On the positive side, this book contains clearly written and technically precise accounts of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and hurricane Katrina, both presented in larger geophysical context. These are somewhat uncomfortably embedded in discussions of ongoing phenomena including sea level rise, mercury pollution and global warming; as well as general natural hazards like tornadoes, earthquakes and volcanoes.

I say "uncomfortably" because the retrospective view is never integrated with the prospective one. You can study individual disasters to look for things that should have been done differently. You can identify current dangers to find ways to mitigate future disasters. Both of these are worthwhile, but at some point you have to combine them. It's not enough to find precautions that would have paid off in the disasters, you have to ask if the cost of implementing these precautions generally is more or less than the expected reduction in harm from future disasters. Equally, it's not much good suggesting fixes for ongoing dangers unless you can demonstrate how these would have helped in past disasters.

The author seems to regard this integration as trivial, but it is not. Most disasters result, at least in part, from unexpected interactions of what were supposed to be safety features. Fixes put in place to prevent the last disaster often set the stage for the next one. Moreover there is a tendency for any risk reduction in one area to be offset by a risk increase in another, so, for example, requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets leads to faster and more aggressive riding, to the point that the injury rates stay about the same. New Orleans floods and nuclear reactor safety in Japan were considered very seriously by multiple investigators and regulators, and the steps that were taken were the result of their conclusions. Why would we think that a new investigation suggesting new precautions will be better than the old investigations?

Of course, I don't mean that we should never think about reducing the frequency and severity of disasters. I mean that the subject should be approached humbly, starting with the acknowledgment that smart people failed to prevent the last catastrophe, so we probably can't prevent the next one, only maybe improve things a little. And we can't just look at historical disasters, we have to find useful ways to distinguish them from the much larger pool of potential disasters that did not occur. When looking to the future, we should think about how wrong people were about the future 10 and 20 years ago to get a realistic expectation of our accuracy.

As a result, the book has a lot of useful material, but it is not combined into a helpful perspective for curbing catastrophe. The final chapter on solutions is frankly embarrassing. The author appears to be unaware that US politicians and candidates do have to disclose campaign contributions, or the auditors do not opine "glowingly" on the financial prospects of a company, but merely attest that its financial statements have been prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. There are all sorts of rants on topics the author has little acquaintance with, plus some horrifying recommendations such as unlimited legal liability for people who criticize scientists--without statute of limitations.

Other recommendations are just silly, like scientists turning their work over to "communications professionals" before publication. The problem is not that scientists are poor communicators. The problem is that science seldom provides simple, clearcut recommendations. When the science is clear and the policy obvious, scientists have no difficulty communicating that.

There's no reason for a working scientist to have the knowledge or skills to integrate complex scientific findings with equally complex social concerns and to distill good policies that compel support. And historically scientists have no better record on policy recommendations than anyone else, some of the greatest horrors of the 20th century were inspired or championed by scientists. Scientists have the same right and responsibility to promote their policy opinions as anyone else, but they have to play by the same rules, and not get special liability weapons or whistle blower protections.

There are some good recommendations as well, but they're generic Mom-and-apple-pie things like more transparency and more thoughtful reporters. These are great ideas, but the hard part is explaining how to get them.

Overall, I can recommend the book for a wealth of useful information, presented clearly, but not for any insight about how to curb catastrophe.

If viewed from afar, you would think human beings have a death wish. For a variety of reasons, we seem to build cities in flood plains, earthquake zones, near rising oceans, underneath volcanos and in the path of hurricanes. Timothy H. Dixon makes an attempt to analyze this behavior, quantify the risks, and explain why we seem unable to mitigate these risks.

=== The Good Stuff ===

* Dixon is a scientist, and for the most part, tries to bring the logic and analytical skills of science to examining the risks natural disasters pose to modern society. He attempts to put the risks of these events in perspective and helps to decode the language of scientists into the language of everyday people.

* The author takes his fellow scientists to task for their communications skills. If you read through a typical report on the risk of a natural disaster, unless you are willing to spend hours teasing out the true risks being reported, the language of scientists tends to obscure the problem. Dixon makes the case that scientific results should be presented in clear, harsh language in the hopes that citizens and political leaders might actually grasp the warnings.

* Many of these problems are very complicated, and have no easy solutions. For example, it is almost a certainty that Seattle will be hit with a large earthquake at some point in the future. And yet Seattle is behind Los Angeles in earthquake-resistant building codes. There are any number of reasons for this, including cost, priorities (Seattle faces other natural disasters), political expediency, and just apathy-since many residents of the area have never felt an earthquake. Dixon makes an attempt to identify and explain these reasons, and for the most part does a credible job.

* Dixon is not afraid to point out where things went wrong because of human error-the type of error that should have been easily prevented. For example, the Fukushima reactor accident was made much worse because of the susceptibility of backup generators on the site to being flooded. But the level of flood should have been anticipated based on available historic records.

* One of the ideas the author postulates is that many natural disasters occur on a cycle longer than the period in which Europeans have been settled on the North American continent. In other words, our civilization underestimates the risks because we haven’t seen full cycles of what is possible. Therefore, only clever reconstruction of past disasters from geological clues will give us a proper feel for the probabilities of recurrence. I found the details of this analysis very interesting.


=== The Not-So-Good Stuff ===

* In some ways, Dixon takes a somewhat naïve view of how risk is really managed. For example, the Pacific Northwest area where I live is vulnerable to earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic activity and coastal storms. And while it is easy to say that not enough is being done to reduce the risks from any one of these, it is a very different problem to allocate scarce resources among all these risks. And to make it even more interesting, the best use of funds to lengthen the lifetimes of current residents is probably to attack obesity-since the number one killer is heart disease.

* I believe some of Dixon’s criticisms of scientific writings are also unfair. While I certainly agree that scientific results can be somewhat difficult to discern from a published paper, but I don’t believe this is deliberate. Scientists are careful people, and they attempt to report their results as accurately as possible. Unfortunately, “accurate” means risks are presented as statistical results, which requires some mathematical skills to decode. But in our litigious society, I doubt anyone with any expertise is willing to report results with more specificity than can be justified.


=== Summary ===

I enjoyed the book, and appreciate Dixon’s arguments. Certainly, we need a better way to make decisions based on the best data possible, and scientists do own some of the problems of making our political leaders aware of the risks. And as humans continue to ignore the warnings, it becomes obvious that we need to better understand the risks we are taking as a society and put together plans to mitigate them.

Dixon proposes a few possible fixes, and while I believe some of his ideas are a bit simplified, they are as good a starting point as any. I would have liked to see him follow his own advice and provide more specific guidance. How is the state legislature to assess the relative risks of all the threats possible, and prioritize its scarce resources among them?


=== Disclaimer ===

I was able to read an advance copy through the courtesy of the publisher and NetGalley.