Dilbert becomes skeptical of climate change disaster

Roger Sewell says “Yes, nuclear power plants. Three major disasters in less than 50 years. Each one, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, would not have happened if the warnings NOT to build these things had been heeded.”
Could you please cite,with links,the exact nomber of people directly killed by either TMI,Chernobyl,or Fukushima??
Thanks in advance.

We shall see, what we shall see, but US’ $222 TRILLION unfunded liabilities and $85 billion/month FED money printing can’t last much longer…
DRIVES ME NUTS! Currency, coin or bills is like 1/500th of the economy. The Fed DOES NOT PRINT MONEY. It grinds me into the ground because there are PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE that actual PRINTING OF CURRENCY controls things.
It is MORE “hazardous” than that…i.e., the money supply is increased by POLICY and COMPUTERS.
However, money “adjusts” to fit circumstances. The things that count are: 1. Real-estate,
2. Resources, 3. Energy. Period.
Thats all!
Max

How about the Australian Labor Party, the Australian Broadcasting Commission and most of the idiots in Canberra.

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.
You mean that movies such as Armageddon or Deep Impact — (both over 15 years old at this point) or science fiction novels like Footfall or Lucifer’s Hammer (1978!) are only a couple of years old? Science fiction writers have been all over this concept for decades. The general public has been at least moderately aware of it since Alverez and his son discovered strong evidence that the Cretaceous exinction event was caused by, or at least associated with, a massive asteroid-scale impact (a BIG rock, not a small one). There is at this point even a specific crater with a 110 mile diameter associated with the event. Every person who ever watched “Walking with Dinosaurs” (1999) — which includes nearly every person who was a child or had a child younger than 15 over the last 14 years — has watched as the momma T Rex and her poor baby are blown to dust by the pyroclastic flow from the event.
Then there are the other umpty shows on BBC, the discovery channel, the science channel, even the history channel. In the US or Europe, one has to have lived in a cave for over a decade or (as noted above) simply be a bit dull, stupid, and disconnected from the flow of information not to know that asteroid falls can cause mass extinctions, have happened before, and will happen again.
Fortunately, they are rare. The Cretaceous event was 60 million years ago. Asteroid events large enough to affect world ecology appear to be roughly order of 100 million year occurrences and were likely more common early on in the Earth’s history than they are now. Events like Tunguska or the megaton-scale meteor that blew up over Russia earlier this year are a lot more common, perhaps decadal or century scale. And one expects a wide range in between, with more smaller and fewer bigger, all as probabilities.
These are, then, “Black Swan” events (a la Taleb). Very rare — downright unlikely, in fact — but enormously expensive if/when they occur.
They are far from our biggest risk of extinction or massive, globe spanning death. If you want risk factors there, they are probably something like:
a) Nuclear/biological war. This (sadly) is still probably likely with a probability of something like 1% in any given year. Who would be surprised if North Korea launched a nuke or more at South Korea, or Japan, or tried to reach the US? Who would be surprised if terrorists got a bomb and nuked Manhattan? Who would be surprised if Iran built a bomb and used it on Israel, if Pakistan (that has the bomb) used it on India or Israel? The risk is greatly diminished compared to the cold war peak, but it is still there. A completely foreseeable “catastrophe” for decades now, but one that no amount of technology can ameliorate.
b) The coming Pandemic. Nearly all of the physicians and epidemiologists I know are waiting for the pandemic shoe to drop. We are living at a critical time. Every year our list of effective antibiotics shrinks as antibiotic abuse and the evolution of resistance among the worst infections they are used on proceeds. The population of the Earth increases, essentially cranking up a “coupling constant” associated with a set of coupled ordinary differential equations (that I’ve actually studied and run a simulation on with my wife, back when she was an infectious disease fellow) that regulates “R”, the probability of an infected person transmitting the disease during the time they are infectious. Viruses constantly evolve — both known viruses such as flu and rare/unknown viruses or viruses that move over from animal reservoirs. One day one of these bugs WILL mutate into a form that has just the wrong characteristics — R > 1 (so the disease grows exponentially), infectious for a week or more before it becomes symptomatic, high lethal once it becomes symptomatic, and untreatable.
Note well that one needs all of these things. Ebola is extremely infectious and lethal and untreatable, but it has a very short window to be passed on before you are symptomatic, so it is self-limiting. Variations of the flu are infectious, easily transmitted, and only partially treatable, but are relatively rarely lethal. Flu killed almost 20 million people a century ago in a single global pandemic — that one could not be foreseen, but the next one is has already been foreseen, and while we aren’t “helpless to prevent it”, all we can really do is not prevent it but reduce the probability of its occurrence. And then there is the black swan event here — the evolution of a catastrophic pandemic out of an animal reservoir, a bug that we have no resistance at all to and have no technical defense against. Imagine HIV, only transmitted by mosquitoes. Imagine a resurgence of pneumonic form antibiotic resistant plague. Imagine smallpox unleashed from “secret” military stores into a world where we stopped innoculating everybody for it decades ago, so that 25% of everybody under the age of 20 or 30 gets the disease and 20% of them die.
c) Volcanoes. If you’ve never heard of Tambora, you might read the wikipedia entry on it. Everybody has heard of Krakatoa (its much younger, weaker, cousin) and Mount St. Helens (hardly in the running as these things go) and Vesuvius and many others. Also celebrated in singularly bad disaster movies, there is an ongoing probability order of or a bit less than 1% of a catastrophe associated with a volcano large enough to be global in its effects (Tambora affected global climate for years, even decades afterwards, Krakatoa for years, Mount Pinatubo (again, a teeny one as these things go) for a year or two. Volcanic events cannot specifically be foreseen site by site, but at the same time we are quite certain that given centuries for them to happen in happen they will.
Note well that even gigaton of TNT scale Tambora is far from the worst that the Earth is capable of here. If Yellowstone should wake up again as a thousand year supervolcano, it could singlehandedly trigger an instant ice age and kill 2/3 of the world’s population in a mix of starvation and global war as the northern nations look south for food as the world’s breadbaskets ice up — Siberia, Canada and the Northern US, China — and as countries like India with enormous populations suffer from killing frosts and failure of the monsoon as the rain they expect falls as northern ice and snow. Yellowstone would have other dire consequences — think of it as an asteroid collision that just keeps happening — most of them foreseeable and indeed foreseen, but there is damn all we can do about it if it happens. Or if a similar supervolcano opens up somewhere else. See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Traps. More than capable of causing global extinction events and of lasting for a million years (as did this event). Fortunately, these appear to be billion year events.
Yellowstone, however, is not that rare:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_Caldera
142 massive eruption events over the last 17 million years is one every 100,000 years or so, on average. There have been major but not supervolcanic events twice over the last 200,000 years, the last one some 70,000 years ago, with a “hiccup” of sorts that left a 5 km crater 13,000 years ago. If it started to crank up, I’m guessing that we would be able to tell a decade or more before it went critical and exploded into SUPERvolcanic activity, although a plain old eruption could occur with at most months of notice. I don’t know what we could do about it, though. These things are associated with forces and energy accumulations utterly beyond our control. Even if we attempted to use thermonuclear devices to release energy less catastrophically, a ten or hundred year non-explosive eruption is EXPECTED from magma upwellings of this sort of scale, and would be truly catastrophic.
Asteroids and gamma ray bursts are way down the list, as you can see. If Betelgeuse explodes (rather, exploded a few hundred years ago so that the supernova shockwave is about to reach us), it is probably too far away to sterilize the Earth but it might affect the Earth “catastrophically” — or not. Asteroids we MIGHT be able to see and deal with.
There are, however, other “black swans” out there. We have no idea what caused e.g. the Ordovician-Silurian transition from a hot Earth with enormously high CO_2 levels — levels over 10 times the present concentration throughout the ice age itself — into an ice age lasting millions of years. Over the last 50 million years BEFORE the current Pliestocene ice age that started 3 million years ago there have been several bursts of completely inexplicable ice age — single glaciations lasting for hundreds of thousands of years or longer. A few exotic theories that might explain them include stuff like the sun itself wandering into neighborhoods of more or less interstellar dust, very long term chaotic variability in solar output (“chuffing” in its nuclear furnace as it were), possibly associated with new physics. We don’t know what dark matter or dark energy are, but they appear to be distributed throughout galaxies and in between. Does this stuff ever interact with normal matter outside of through gravitation? If so, can it affect climate?
As you can see, a far better game than Scott Adams slow catastrophes that haven’t happened one is to meditate upon the next slow catastrophe that could, and eventually will, happen.
Oh, I forgot in my previous list (and so did everyone else, it appears):
4) The Great Depression. Oh, boy was that one foreseeable and avoidable. And one of the direct “causes” of World War II and the current shape of the political world. If it hadn’t happened, who knows where we would be today?
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Ack! What happened to the close blockquote?

With apologies to the Kingston Trio
“They’re rioting in Africa
They’re starving in Spain
There’s hurricanes in Florida
and Texas needs rain
The whole world is festering with unhappy souls
The French hate the Germans The Germans hate the Poles
Italians hate Yugoslavs South Africans hate the Dutch
And I don’t like anybody very much
But we can be tranquil and thankful And proud
for man’s been endowed With a mushroom shaped cloud
And we know for certain that Some lovely day
someone will set the spark off
And we will all be blown away
They’re rioting in Africa
There’s strife in Iran
What nature doesn’t do to us
will be done by our fellow man”

AIDs was foreseeable, as the first case was discovered in the 1960s.
The rise of Islamic militancy was foreseeable.
On a more personal note, the decision to plant an acacia tree so close to my pool a decade ago was ill advised, and I am now living with the disaster of many, many acacia seeds clogging my pool filter.