Quantifying and Thinking About Climate Risk
My friend Mark Boslough presented a fascinating analysis last month at AGU comparing the risks of climate change to big rocks from space hitting Earth:
One objective way to compare the relative magnitude of the impact threat to that of anthropogenic climate change is to estimate the long-term worldwide fatality rate. For asteroids, the average is about a hundred deaths per year–about half of which are climate-change related. By contrast, the World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated that 150,000 deaths per year are currently attributable to anthropogenic climate change.
From the AGU poster:
The risk of global catastrophe is dominated by low-probability, high-consequence occurrences. The asteroid threat community has been much more successful than the climate change community in characterizing the dominant “worst-case” scenarios and communicating them to policy makers, the media, and the public–even though the climate change threat is more than a thousand times greater. Media focus on exceptionally unlikely impact scenarios is common, whereas focus on high-consequence climate scenarios is often unfairly labeled as “alarmist”. Quantitative comparison of climate change to asteroid impact is a valuable way to put both threats into perspective.
Construction Work Force
Discussing federal stimulus spending yesterday, a colleague and I were pondering how the New Mexico economy might go about absorbing the money the feds want to pump into it. One key question is the availability of a work force with the skills to build stuff.
Some numbers, courtesy St. Louis Fed. The drop from the peak last spring to November (the latest data available) is 2,500. Data’s seasonally adjusted.
No idea what this means, whether 2,500 is a lot. Just thinking out loud. Plus, I think playing with the Fed data is fun.
Elephant Diaries: The Affirmative Answer to a No-Newspaper World
I have no reason to think Albuquerque will become a no-newspaper town, but the set of questions confronting civic life in Seattle as the P-I goes down and the Times teeters are nevertheless worth thinking about in our own context.
In that regard, I’ve been following the discussions my old college chum Chuck Taylor and others have been having about what happens next in Seattle (a city I’ve always loved). Chuck, an alum of the Times and other Seattle media, yesterday began sketching out a framework for how one might organize post-newspaper journalism is his town (or how it might self-organize).
Setting aside that thorny revenue stream question, Chuck sketches out five full-time beats, and then probes what might need to go on beyond that:
So that’s five full-time reporters, and they will be stretched pretty thin. What about all the other stuff going on?
Time to tap and organize the neighborhood bloggers, a number of whom are already dominant voices in their own right.
He goes on to talk about the neighborhoods and issues already well covered in Seattle by citizen journalists, and the gaps in the system there. It raises an interesting question here in Albuquerque. What are the blogs that are most integral to our civic dialogue, that do the sort of work that could be integrated in a post-newspaper structure that would, in the absence of the work of paid journalists, give people a foundation for understanding what’s going on in their community?
I’m especially interested in those blogs that do original content, rather than (or in addition to) linking to and expanding on MSM work. This is the sort of citizen journalism that is a gap-filler for what the MSM misses, either because there simply are far too many topics for the big media to reach, or because there are far too many ways of viewing any given topic for the mainstream media to provide a comprehensive discussion.
I have my own ideas, but rather than turning this into a discussion of the pros and cons of my list, I’d like readers’ input. What is the Albuquerque citizen journalism on which you rely? I’d especially like your thoughts on how the content of those blogs would change if they were the primary information source rather than an extension of a discussion that includes funded mainstream media.
A New Climate Change Mitigation Strategy
Nothin’ like a good economic collapse to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. From Bloomberg:
Oil demand will fall for a second year, the first back-to-back contractions since 1983, as a deepening recession erodes consumer spending, the International Energy Agency said.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Pink Iguanas Edition
(story ad gated, picture courtesy National Geographic, which also had a story)
Screech Owl
Re last week’s post about the dead owl, which Jaime and I saw while out bike riding.
This is one of those “I’ve got the best job in the world” things. I was over at the Museum of Southwestern Biology, talking about pink iguanas. When I was done, I stuck my head in the office of museum bird guy, Chris Witt, to ask him what kind of owl he thought it might have been. I described it.
“Let’s go look,” he said, and took me back into the collections to peer through the various owls.
Western screech owl. No doubt.
What Was the Question?
Tim Haab on the question of which is better, a fuel consumption-based or mileage-based motoring tax:
The answer comes down to one simple question: What is the goal? If the goal is revenue generation then a mileage tax makes sense. If the goal is fuel efficiency then a gas tax makes sense. If the goal is revenue generation and improved fuel efficiency, then a graduated mileage tax may make sense.
Insert appropriate comment about walking and chewing gum while cooking dinner in the shower.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Boring Edition
Elephant Diaries: Obituary for a Life I Never Quite Lived
Rick Anderson on the rich life and untimely death of the Seattle P-I:
It was different after the P-I packed up its globe and moved to a new building on the waterfront in 1986. Newspapers were evolving—less fun, but more respectful work. No more would a beleaguered reporter likely need to drop acid to get through the day. (The one who did in the old P-I newsroom said the idea backfired: “I kept seeing two city editors!”)