that the general public saw coming, with at least a ten year warning, and it actually happened as predicted?
==============================================================
Full story here: http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/fact_checking_adams_law_of_slowmoving_disasters/
WUWT readers surely can find some examples?
h/t to WUWT reader AJ
Iraq war.
Huge demonstrations against, so was seen coming. 100,000+ dead.
The question asked about disasters seen coming. That assumes people recognized the problem they faced. If some people claim there isn’t a problem, they have enough influence to prevent anything getting done, but they are wrong and there actually *is* a big problem, does that count as “seen coming”?
That scenario has played out with fish stocks. The inshore Atlantic cod fisherman knew what was coming, but false arguments about economics won (like large factory trawlers), wiping out what could have been a sustainable fishery
thingodonta says:
April 20, 2013 at 5:18 am
“The climate change movement has elements of all the above except 6- no military involvement. ”
The concept is called democide, death by government. Involvement of the military is not important. The military is just one branch of government.
omnologos says:
April 20, 2013 at 3:37 am
———————————————
When Nixon came to the presidency in 1968, the Kennedy/Johnson policies had turned large US cities into war zones, and Detroit and LA were literally on fire. When the Dems won the mid-terms in 1974 and were able to force Nixon out (for lesser transgressions than the Kennedys committed in 1960), the US got Ford and Carter for the next 6 years.
If you have stopped drinking the orthodox kool-aid, it’s time to recognize the flashbacks for what they are.
Leo Geiger says:
April 20, 2013 at 5:38 am
“That scenario has played out with fish stocks. The inshore Atlantic cod fisherman knew what was coming, but false arguments about economics won (like large factory trawlers), wiping out what could have been a sustainable fishery”
Really?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/31/walking-the-plank-ton/#comment-445129
“OT – am just reading Vladil Lysenko’s “A Crime Against the World” (1983) – a book by a former Soviet trawler captain which divulged Soviet fisheries policy in the era before the 200-mile EEZs when Russian factory trawlers vacuumed up much of the world’s most valuable fish stocks. He provides a political side that I had never realized: the Soviets overfished not just to meet their own protein needs and because of the system of production targets that was politically dictated in all sectors of the Soviet command economy, but also to actively destroy fish stocks so as to economically damage the industries of capitalist nations. A rivetting read and strongly recommended. “
@evenmjones
…Close. It would be Herman Kahn’s work. …
They worked together at RAND, of course. I had always associated Kahn with nuclear war and game theory, while Simon was the one who did the data-gathering work necessary to show that humanity, for all recorded history, had:
1) Continuously improved on its condition throughout ALL generations
2) Always preferred to believe that it was actually about to collapse, and that the ideal condition was about 2 generations ago
3) Automatically believed and praised anyone who said that we were on the brink of disaster
4) Disbelieved, ignored, slighted and forgot anyone who said that we weren’t.
It was Simon who came up with that line about people preferring to believe disaster, even though you could prove that it would not happen. “..almost as if they had been vaccinated against the truth…. I cannot recall Kahn being the primary driver for this position – though, of course, he agreed with it, and co-authored one of Simon’s books on the subject…
andrewmharding says:
April 20, 2013 at 2:55 am
“Famine in Africa, which has been an ongoing problem for years, highlighted by Band Aid in the mid-80′s
Overpopulation in China, which has been relieved by by the policy of limiting couples to one child only, but has caused misery to those who want to have more than one child.”
Two examples of democide, death by government, in the case of the Ethiopian communist and “reform”-communist government, the price fixing that prevents farmers from selling surplus on the market, stifling their productivity to subsistence levels.
In the case of China, literal death by government; abortions that even Planned Parenthood would not dare to endorse.
..They worked together at RAND, of course. ..
Whoops, sorry. I see that I have implied that Simon was at RAND, when what I meant to say was ‘while Kahn was at RAND’. AFAIK, Simon was never at RAND. And, in fact, checking up, it seems more likely that they worked together when Kahn was at the Hudson and Simon was at Cato. However, I fully agree that they worked together and were of one mind on the subject of disaster avoidance…
Dodgy Geezer says: April 20, 2013 at 2:14 am
“…Thomas Malthus famously predicted that the world would run out of food as the population grew. Instead, humans improved their farming technology.
Can someone tell him that he’s rediscovered Julian Simon’s work? I know that Simon was brushed out of history by Ehrlich and his crowd, but this is ridiculous…
***********
Yes, AND Norman Borlaug! (Whose Institute is at Texas A & M, naturally!)
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)
thingodonta says:
April 20, 2013 at 5:18 am
The climate change movement has elements of all the above except 6- no military involvement.
=========
didn’t the military recently announce that AGW was the single greatest threat facing the US? military planners even now are retasking the nukes from missle silo’s in Russia to coal plants in China.
cost of living wage increases. a slow moving disaster that was not avoided. over time, marginal tax rates take 1/2 of the wage gain, leaving workers with real wage gains of only 1/2 the rate of inflation. as a result it now takes two parents working to afford what took only 1 parent working a generation ago. continued long enough this will bankrupt the workers that pay the taxes, as it is difficult to find families with 3 or 4 working parents. bankrupt workers mean bankrupt countries collecting the taxes, which is what we see today. the housing crisis is a crisis of income. people unable to afford the debt leading to widespread default. the cure for inflation 30 years ago sowed the seeds of today’s debt crisis. low oil prices in the 90’s hid the problem from view.
“DirkH says:
April 20, 2013 at 6:04 am”
And still to this day when discuss that period with Ethiopians, they truly believe it was “the right way”. A lot has changed since then, but a lot still needs to change. But I see Govn’t and corporations repeating, pretty much, the same thing, albeit under a different banner.
Can anyone give me an example of a potential global disaster that the general public saw coming, with at least a ten year warning, and it actually happened as predicted?
Given that if one interprets the term “general public” broadly enough or “global disaster” narrowly enough it will be impossible to satisfy this by definition, since the general public is generally clueless about so very many things that are openly known or predicted/predictable and we’ve NEVER had a truly global disaster predicted or otherwise as they require things like kilometer scale asteroids or Yellowstone eruptions, but if you go with a definition that includes a reasonable subset of the general public (the smarter one) and events that affect directly or indirectly a substantial fraction of the Earth’s population a list might look like:
World War I (post Sedan, the eventual occurrence of WWI was foreseen by and indeed encouraged by a large chunk of both the “general public” and the burgeoning military-industrial complex).
World War II (post Versailles, ditto and then some. Hitler even did the world a favor and wrote a book detailing his plans for disaster. Japan was less obvious to the clueless West, but perfectly obvious in China and the pacific rim countries that it threatened).
Viet Nam (talk about slow moving disasters! Twenty or more years OF disaster, let along ten years of warning. We can’t even FIX certain disasters in ten years). This affected the entire world economy, global patterns of military intervention, kept the cold war on the edge of being hot, and drove barriers between e.g. the United States and many world nations who worried about U.S. and/or Soviet imperialism.
The Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming scam. It has all by itself been a global catastrophe, one that is still continuing so that its catastrophic cost continues to mount. The global “bill” is currently at least a few trillion dollars and the perpetuation of global poverty by at least one full generation and rising. A substantial fraction of the general public has “seen the scam coming” for well over a decade — again, it was more or less openly announced back in the 90s that certain powers were “going after carbon dioxide” as soon as they finished forcing us all to stop using Freon in air conditioners because (allegedly) it punched holes in the ozone.
International Drug Laws. Again, a slow catastrophe that one doesn’t have to “see coming” — it has been ongoing for thirty or forty years, it has obvious, simple solutions known perfectly well to a large subset of the human population, it costs hundreds of billions of dollars a year in diverted/wasted resources (enough to qualify as catastrophic over time if not right away) and no, neither human technology nor common sense suffice to fix it.
You will note the common factor in the exceptions above. Human greed and war are often predictable, if one bothers to look, but too many people just don’t give a damn (or the ones who do are the ones who benefit) so the human world is entirely capable of careening into easily avoidable global disasters of its own making. War is almost by definition avoidable and foreseeable, yet we still have war. CAGW and global geopolitical scams are a relatively new invention, preceded only by things like the Cold War — a slow catastrophe that was enormously beneficial to the military-industrial complex and enormously risky and catastrophic to everybody else.
Once the cold war ended, once the prospects for MAJOR wars subsided in the mid-90s, there was a huge incentive for the political and economic interests that control much of the world’s economy to find other avenues for maintaining their control and continuing to funnel unearned income into their pockets and offshore accounts. An ongoing series of MINOR wars have been openly encouraged and manipulated by some, allowed to occur by stupidity and inaction by others, to feed the military-industrial maw its hundred-billion dollar boluses of unearned income. The “war on drugs” sucks up hundreds of billions of dollars globally, potentiates military intervention in sovereign nations other than our own, and gives our police state a “crime” they can choose to enforce or not to extort power and manipulate the political process. CAGW has become an open excuse for picking our pockets almost daily, and don’t make the mistake of thinking that this pocket picking isn’t being done with the open support and monetary encouragement of the very energy industry that it supposedly castigates. Who really benefits from the artificially high prices of electricity, of oil, of coal? Who benefits from carbon trading (or would, if the scam weren’t so transparent that it isn’t working in spite of one of the best marketing efforts in all eternity)?
I’m not a full scale conspiracy theorist — plenty of world catastrophes can be interpreted as stupidity and greed, not intelligent manipulation by Illuminati — but the case to be made for the existence of a firmly entrenched shadow government is compelling. It is largely made up of a mix of organized criminals and the merely greedy — politicians and bankers and industrialists who profit from the system that serves the criminals. Periodically attempts are made to “follow the money” and untangle the morass of money laundering and tax evasion among the very powerful, and the people who do so who aren’t killed, discredited, or otherwise brought to heel before they can do damage bring back reports that outline the true extent of this in our society.
This is probably the biggest “catastrophe” of our time. Our personal freedom and the well-being of the entire world depend on cleaning up the mess left by the drug prohibition and the persistent reign of the military industrial complex and the wealthy non-governments of e.g. the Catholic Church (which has assets that make it the 18th or 19th richest “country” on the planet, in spite of the fact that it isn’t a country and is ruled by a closed conclave of old men). Adams is pretty smart — I’m sure he has seen this coming (or known it was going on) all of his life. Many of us, if not most of us, have. We talk about it. It often directly impacts upon our lives, or shows up in the news.
Can we solve this crisis by direct action and/or technology and planning? No. We don’t even know how to begin.
rgb
The clock is ticking on a devastating asteroid impact, but public awareness is only a couple of years old and it hasn’t happened quite yet. Put this in the check back later bin.
I think plenty of people could see the globalization being a disaster for manufacturing jobs and union scale wage.
We were told globalization was to keep the peace. Now US and world military spending is very high, almost back to cold war levels…
http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending
David, UK says:
April 20, 2013 at 3:51 am
I don’t think anyone could claim that the general public saw that one coming. Remember the cheers when Chamberlain returned from his meeting with Adloff Hilter* with that “piece of paper?” It was only after they bomber Poland that we “saw it coming” – somewhat after the fact.
*deliberately misspelt to attempt to avoid the sin bin
David, absolutely fair comment, quite agree. Just wanted to pitch in a suggestion. Thanks
Admad
I don’t know if the demise of the Passenger Pigeon was predicted, but it certainly could have been. Big game may do better, but that’s a work in progress.
Warnings of what could happen to New Orleans if it were to be hit by a Cat-3 hurricane were largely ignored and remarkably accurate. This probably flunks the “general public saw coming” but Neil Frank continued warning the public of hurricane risk long after he left the directorship of the National Hurricane Center.
“Can anyone give me an example of a potential global disaster that the general public saw coming, with at least a ten year warning, and it actually happened as predicted?”
Hey, is this a trick question? How many concerns about anything with a lead time of a few years is the general public aware of?
” Simon was the one who did the data-gathering work necessary to show that humanity, for all recorded history, had:
1) Continuously improved on its condition throughout ALL generations”
This is factually incorrect. The collapse of the Roman Empire, for example, was followed by almost a thousand years, when the standard of living and quality of live were dismal compared to what they had been during the first century or two AD. The same applies to all the numerous collapses of civilizations known to history.
Could it be that the real question is: how to detect a real crisis in the midst of continuous “background noise” of misalarms? Knowing the history of periods such as the later Roman Empire or late Renaissance Italy might be helpful here. Unfortunately, ‘history of decadent civilizations’ is not a popular subject these days.
One possible explanation cum description of crisis was offered by Rostovzeff, who closed his huge, two-volume social and economic history of the Roman Empire by this summary (quoted from memory): ‘ What went wrong is that the effort to civilize barbarians failed. Instead of the barbarians becoming civilized, civilization became barbarized.’
Unfortunately, most people experiencing this kind of “barbarization crisis” are by definition incapable of noticing it.
Can anyone give me an example of a potential global disaster that the general public saw coming, with at least a ten year warning, and it actually happened as predicted?
Exactly, to the point.
When one takes a look at the examples given:
Thomas Malthus famously predicted that the world would run out of food as the population grew. Instead, humans improved their farming technology.
This was not due to Thomas Malthus prediction and reaction to it. About 15% of our food is coming from improved CO2 atmosphere – estimation that I saw also mentioned by Freeman Dyson. That is food for 1 000 000 000 people out of 7 000 000 000. Not bad for a beggining. Then it was a result of improved farming technologies, and genetics.
The world was supposed to run out of oil by now, but instead we keep finding new ways to extract it from the ground. The United States has unexpectedly become a net provider of energy.
Not a result of a reaction to the oil crisis by any bureaucratic government, not a reaction to the Club of Rome manifest, but a result of free market allowed to perform in some areas. A result of human inventivity as the “Doomslayer” said:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffsimon_pr.html
“Resources come out of people’s minds more than out of the ground or air,” says Simon. “Minds matter economically as much as or more than hands or mouths. Human beings create more than they use, on average. It had to be so, or we would be an extinct species.”
The defect of the Malthusian models, superficially plausible but invariably wrong, is that they leave the human mind out of the equation. “These models simply do not comprehend key elements of people – the imaginative and creative.”
As for the future, “This is my long-run forecast in brief,” says Simon. “The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today’s Western living standards.
“I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse.”
Historian says:
April 20, 2013 at 8:19 am
“One possible explanation cum description of crisis was offered by Rostovzeff, who closed his huge, two-volume social and economic history of the Roman Empire by this summary (quoted from memory): ‘ What went wrong is that the effort to civilize barbarians failed. Instead of the barbarians becoming civilized, civilization became barbarized.’”
It became colder.
Their EROEI dropped under three.
So the high culture collapsed.
That’s it in a nutshell. A lot of drama during the collapse but basically they ran out of energy.
thingodonta says:
April 20, 2013 at 5:18 am
You left off that they were all collectivist in some fashion.
Um, I suggest you actually spend a bit more time researching the causes of the Great Depression. The government (Fed policy) most certainly was involved, and “the failure to regulate the market” is not often mentioned by sane economists as one of the causes. Similar to the current problems, it was also predicted by several economists. Funny that the guys that always see these things coming tend to be capitalists.
Not that you know about, but rest assured, if the government sees GW as a threat, the military is involved.
Mark
“DirkH says:
It became colder.
Their EROEI dropped under three.
So the high culture collapsed.
That’s it in a nutshell.”
Please, do read up on Roman history. A more likely explanation than climate change was the massive growth of the state and its bureaucracy, which in effect enslaved the population. As a result, people reached a level where they regarded the barbarians as a lesser evil than their own government.
All civilizations of which we have sufficent data to say what happened began as laissez-faire systems, with a small central government and very low taxation. The process of decay was accompanied by a growth of goverment. The development seen in western countries in the 20th century is only a repetition of what has happened repeatedly in the past. At the time of collapse, the state controlled just about all aspects of people’s lives and taxed away most of their earnings. All this was done the name of common good.
Some civilizations can survive massive climatic disasters without collapsing. East Rome coped with the catastropies of 535-545, and Renaissance Italy thrived in the Little Ice Age. This is a particularly impressive feat, since at the same time the Black Death caused Italian cities population losses of over 50%.
If one considers
War on the weather Army – “climate” change
War on Impoverishment (in our back yard) Army – entitlement
then I think
Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961
Military-Industrial Complex Speech
where the councils of government a
there is a recurring temptation to feel that some
spectacular and costly action could become
the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.
Unfortunately,
we live in interesting times.