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Is the Earth Getting Riskier? Expert Says No

October 24, 2005
As Hurricane Wilma -- the year’s 12th Atlantic hurricane -- spins along the south Florida coast, people everywhere else are nervous. Florida has weathered seven hurricanes since August 2004; the storms have caused more than $20 billion in damage and killed more than 100 people.

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This disastrous Atlantic hurricane season caps a tough year for natural disasters: a tsunami in Southeast Asia killed a quarter of a million people; several earthquakes in Asia -- including a recent one near the Pakistani/Afghan border -- killed thousands more; and western Europe is bracing for a deadly outbreak of avian flu.

This run of global bad luck has many people looking for deeper meaning in the chaos. Some say climatic change has triggered the disasters; others blame politics for the inadequate response of various governments. Some says it’s God’s wrath; others say mankind’s hubris. Extremists of both the Christian and pagan varieties are talking about the apocalypse.

All of those responses are rubbish, says author James Walsh, whose "True Odds: How Risk Affects Your Everday Life" is considered a classic in explaining the concept of risk.

“People are terrible at dealing with risk,” says Walsh. "They’re inclined to focus on the most specific, dramatic cause of loss in front of them. They always do this -- especially in times of general anxiety. There’s something hard-wired in the human psyche that wants to focus on the catastrophic loss ... and ignore more subtle risks."

Statisticians call this response risk telescoping; psychologists link it to the flight-or-flight syndrome.

Walsh offers an old axiom of statistical analysis that random events, distributed randomly over a time period, will tend to “bunch” together in groups, or periods of intensity. Statisticians use various mathematical tools to calculate this bunching. Anxious people tend to read external meaning into it.

“This doesn’t mean that climatic factors or slow government response are meaningless. They may have something to do with a given disaster. But there’s no reason to suspect they’re the cause of the losses,” writes Walsh. “It’s solipsistic to believe that your own favorite issues cause natural disasters. But people do it all the time.”

Walsh faults the mainstream media for delivering “an impressionistic version” of the news; TV shows and newspapers are very good at reporting intense details and emotions but terrible at reporting these things in context, he said.

Dramatic footage of storms reaching land makes interesting TV. But the worst hurricane, earthquake, terrorist attack or flu outbreak has almost no effect on the overall mortality rates for a general population. More mundane risks do.

Walsh points out that, in the developed world, nine of 10 premature deaths are linked to one of six behaviors. These are:

1. smoking cigarettes,
2. overeating,
3. misusing alcohol,
4. failing to control high blood pressure,
5. not exercising, and
6. not wearing seat belts in cars.

These are the things that most people should be worried about -- not al Qaida or avian flu.

“The mainstream media tends to get all the small things right and all the big things wrong. It’s great at telling you exactly how many millibars of barometric pressure a storm carries,” says Walsh.

“But it doesn’t tell you that storms are deadlier today because many, many more people live in coastal areas today than did a generation ago. Or that the risk of another al Qaida attack is almost meaningless compared the danger of meeting friends for drinks after work…and then driving home without wearing a seatbelt. Those things are much more dangerous for most people—by a factor of hundreds.”

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