Cool look at risk — Part 3: Epilogue
The third and last post for the fourth edition of my book
[There is also a Greek version of the post—Υπάρχει και ελληνική έκδοση της ανάρτησης]
In this third and final post about my book Stochastics of Hydroclimatic Extremes — A Cool Look at Risk I highlight its last two sections, 11.3 and 11.4.
11.3 Is the risk from hydroclimatic extremes increasing?
To track changes in the risk from extremes, including the influence of exposure and vulnerability, the ultimate measure of risk is the number of deaths from natural disasters. Relevant data are shown in Figure 11.14 for all natural disasters classified into five categories, three of which are of hydroclimatic type (see also : Koutsoyiannis, 20201).
Clearly, the impacts of hydroclimatic disasters, particularly the severest of them which caused human losses, have dropped spectacularly since the beginning of the 20th century. The number of victims arising from these disasters has fallen, while other types of disasters still cause large numbers of victims. Thus, in the 2010s the primary cause was earthquakes, representing 59% of the total number of victims from natural disasters. Obviously, the reason behind the reduction of the death toll from floods and droughts is not that they have become less severe or less frequent. Rather it is due to improvements in technology, risk assessment and management, and international collaboration. Strengthening of the economy enabled the implementation of these improvements.
Interestingly, according to data of 2010-2017, the deaths from natural disasters represent 0.08% of the total number of deaths, as seen in Figure 11.15. This number ranks them at the bottom in Figure 11.15, with the penultimate cause being cold and heat. Deaths from cold and heat are registered together. However, a multi-country analysis by Gasparrini (2015)2 suggests that these are mostly (at 95%) due to cold, while in the more recent study by Zhao et al. (2021)3 it has been estimated that the percentage of deaths from cold is more than 90% of the total. For comparison, the contribution to deaths of respiratory diseases (belonging to the broader category of health issues) is 11.6%, about 150 times higher than natural disasters (and, apparently, this figure should have now increased due to the Covid-19). Also, the share of deaths due to road accidents is 30 times higher than natural disasters.
The curious reader is encouraged to try to trace the reasons why the general perception of the public as informed by the media, is the inverse of reality. Also, why the climate related risks, the least severe of all, have been promoted so extensively by international organizations (governmental and non-governmental), politicians (of practically the entire political spectrum) and “philanthropists”.
11.4 Gazing into the future
The enormous promotion of climate related risks has been accompanied by the development of a paradigm of prophecy concerning the future of the planet and of humanity, based on models. There seems to be no reluctance to extend the time horizons of such prophecies which can reach the year 100 000 AD (Shaffer et al., 2009)4 or even 1 million years (Archer et al., 2020).5
The prophetic approach is also quite pessimistic, generally predicting future disasters, more recently despising science and technology, if not attempting to deprive mankind of them, like in Aeschylus’s extract from Prometheus Bound, which appears as an epigram at the beginning of the book.
This book supports the more traditional historical approach, which is also stochastic, both in the modern and the ancient interpretation of the term (cf. the quotation by Basilius Caesariensis in Digression 1.A). We have used the scientific method to reveal hidden secrets of the past and quantify the evolution of natural processes. We have used stochastics to describe that evolution in the past and to make induction for the future.
History teaches us that technology has substantially contributed to risk reduction, to the quality, length and value of human life. Technology can further improve the present. Using technology and lessons from the past, we might develop an optimistic vision for the future. Indeed, the information presented in this chapter encourages this.
The real issues of concern about the future are related to social, rather than natural, dynamics (cf. Sargentis et al., 20226). These include societies’ abandonment of reason, intellectual decadence and people’s reluctance to envisage the truth, combined with their preference for promoted virtual realities.
That's how my book ends. I repeat with emphasis the following extract from above:
The curious reader is encouraged to try to trace the reasons why the general perception of the public as informed by the media, is the inverse of reality. Also, why the climate related risks, the least severe of all, have been promoted so extensively by international organizations (governmental and non-governmental), politicians (of practically the entire political spectrum) and “philanthropists”.
It is important for the reader to discover for himself the reasons for the many reversals of reality. I do not want to guide the reader’s thinking because I may be mistaken—and I will be grateful if readers who have spotted possible mistakes on my part discuss them in the comments. Yet, in this post, which is informal (whereas in the book I tried to be as formal as possible), I give some more information and some additional questions that may provide hints in the reader’s thinking process.
First the additional questions:
Can Malthusians, whose interest is to reduce the Earth’s population, be philantropists?
Are the controligarchs, whose interest is to build and control a global political and economic structure, working for the peoples’ benefit?
Is the climagenda, invented and put on the international stage by the Rockefellers (used to be known as Big Oil) and their distinguished attaché, Kissinger, intended to save the planet or to facilitate building their global empire? (Nb., when the climate agenda was launched by Kissinger in the 1970s, it was not clear whether the invented threat was global cooling or global warming. But that did not matter at all. What did matter was the alert that there were climate threats.)7
Is the reason for choosing climate as a main catalyst of the agenda related to the threats it poses or to (a) the fear it inspires in people, and (b) its disconnection from national borders?
And next, the additional information:
An extract from David Rockefeller’s book, Memoirs (p. 405):8
An extract from the book Sapiens9 by Yuval Noah Harari (a distinguished attaché to the World Economic Forum):
A TED talk by Bill Gates (BTW, one of the promoters of the above Harari’s book):
Notice at 2:23 his causal graph which shows only “negative effects” due to the increase of CO₂ concentration.
This causal chain is oposite to what I described in my earlier post A quick overview of my recent works on climate.
Also note that at 0:47 he says:
The climate getting worse means that many years, their [those of the poorest two billion] crops won't grow.
This is blatantly false, and again contrary to reality. It is well known that increased levels of CO₂ help crops to grow more — and that this has caused a greening of the Earth.
A most striking statement is heard at 4:42:
First, we’ve got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, healthcare, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps ten or fifteen percent.
This clearly reveals his interest in lowering the population, and his means of doing so through the new vaccines he promotes. Based on this, one can guess what his interests are that led him to engage in the climangenda and advocate “zero carbon emissions globally by 2050” in his above talk.
Gasparrini, A., Guo, Y., Hashizume, M., Lavigne, E., Zanobetti, A., Schwartz, J., Tobias, A., Tong, S., Rocklöv, J., Forsberg, B., and Leone, M., 2015. Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multicountry observational study. The Lancet, 386 (9991), 369-375.
Zhao, Q., Guo, Y., Ye, T., Gasparrini, A., Tong, S., Overcenco, A., Urban, A., Schneider, A., Entezari, A., Vicedo-Cabrera, A.M. and Zanobetti, A., 2021. Global, regional, and national burden of mortality associated with non-optimal ambient temperatures from 2000 to 2019: a three-stage modelling study. The Lancet Planetary Health, 5(7), e415-e425.
Shaffer, G., Olsen, S.M., and Pedersen, J.O.P., 2009. Long-term ocean oxygen depletion in response to carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. Nature Geoscience, doi: 10.1038/NGEO420.
Archer, D., Kite, E. and Lusk, G., 2020. The ultimate cost of carbon. Climatic Change. doi: 10.1007/s10584-020-02785-4.
Koutsoyiannis, D., 2021. Rethinking climate, climate change, and their relationship with water, Water, 13 (6), 849, doi:10.3390/w13060849.
Koutsoyiannis, D., 2020. The political origin of the climate change agenda, Self-organized lecture, doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.10223.05283, School of Civil Engineering – National Technical University of Athens, Athens.
Rockefeller, D., 2002. Memoirs. Random House, New York, USA. https://archive.org/details/davidrockefeller00davi/page/405/mode/2up
Harari, Y.N., 2014. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Random House.
Dimitris, well done again! I suggest, if you agree, that you present some of the most compelling evidence in the lecture you are going to give as a guest speaker of IHA.
Hello Professor, I came to this site from reading some of your work on Researchgate. Your, "The superiority of refined reservoir routing (RRR) in modelling atmospheric carbon dioxide" for example, was one I found interesting and I am going to read through it several times more to get as much out of it as I can. My interest is in that resident time of radio carbon 14. That variable, I feel, will be where the IPCC will eventually be made irrelevant.
Have you by chance seen?
"Observations of diapycnal upwelling within a sloping submarine canyon"
Published: 26 June 2024
Bethan L. Wynne-Cattanach et al.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07411-2
Walter Munk in the 1960's had estimated that the rate at which the cold bottom water of the abyssal plain returned to the surface was of the order of one centimeter per day. A volume, that at the time in the 1960's, was inferred but never directly measured and unfortunately would be to slow to actually measure. Recently, Alford et al. 2024, has directly observed several upwelling sites proceeding at 100 meters per day. A rate of more than 10,000 times the global average predicted by Munk. I suspect this volume is a variable with higher values driven by geothermal sources.
"Here we show vigorous near-bottom upwelling across isopycnals at a rate of the order of 100 metres per day, coupled with adiabatic exchange of near-boundary and interior fluid. These observations were made using a dye released close to the seafloor within a sloping submarine canyon, and they provide direct evidence of strong, bottom-focused diapycnal upwelling in the deep ocean. This supports previous suggestions that mixing at topographic features, such as canyons, leads to globally significant upwelling. The upwelling rates observed were approximately 10,000 times higher than the global average value required for approximately 30 × 106 m3 s−1 of net upwelling globally."
This undoubtably would complicate the IPCC's narrative. The Carbon transport in this would be interesting to know precisely, but saying it's probably massive would be a good start.