How prepared are we for any large scale natural event?
Not prepared at all.
It's costs money to be prepared for things that might not ever happen. No CEO ever got fired for choosing profits, no CEO ever will get fired for choosing profits.
> Probably similar to people living in a cave and refusing to leave it out of fear.
I'm not sure where you're getting that. People living in a cave are far less prepared than we are for pretty much any potential large-scale disaster we already know about (never mind the ones we don't know about yet!). Although you oppose it (that's good!), you seem to be making a classic mistake by thinking that technological stasis or regression is the way to prepare for or protect against disasters. But the vital point is that stasis only protects us against the danger posed by new technologies, while almost certainly condemning us against other inevitable dangers like disease, earthquakes, weather disasters, climate change (man-made or otherwise), meteor impacts, supernovae, and probably lots of unknown things we would never learn about until they hit us.
> thinking that technological stasis or regression is the way to prepare for or protect against disasters.
Well put. Regression is a very real danger in all civilizations and it's inevitable. It is the full time job to actively resist decline.
Reminds me of that plan to intercept an earthbound meteor/asteroid. It sounds absurd - until we hit an existential crisis when one such object is in our trajectory and all the bullshit stops. The sad thing is not IF but When. Could be a year or a million years.
Inexpensive mitigations in this case are things like evaluating and improving transformer designs so they are more resilient to these events, maybe speeding up replacement of some transformers (if they are especially susceptible or very critical) and maybe having a few more spares around.
Of course nothing will make sure we are 100% prepared, but there can be a lot of value in reevaluating and improving things.
> What would life look like if we tried to be 100% prepared for all contingencies?
No one is suggesting that it would make sense to be 100% for all contingencies. But most people wear their seat belts, even though your chances of dying in a Carrington-type event are greater than your chances of dying in a car crash. So it would seem rational to invest at least as much into preventing Carrington-type events as we invest into car safety.
> even though your chances of dying in a Carrington-type event are greater than your chances of dying in a car crash
That can't be right. Or am I misunderstanding something? Your chances of dying in a car crash are higher than dying in a global extinction level disaster. How likely are car crashes with fatalities? How likely are extinction level disasters?
In the US, 0.01% of the population dies in car crashes each year (I didn’t misplace a decimal, it’s actually a fairly rare event).
If there’s a 1% annual chance of a single event where 1% of the population dies all at once, that makes the risk dying of dying in such an event the same as dying in a car crash. If if either of those numbers are higher than 1%, it’s more likely than dying in a car crash. I’m not sure if the comment you responded to is correct about the numbers for this particular risk, just showing how rare extreme events can be important risks.
I think people tend of overrate rare events that only hurt a few people at a time (like shark attacks and lightning strikes) and underrate rare events that hurt a lot of people at once (like pandemics, extreme weather events, or other society-scale disasters).
It hinges massively on how correct the worst-case predictions about impact are. I don't agree with the worst-case predictions but let's entertain them for a moment as a thought experiment: let's say grid power is almost entirely knocked out for a full year in and that leads to mass starvation and a general breakdown in society. 30% of the population dies of either starvation, heat/cold exposure or from th troubles.
If, and it's a big if, that came to pass just once in five hundred years then sure, the chances of dying in such an event turn out to be higher than dying in a car crash. Much higher, at that, so the real figures don't need to be anything like this extreme. Low-frequency high-impact risks can lead to that situation and it's one reason why 'the odds' is often too simplistic to be useful in assessing risk. Humans have a general cognitive blind spot when it comes to assessing this kind of thing.
We're generally terrible at predicting how high-impact, low frequency events will impact us and play out and part of that is that our collective reaction is the most unpredictable element, with potential to multiply or mitigate the impacts to a huge degree in either direction. The current pandemic illustrates that quite well, as does Texas. A CME if/when it hits will open us up to a similar opportunity (or risk) of reacting in a way that either minimizes or intensifies the damage.
> If, and it's a big if, that came to pass just once in five hundred years then sure, the chances of dying in such an event turn out to be higher than dying in a car crash.
Wait, do you mean "if you were involved in a car crash you'd be less likely to die than if you were involved in a CME"?
Is that what you and the OP were saying? If so, I could agree with that, rephrased as "the lethality of a CME is higher than that of a car crash".
But what I was thinking is that CMEs are far less likely, so their lethality doesn't matter as much when predicting what you'll die of. I'm far more likely to be involved in a car crash than in a CME, and since fatal car crashes actually occur, I'm far more likely to die in one than in a CME. Simply because the CME is very, very unlikely to happen.
To rephrase it in terms of things that actually happen in our lifetimes more than once: the lethality of plane crashes is very high: you're very unlikely to survive one. Their lethality is higher than that of car crashes. However, if I were to ask you: "is this person, Jane Random, more likely to die of a car crash or a plane crash?", you'd have to bet on the car crash -- simply because plane crashes occur far less often.
(This is purposefully excluding other, likelier causes of death, of course).
> Wait, do you mean "if you were involved in a car crash you'd be less likely to die than if you were involved in a CME"?
Car crashes kill around 35k Americans per year. Whereas let's say a CME would kill 300M Americans. Even if a CME only happens once every 500 years, your chances of dying in a CME would still be vastly greater than your chances of dying in a car crash, because 35,000 * 500 < 300,000,000.
Now granted a CME might not kill 85% of Americans, but they also happen more like every 100 years, rather than every 500. So yeah, the math should actually be pretty terrifying no matter what assumptions you plug in.
By that logic, no preventive measures should ever be taken. But individual measures have varied costs and returns, and it is worth considering those and selecting measures that make sense.
Would you never screen for cancer because you can use chemotherapy?
Who's suggesting we be 100% prepared for all contingencies?
At a high level, there's a tension between efficiency and resiliency. Profit growth necessarily demands an increase in efficiency, and resiliency necessarily drops.
Texas's power grid is a recent good example of this issue. Texas chose to skip many resiliency measures w/r/t cold temperatures even though they suffered this same issue 10 years ago. The expense, for the businesses, may be lower to rebuild after disasters. But these types of catastrophes often cost people their lives.
It's not incredibly effective for the disasters that happen, no. It still may be the right approach, though.
There are many possible disasters. Being prepared for all of them takes all your time and resources - more than all, in fact. We don't have enough time and resources to prepare for all possible disasters. So we put more effort into preparing for the most likely ones, and sometimes one of the less likely ones gets us. Note that there are more "less likely" scenarios than there are "more likely" ones.
Also note that, after a disaster has occurred, it suddenly seems very probable, which makes it look like we mis-evaluated which risks were likely. On the other hand, sometimes we really do mis-evaluate or under-prepare. It's hard, in advance, to get the balance right. And even if we did, after a disaster we say "yeah, should have seen that one coming".
> Being prepared for all of them takes all your time and resources - more than all, in fact.
Most of the time preparing for most disasters has a few common features to it.
- Food
- Power
- Transportation
- Housing/Shelter
These are common issues with every single possible disaster that can happen. So instead of preparing for "every disaster possible", you need to prepare for the outcome of "every disaster possible."
These four things can reduce lives lost by a significant amount, and as a 21st century society we need to limit our growth to the point where we're keeping up with the potential disaster situation, less we regress a thousand years because we didn't.
So no you're absolutely wrong. You don't need to plan for disasters at this scale. You plan for the outcomes of it.
Many areas have natural water sources that could be used in a serious emergency, but having some potable water on hand and a way to purify more, is pretty easy and inexpensive.
OK, but... take power, for example. Ensuring power after a Carrington Event is completely different from ensuring power after cold weather in Texas. Not completely different because of scale; completely different because the intersection of the solutions is very close to the empty set.
So, while your "consequences" approach has a lot of merit, what you have to do to handle the consequences still depends significantly on what the cause of the problem was. Which brings you back to preparing for multiple scenarios. (I'll give you this, though: It may be fewer scenarios than a cause-based approach.)
The solution to keeping the entire grid powered is very different between the two events, but the solution to keeping hospitals powered is basically the same (diesel backups with huge tanks).
Unless there's extreme weather you don't need to keep the entire grid operational for people to survive, only key infrastructure. So you can cut out those concerns if you have preparations for extreme hot and cold events (with cold being much easier to prepare for)
Carrington Event does have overlap with EMPs, if I understand my physics correctly, so there's at least an overlap with military concerns, which is tied to unlimited budget.
At what point do you allow for any risk management whatsoever? Your arguments against risk management rely on an an event space being large enough such that attempting to prepare for at least some events is absurd. That's the charitable version anyhow since I'm assuming that you actually do want to do risk management, which you discounted out of hand at the beginning just because there are many risks.
Any heuristic to make this more tractable (including ones that eschew having to work with probabilities and thus event space sizes, like the consequence-based approach) works in favor of more prep.
I said that you can't mitigate every possible disaster. It is a logical fallacy to conclude that I meant "do no risk management whatsoever"; that does not at all follow from what I said.
If you do any camping you can easily be prepared for most disasters that happen when it's not winter. Buy some serious sleeping bags and you could be ready for disasters in winter also.
Well, its just that people who made the decision are not paying for all the business disruption, productivity and health damages (including deaths) they caused.
For some reason if you mop the floor without the "wet" sign, you could be liable, but if you let the whole powergrid collapse twice, you bear no fault
Yup. Money is a surprisingly good metric for these things, but it's how you count money that matters. That a power grid can collapse due to a predictable natural event tells us that the accounting we use here is wrong, as it doesn't correctly allocate costs of failure.
You make good points. Please consider, however, that historically those decisions have not been made on relative likelihood, they’ve been made based on who we didn’t care about. New Orleans is a prime example - experts had warned for decades about what would happen if NO were to be hit by a cat 5.
The cost of a company not preparing for a catastrophe is hugely externalized, resulting in a lopsided risk equation that represents a market failure.
In texas, the cost of that market failure can be measured in preventable deaths, none of which private energy companies needed to account for when managing risk.
In the event of a solar flare knocking out national power for months, the cost could be the collapse of modern civilization.
In this scenario you would have to rebuild all of civilization. I do not think modern civilization could survive the loss of the entire electrical grid.
Not prepared at all.
It's costs money to be prepared for things that might not ever happen. No CEO ever got fired for choosing profits, no CEO ever will get fired for choosing profits.