If a 1km asteroid were to hit the Earth, the dust it kicked up would block most sunlight over most of the world for 3 to 10 years. There’s only a one in a million chance of that happening per year, however. Whew. However, there’s a ten times bigger chance that a super volcano, such as the one hiding under Yellowstone, might explode, for a similar result. And I’d put the chance of a full scale nuclear war at ten to one hundred times larger than that: one in ten thousand to one thousand per year. Over a century, that becomes a one to ten percent chance. Not whew; grimace instead.
If it were free, more food storage would make us more resilient to catastrophes. The problem is that to store up five years of food for 7 billion people would cost tens of trillions of dollars (not to mention the fact that it would not protect us if the catastrophe hit soon, and storing fast would cause many more people to starve in the near term). What I am talking about is spending tens of millions of dollars for planning, targeted research and development, so that we are ready to quickly scale up alternate foods.
I ran across an interesting article [1] that reminded me of this topic. A few quotes from it.
"Never has the world produced so much more food than can be consumed in one season. World ending stocks of total grains - the leftover supplies before a new harvest - have climbed for four straight years and are poised to reach a record 638 million tonnes in 2016/17, according to USDA data.
[...]
"China’s stockpiling policies, enacted in 2007 when corn supplies were tight, also stimulated oversupply. Aiming for self-sufficiency in grains, Beijing bought virtually the entire domestic crop each year and paid farmers as much as 60 percent more than global prices.
"The program stuffed Chinese warehouses with some 250 million tonnes of corn by the time Beijing scrapped it last year. China is now boosting incentives for farmers to switch to soybeans from corn.
“The world’s corn is mainly in China,” said Li Qiang, chief consultant at Shanghai JC Intelligence Co Ltd.
"He said it will take three to four years for stocks to reach a “normal” level of around 40-50 million tonnes.
So, I guess the capacity is there to grow and store large amounts of grain, but the question for people worried about nuclear winter or similar disasters is how to convince governments that storing this amount of grain and expanding storage (rather than cutting it back as wasteful excess) is something they should keep doing, on purpose?
Two options in space are solar and nuclear powered direct chemical synthesis of food from the CO2 we breathe out. There are also electrically powered bacteria. Incidentally, these could also be useful for refuges to repopulate the earth (space-based or terrestrial): http://sethbaum.com/ac/2015... .
I didn't see the book, but my rough back-of-the-envelope calculation supports your conclusion. I calculate that it would very significantly exceed current global GDP, in the cost of electricity alone, just to power the growing lights. Moral: Don't block the sun!
Also energy supply. Nuclear is much better than sunlight! Even if sunlight would be cheaper. Even if you got food and peace, you still need energy. At least it would be contribute to lack of immigration waves from colder climates and peace.
Yes there is a book called "Feeding everyone no matter what", and I don't think solving the food supply problem is even hard if we just got the global (and local) coordination to do it. I don't think it would be even much of the GDP.
What was interesting is that ROI and expected lives saved per $ was much higher than saving people in Africa in the guy's presentation (ask Kaj Sotala for link).
The ALLFED folks are mainly engineers who are doing their part of what needs doing. But their efforts aren't enough; we also need enough social support for the engineers now and in a crisis.
See https://www.google.com/url?... : based on past close calls, 0.02% - 7% per year chance of full scale nuclear war. Median is .4%/year, or ~30% chance this century.
If the estimate of risk is suffiently wobbly, we should do nothing, that is, we should devote no resources to the problem. [Or so it seems to me: I haven't seen a formal treatment, although I think I see the outline of an argument.] An example: I'm told that investors tolerate high risk, but not risk that can be estimated only by a wild guess.
Social science is pretty new. How often can any group take sole credit for a major improvement? I suspect that social science played at least an important role in a number of improvements in the twentieth century like the reductions in war for conquest and civil rights.
Agreed that the numbers are wild guesses but I don't think the risks are trivial. There were several close calls in the '80s when early warning systems malfunctioned. Add in potentially desperate leaders (North Korea if something goes wrong), demented major power leaders, and the potential return of major power rivalries, and I don't think one in a thousand is implausibly high. With the three early warning failures, if each had a 1 in 50 chance of causing an exchange we're already there.
The point is that the risk is high enough over even a normal human lifespan to at least consider mitigation strategies. I think the analogy to asteroid strikes is good - the fairly wobbly estimates of strike probabilities justified a sky survey. That's mostly done, and has indicated we weren't going to get hit in the next 1000 years, but I'm still glad we did it.
And I’d put the chance of a full scale nuclear war at ten to one hundred times larger than that: one in ten thousand to one thousand per year. Over a century, that becomes a one to ten percent chance.
I don't think a plausible model of the likelihood of nuclear war assumes the outcomes for years are independent. Each year that we survived the Cold War period increased the credibility of Mutually Assured Destruction and decreased the probability of war for following years.
I bring this up because your entire argument (that the risk of nuclear winter is worth preparing for) rests on an apparently arbitrary likelihood estimate combined with an impluasible assumption.
[In making this criticism, I assume it makes sense to assign probabilities to one-off events (at least under one-off descriptions). I don't believe it does. For why I'm interested in this, see "Epistemological implications of a reduction of theoretical implausibility to cognitive dissonance" - http://tinyurl.com/yd2mzbgt ]
I question the entire 'nuclear winter' premise. All the nukes going off at once will occur above ground if used for war, and there simply isn't nearly enough energy to equal even a minor volcanic eruption. Nukes vaporize shit, and undoubtedly start secondary fires, but their ejectementa is not even close to the scale of the cubic miles of volcanic spew ejected upwards into the atmosphere from even a moderate eruption. So the idea of sunlight being blocked out for years by a nuke war is a fantasy.
If it were free, more food storage would make us more resilient to catastrophes. The problem is that to store up five years of food for 7 billion people would cost tens of trillions of dollars (not to mention the fact that it would not protect us if the catastrophe hit soon, and storing fast would cause many more people to starve in the near term). What I am talking about is spending tens of millions of dollars for planning, targeted research and development, so that we are ready to quickly scale up alternate foods.
I ran across an interesting article [1] that reminded me of this topic. A few quotes from it.
"Never has the world produced so much more food than can be consumed in one season. World ending stocks of total grains - the leftover supplies before a new harvest - have climbed for four straight years and are poised to reach a record 638 million tonnes in 2016/17, according to USDA data.
[...]
"China’s stockpiling policies, enacted in 2007 when corn supplies were tight, also stimulated oversupply. Aiming for self-sufficiency in grains, Beijing bought virtually the entire domestic crop each year and paid farmers as much as 60 percent more than global prices.
"The program stuffed Chinese warehouses with some 250 million tonnes of corn by the time Beijing scrapped it last year. China is now boosting incentives for farmers to switch to soybeans from corn.
“The world’s corn is mainly in China,” said Li Qiang, chief consultant at Shanghai JC Intelligence Co Ltd.
"He said it will take three to four years for stocks to reach a “normal” level of around 40-50 million tonnes.
So, I guess the capacity is there to grow and store large amounts of grain, but the question for people worried about nuclear winter or similar disasters is how to convince governments that storing this amount of grain and expanding storage (rather than cutting it back as wasteful excess) is something they should keep doing, on purpose?
[1] http://www.reuters.com/arti...
Two options in space are solar and nuclear powered direct chemical synthesis of food from the CO2 we breathe out. There are also electrically powered bacteria. Incidentally, these could also be useful for refuges to repopulate the earth (space-based or terrestrial): http://sethbaum.com/ac/2015... .
Here is a link to the cost effectiveness paper: https://link.springer.com/a...
I didn't see the book, but my rough back-of-the-envelope calculation supports your conclusion. I calculate that it would very significantly exceed current global GDP, in the cost of electricity alone, just to power the growing lights. Moral: Don't block the sun!
Also energy supply. Nuclear is much better than sunlight! Even if sunlight would be cheaper. Even if you got food and peace, you still need energy. At least it would be contribute to lack of immigration waves from colder climates and peace.
Also have they discussed this at UN?
Yes there is a book called "Feeding everyone no matter what", and I don't think solving the food supply problem is even hard if we just got the global (and local) coordination to do it. I don't think it would be even much of the GDP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
What was interesting is that ROI and expected lives saved per $ was much higher than saving people in Africa in the guy's presentation (ask Kaj Sotala for link).
The ALLFED folks are mainly engineers who are doing their part of what needs doing. But their efforts aren't enough; we also need enough social support for the engineers now and in a crisis.
It is only the sulfate from volcanoes that counts - the soot from fires is comparable: https://www.google.com/url?...
See my comment above.
See https://www.google.com/url?... : based on past close calls, 0.02% - 7% per year chance of full scale nuclear war. Median is .4%/year, or ~30% chance this century.
If the estimate of risk is suffiently wobbly, we should do nothing, that is, we should devote no resources to the problem. [Or so it seems to me: I haven't seen a formal treatment, although I think I see the outline of an argument.] An example: I'm told that investors tolerate high risk, but not risk that can be estimated only by a wild guess.
Social science is pretty new. How often can any group take sole credit for a major improvement? I suspect that social science played at least an important role in a number of improvements in the twentieth century like the reductions in war for conquest and civil rights.
Agreed that the numbers are wild guesses but I don't think the risks are trivial. There were several close calls in the '80s when early warning systems malfunctioned. Add in potentially desperate leaders (North Korea if something goes wrong), demented major power leaders, and the potential return of major power rivalries, and I don't think one in a thousand is implausibly high. With the three early warning failures, if each had a 1 in 50 chance of causing an exchange we're already there.
The point is that the risk is high enough over even a normal human lifespan to at least consider mitigation strategies. I think the analogy to asteroid strikes is good - the fairly wobbly estimates of strike probabilities justified a sky survey. That's mostly done, and has indicated we weren't going to get hit in the next 1000 years, but I'm still glad we did it.
And I’d put the chance of a full scale nuclear war at ten to one hundred times larger than that: one in ten thousand to one thousand per year. Over a century, that becomes a one to ten percent chance.
I don't think a plausible model of the likelihood of nuclear war assumes the outcomes for years are independent. Each year that we survived the Cold War period increased the credibility of Mutually Assured Destruction and decreased the probability of war for following years.
I bring this up because your entire argument (that the risk of nuclear winter is worth preparing for) rests on an apparently arbitrary likelihood estimate combined with an impluasible assumption.
[In making this criticism, I assume it makes sense to assign probabilities to one-off events (at least under one-off descriptions). I don't believe it does. For why I'm interested in this, see "Epistemological implications of a reduction of theoretical implausibility to cognitive dissonance" - http://tinyurl.com/yd2mzbgt ]
I question the entire 'nuclear winter' premise. All the nukes going off at once will occur above ground if used for war, and there simply isn't nearly enough energy to equal even a minor volcanic eruption. Nukes vaporize shit, and undoubtedly start secondary fires, but their ejectementa is not even close to the scale of the cubic miles of volcanic spew ejected upwards into the atmosphere from even a moderate eruption. So the idea of sunlight being blocked out for years by a nuke war is a fantasy.