Evidence: too hot to handle?
Americans (chiefly those in the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico) face hurricanes. New Zealanders and the Japanese worry about earthquakes. And in much of Australia, we worry about bushfires. Without wishing to make light of the tragic toll they can inflict, natural disasters are part of the world we inhabit. But as inevitable as they are, we still try everything we can to stop them — or at least to minimise the impacts they have on us.
As Philip Gibbons notes, while many can offer up their own ‘solutions’ to mitigate risks, few bother to check the evidence to see if they work. In the case of bushfires, Gibbons concludes that many of the options commonly touted don’t have much merit. For instance, the Black Saturday bushfires of three years ago would not have been substantially lessened by more ‘prescribed burning’ (ostensibly to eliminate potential fuel for fires, but often too far away from where they would make a real difference). By contrast, greater clearing of vegetation surrounding homes would have offered significant protection. But this strategy puts a large onus on individual homeowners to safeguard themselves — less appealing than expecting the government to do the job for you. Furthermore, people move in to the bush often because they want to be surrounded by nature. That aspiration is kind of spoiled when you clear out all the nature.
And that’s at the core of the problem: for all the beauty of the environment, there is plenty of danger too. Those who live in the bush can’t take the good without the bad.
2011 Express: Society
As Time magazine declared it, 2011 was the year of the protester. Europeans took to the streets over austerity measures, while a group of Americans ‘occupied’ a park near Wall Street.
Slaying the scapegoat
Former Victorian Police commissioner Christine Nixon is doing the media rounds at the moment as she tries to flog her memoirs. Unsurprisingly, just as she has returned to the spotlight, so too has much of the criticism levelled at her in the wake of the devastating ‘Black Saturday’ bushfires in 2009. Nixon was widely slammed for her decision to leave the bushfire command centre as the disaster was unfolding, to have dinner with her partner at a local pub. The ‘mushroom risotto’ fiasco has blotted her record — and totally unfairly, in my view.
As Lyn Bender writes, Nixon left the command centre for 75 minutes. Afterwards she returned, and continued through until well after midnight. She got four hours sleep before returning once again. This is not evidence of a careless attitude. More to the point, Nixon’s role was always minimal — her subordinates had far greater direct knowledge of events, and were accordingly better placed to respond. Even if Nixon had skipped (and sleep later on) entirely, the bushfire would still have been just as devastating — scores of people, sadly, would still have perished in the flames. It seems the outcry is driven by a desire to apportion blame for the tragedy that unfolded that weekend. None, to my knowledge, rests with Nixon.
By the IMF’s math, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, a [23-metre] tsunami and nuclear reactors leaking radiation will barely nick growth. It now sees Japan advancing 1.4 percent this year, down from its earlier 1.6 percent prediction. That raises a very technical econometric question: Huh?
William Pesek, Bloomberg
‘Huh?’, indeed. The IMF’s analysis does not seem to gel with what many commentators have observed in Japan. The combined effects of the devastating earthquake, tsunami and on-going nuclear emergency have crippled business investment. While there will doubtless be something of a reconstruction boom, it will take time before Japan reaches that point — particularly as aftershocks continue to unnerve locals and disrupt production, and there remain serious question marks about Japan’s ability to meet its energy needs in the short to medium term with the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant permanently out of action. William Pesek also observes two other critical factors that will ensure any recovery is slow in materialising: a weak global economy that will make export conditions (crucial to an economy where domestic demand has been perennially weak) challenging, and poor political leadership. While I don’t profess to be a macroeconomist, my own impressions are that expectations of 1.4 per cent GDP growth this year seem absurdly optimistic.
I don’t normally post skateboarding-related stuff on my blog. However, I stumbled across a video today that shows skateboarders making the most of the new landscape that this year’s earthquake brought to the New Zealand city of Christchurch. It is but one encouraging sign of a community trying to return to normal despite the devastation that has befallen it.
