Here’s one reason people don’t pay attention to big risks: too many times they’ve heard that things will fall apart in a big way, such as overpopulation as predicted back in 1968 (by which prediction we should have probably 10 billion people on the planet now), and some of the more overblown Y2K predictions; many of these are cataloged in an article by Michael Crichton.

Notice that in 1968, when Ehrlich published his book The Population Bomb, world fertility was already in decline. Ehrlich was thus urging people to do what they had already been doing for about 10 years. It’s not clear whether he knew this or not. But certainly when he said, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over….At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…” he was simply wrong. As you see, after his book appeared the death rate remained flat in developed countries, and it continued to fall for another 10 years in developing countries.
Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy, Washington DC, November 6, 2005, By Michael Crichton

Crichton remarks that Erhlich was merely crying out in desperation to urge what’s already happening. However, Crichton also neglects to mention that a quite significant government initiative, the One-Child Policy in China, was promulgated after Erhlich’s warning and has apparently had a significant effect on population growth in China, which is now expected to peak somewhere around 1.5 billion in about 2025. In other words, China chose to change its demographics to start acting like a developed country before it became one. Crichton also doesn’t mention improvements in food production that weren’t known to be possible when Erhlich wrote. Erlich was in fact wrong in his predictions, but Crichton is also wrong in implying that things would have gone as well if nobody had tried to do anything to change the situation.

Crichton also uses some of the more extreme Y2K predictions as fodder for his arguments, and notes that governments didn’t do much to fix whatever Y2K problems there were. OK, so governments shouldn’t congratulate themselves on fixing things they didn’t fix, but I was on the U.S. government’s panel on Y2K and the Internet, in which I never noticed the U.S. government claiming it was going to fix the problem: it seemed to spend a lot of time reminding industry that it would have to fix the problem. Also the predictions of that committee were nowhere near as alarmist as the ones Crichton quotes. If you pick the most alarmist warnings, it’s easy to say warnings are alarmist.

Then Crichton talks about reversals in predictions:

One interesting feature is the tendency to reversals: a benefit becomes a hazard and then becomes a benefit again. Butter is good, then bad, then good again. Saccharine is good, then bad, then good. But this is also true for some much larger scares, like cancer and powerlines, which hit the media in 1989.

This is certainly true about things for which evidence is scanty or research on them is new. It’s less true when there are now thirty years of research and evidence on for example global warming.

Crichton recommends that everyone should stop believing that complex systems follow linear cause and effect paths. This is good advice. Fortunately, current models of global warming already incorporate that advice. As do measurements of incidence, severity, and economic damage of natural catastrophes, such as are kept by reinsurers.

I do agree with Crichton’s bottom line:

And one other thing. If we want to manage complexity, we must eliminate fear. Fear may draw a television audience. It may generate cash for an advocacy group. It may support the legal profession. But fear paralyzes us. It freezes us. And we need to be flexible in our responses, as we move into a new era of managing complexity. So we have to stop responding to fear:

However, we also need to encourage those companies and governments that are actively promoting bad practices such as ongoing burning of petroleum products with no attempt to conserve; we need to encourage those entities to change their ways.

Public opinion is part of the complex global system that includes economics and global warming. Crying wolf isn’t the best way to manipulate public opinion, but just because some people have cried wolf doesn’t mean there aren’t changes occuring in global climate that may be sending wolves to the door. Katrina happened, as did Rita and Wilma and several hurricanes into the greek letters. Things are changing, and pretending they aren’t is simply denial, which is no better than fear.

-jsq