How do you prepare for “high impact-low probability” events? That’s a phrase that crops up regularly in global warming research and insurance industry talk. It’s also one that’s given me increasing pause, especially since I’ve begun reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.”
Taleb’s argument is this: that it’s the low-probability, high-impact, random and unpredictable events that have shaped human history, rather than the events everyone “saw” coming (only in retrospect, typically).
Thinking about this, I realized the same argument applies to Earth’s history. How, after all, do we slice up 4.5 billion years of geological time? We use geologic periods whose boundaries are usually catastrophic — low-probability but high-impact — events.
For instance, the “Great Dying” between the Permian and Triassic ages around 250 million years ago, caused more species to die out than any other mass extinction event on Earth. One theory for its cause was a huge meteor impact — something that wasn’t predictable then, but might be today. Another hypothesis, though, suggests a sudden and massive release of clathrates, which are basically greenhouse gases stored in crystalline form under the floors of the oceans.
Now, consider the present day. There are still clathrates under the oceans and methane stored in permafrost. There are also tons of human-created carbon that has — until now — been safely stored away in the seas, soils, plants and trees. And there’s a body of scientific opinion that states we’re already in the midst of the Earth’s sixth mass extinction.
To all the uncertainties that already guide Earth’s path through time, we’re now deliberately throwing gasoline onto the fire in fhe form of ever-rising greenhouse gas emissions. In a recent study on “Florida and Climate Change,” Tufts University researchers Elizabeth A. Stanton and Frank Ackerman put it this way: we’re changing our deck of climate cards — already impossible to predict for each individual draw — by adding more cards that change the odds further.
That sounds to me like we’re making the “low probability-high impact” event even more probable. What do you think?
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Shirley Siluk Gregory
Shirley Siluk Gregory, a transplanted Chicagoan now living in Northwest Florida, represents the progressive half of Green Options' Red, Green and Blue segment. She holds a bachelor's degree in Geological Sciences from Northwestern University but graduated in 1984, just when the market for geologists was flatter than the Florida landscape. Just as well, though: she had little interest in spending her life either in a laboratory or, heaven forbid, an oil field. So, of course, she went into journalism. After extremely low-paying but fun and educational stints at several suburban Chicago weeklies and dailies, Shirley and her then-boyfriend/now-husband Scott found themselves displaced by a media buyout and spending the next several years working as freelancers. Among their credits: The Chicago Tribune, a publication for the manufactured-housing industry, and Web Hosting Magazine, a now-defunct publication that came and went with the dotcom era. Shirley's always been concerned about nature and conservation (and an avid pack-rat, as her family can attest to), but became even more rabidly interested in the environment primarily due to two factors: the growing signs that global warming was real and threatening, and the birth of her son, Noah, in 2003. Suddenly, the prospect of a world that might not be quite as habitable in 40 or 50 years took on a whole new, and personal, meaning. Living where she lives now also helped light the fire of Shirley's environmental awareness: her hometown was severely damaged by Hurricane Ivan in 2004, and beaten up again by Hurricane Dennis in 2005. That, and the fact that she and her family were vacationing in New Orleans until the day before Katrina -- and spent 12 hours driving home for a trip that normally takes 3 -- has made Shirley deeply appreciate how fragile our lifestyles are, and how dependent they are on sound management of natural resources and sustainable living practices. That's why she's become a passionate reader and writer about all things green and sustainable.
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