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Catastrophe: Risk and Response
by Richard A. Posner
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (2004-11-11)
ISBN: 0195178130
EAN: 9780195178135
Dewy Decimal #: 363.34
Hardcover: 336 pages
SKU: 00-EV10-0FHD
Condition: Good
Comments: Former library book with normal stamps and stickers. Dust jacket present with mylar cover. Pages have no underlines or highlights.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Catastrophes, whether natural or man-made, that could destroy the human race are often dismissed as alarmist or fanciful, the stuff of science fiction. In fact the risk of such disasters is real, and growing. A collision with an asteroid that might kill a quarter of humanity in 24 hours and the rest soon after; irreversible global warming that might flip, precipitating "snowball earth;" voraciously replicating nanomachines; a catastrophic accident in a particle accelerator that might reduce the earth to a hyperdense sphere 100 meters across; a pandemic of gene-spliced smallpox launched by bioterrorists; even conquest by superintelligent robots-all these potential extinction events, and others, are within the realm of the possible and warrant serious thought about assessment and prevention. They are attracting the concern of reputable scientists--but not of the general public or the nation's policymakers.
How should the nation and the world respond to disaster possibilities that, for a variety of psychological and cultural reasons, people find it hard to wrap their minds around? Richard Posner shows that what is needed is a fresh, thoroughly interdisciplinary perspective that will meld the insights of lawyers, economists, psychologists, and other social scientists with those of the physical sciences. Responsibility for averting catastrophe cannot be left either to scientists or to politicians and other policymakers ignorant of science.
As in many of his previous books, Posner brings law and the social sciences to bear on a contemporary problem-in this case one of particular urgency. Weighing the risk and the possible responses in each case, Posner shows us what to worry about and what to dismiss, and discusses concrete ways of minimizing the most dangerous risks. Must we yield a degree of national sovereignty in order to deal effectively with global warming? Are limitations on our civil liberties a necessary and proper response to the danger of bioterror attacks? Would investing more heavily in detection and interception systems for menacing asteroids be money well-spent? How far can we press cost-benefit analysis in the design of responses to world-threatening events? Should the institutional framework of science policy be altered? we need educational reform? Is the interface of law and science awry? These are but a few of the issues canvassed in this fascinating, disturbing, and necessary book.
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Customer Reviews
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An academic way to talk about the end of the world
Rating  (3)
Date: 2008-06-17
This is a very interesting book but it didn't quite grab me. It is a very academic book, almost like a text book. This book would make a better lecture. Most of his meat in the book comes from economic cost benefit analysis. That information probably comes across better in a lecture.
First the author lays out various threats to not only the country but to the world. He does donate a lot to the end of the world stuff like an asteroid hitting the earth. Then he talks a lot about how to express that danger. He also goes into how to express that risk. That is an interesting thing. The expression of the risk helps society express the worth of solutions. The author goes into standard explanation of present value vs. future value. His method of explaining that response is really interesting. For example he explains how society puts a price value on lives.
His last chapter is a departure of the book style. He has some interesting solutions. Those solutions is a big departure for a judge, but nothing to radical.
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The Greatest Problems of the 21st Century...Solved!
Rating  (5)
Date: 2007-03-05
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
With the emerging trends in healthcare, many of today's young children will be alive in 2100. This would be a remarkable achievement.
Then again, sometime in the next 100 years perhaps the entire human race including all today's children will die violent deaths.
In Catastrophe, US Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner shows that humanity enters the 21st century with a greater chance of annihilation than at any time in human history. Mankind faces new perils that our institutions are not addressing.
Posner does not just warn of dangers. He proposes solutions we can enact today that would reduce risk and improve world security for the next 100 years.
His facts are well researched; his analysis is well thought out. Unfortunately, his writing is heavy. He uses large amounts of hard science, legal theory, and economic analysis.
His major theme is that rapid scientific progress has created perils that our leaders are not addressing.
In a short book, he addresses a large number of doomsday scenarios that would otherwise require years of study.
None of the risks he discusses are likely to happen this year or in any particular year. However, as a group they pose a disturbing risk when looked at over a hundred years.
He collects these horrific events into four groups
1) Natural disasters - This includes asteroids striking the earth, pandemic disease, and huge volcanoes and earthquakes. These have always been around and have caused mass destruction in the past.
The other risks are new to the 21st century.
2) Perils caused by Economic Growth - This includes global warming, resource depletion, loss of biodiversity, and population growth. Posner looks critically at each.
3) Scientific Accidents - These include accidents with robots, artificial intelligence, robotic war machines, genetically modified crops, nanotechnology, and particle accelerators, These all sound like science fiction but Posner uses credible evidence to paint scenarios on how each could destroy the entire human race.
4) Intentional catastrophes - These include nuclear war, biological terror, cyber terror, surveillance, concealment, and encryption. His discussion of biological terror is especially disturbing. He cites evidence that nations, terrorist groups, or even crazed Unabomber type individuals may soon be able to create life forms that can kill billions of people.
This is frightening but Posner does not stop here. He proposes solutions we can work on today to reduce the risk of each catastrophe.
His solutions attempt to reduce each hazard while impairing our current standard of living as little as possible. Each proposal is painful and will disturb many people.
1) Fiscal solutions - He proposes increasing taxes and spending on science to address natural disasters and global warming. He uses economic tools to show that our current policies are inadequate to address these risks. His solutions will lead to a reduced standard of living for all of us.
2) Regulatory solutions -These include an international EPA, specialized science courts, a center for catastrophic risk assessment and response, an international bio-weaponry agency, and catastrophic risk review of new projects. They require international cooperation to work. These proposals will be controversial because they would require national governments like the US, Russia, and China to obey international agencies like the UN. How likely is this?
3) Reduction of civil liberties - As a judge, Posner is careful to defend the US tradition of human rights. However he questions whether the civil liberties of Western societies can continue.
With nuclear or bio-terror, we cannot afford to allow a single mistake. One crazed person can kill millions or perhaps all of us. Given this threat, should we restrict the right of unstable persons to learn dangerous technologies? Can we extend a right to privacy to people with the know how to develop viruses that can kill the entire human race? Should we profile people from certain areas of the world? Does free speech allow us to publish how to make nuclear weapons? Is there a role for torture and threats to families? Being a judge, he explains these ideas clearly and soberly.
4) Education - Posner's solutions are weakest in this areas. He does not trust generalist judges to adjudicate any case involving scientific matters but proposes a special court with judges trained in science.
In an early chapter he shows how the scientific ignorance of some people and the obsession with scientific progress of others work together to make these risks worse. However, he does not recommend improved science education for Presidents, legislators, journalists, or the general public--only judges.
Most important he does not recommend changing science education to emphasize the dangers and ethical responsibilities of scientists. Is it not important for everyone trained in science to understand the danger of what they could achieve and the responsibility to abide by ethical standards? Posner does not mention this.
In a short book, Judge Posner has done an outstanding service in explaining the most important issues confronting us in the 21st century and how they can be solved. However, his ideas should be viewed as intial ideas to stir a public debate not as final solutions. For our children's sake, I encourage everyone to do the heavy research needed to read the book and become active in working toward the best solutions.
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OK Survey, but focused for attorneys & politicos
Rating (3)
Date: 2006-12-24
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
I purchased the book looking for interesting insights on catastrophes. I have to say I did not expand my knowledge of catastrophes much by reading the book. I did expand my knowledge of the relation between our legal/political systems and catastrophic defense/scientific research.
I thought Posner did a good job surveying different catastrophes and assigning rough estimations to them. However, I felt the key point of his book was promoting more attorneys learning about science so an intelligent discusssion could be made. I agree with the point...but it was such a recurring theme, it became dull for me, since I am not an attorney.
I had not read a book by Posner before. He is a judge, and I felt it read like a judge wrote it. I.e. in most areas he was very careful to be impartial. But then occasionally he would make a blanket opinion without any substantiation and move on as if he had proved some point. You can see examples of this in the other reviews below. I'll only point out I had different examples.
If you are soft skinned, conservative and liberal alike will probably find points of offense in the book. And I guess that is what surprised me the most, that this is a political book, not a scientific one.
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A farrago of fear and frustration
Rating (3)
Date: 2005-07-02
9 out of 15 customers found this reveiw helpful
The cliche of fearing only those who are afraid surely holds true for this book. Posner, a judge, wants lawyers to sit in judgement of which research should go forward and which curtailed. He has lined up a string of threats we face in terms of "catastrophic" loss of human life. There are bolides cruising in space eager to smash into our planet and repeat on us what one did to the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Physicists tinkering with subatomic particles could trigger a reaction that would shrink the Earth to a sphere 100 metres across. "Bioterrorism" is the next thrust from "America's" off-shore enemies. What to do to counter this litany of disasters? He insists we need a policy to address each of them.
Posner analyses the various challenges to continued human existence. For each threat there is a "risk assessment" examining the probabilities of its occurring. From the assessment, there is a "cost-benefit" calculation to determine how much to spend to prevent the catastrophe. How likely is the impact of another asteroid extinguishing much or all of human life? How much need we spend to deflect it? What is the true cost of the Kyoto protocol? Posner puts dollar values on each of these in terms of likelihood of the event transpiring and the cost of countering it.
Significantly, Posner posits the threats and their solutions to his countrymen. These are "American" problems and must be dealt with in an "American" environment. He patronisingly grants some UN agency involvement on a few issues, but these are limited to areas the UN is already dealing with or ones the USA has disdained. The British pre-emption of interest in rogue asteroid is given a nod, then passed over. Keeping the focus on what the USA must do in countering, Posner ignores the element of his society that must accept or reject these numbers and the costs involved. Even the most clumsy (clumsiest) estimate of cost per taxpayer would have given this analysis some basis in reality. Posner, however, must suspect that the figure would likely be too high for taxpayers to cope with. He concedes the point in his claim that the costs of adhering to Kyoto would be disproportionately high for his countrymen.
There are so many inconsistencies and self-contradictions in this book they defy listing here. He condemns the Kyoto Protocol as too restrictive on one hand and costing the USA too much on the other. He ignores the fact that this Protocol is a beginning, not an end. He also bypasses the reality of his own country being the world's biggest consumer of resources and exporter of greenhouse gases. He condemns foreign students who return to home countries and urges strengthening of restrictions on what they're allowed to study. This in the face of his braggadocio about the high levels of American science and education. That these departing foreign students are taking expertise to solve problems in their own lands seems to have eluded him. He rants about keeping foreign students away from "lethal toxins" and ignores the number of these that occur naturally and cause death or disfigurement in humans and livestock - even in the technologically superior USA. How many "enemies" would be generated by the constraints he proposes? Finally, how he expects lawyers to gain enough expertise in science to sit in judgement of which research should go forward in a nation unable to come to grips with natural selection remains an enigma. It's commendable that Posner raises the list of threats the entire planet faces. His chauvinist solutions bear little relation to the reality of today's world. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
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"Preparing" For The Future
Rating (5)
Date: 2005-03-21
4 out of 10 customers found this reveiw helpful
Looking out for future risk into the future. For example, asteroids pose a long-term risk hundreds and thousands of years into the future. We have the technology now to map asteroids and safeguard our future. To a large extent this is not being done. There is a lack of scientific enthusiasm to do this.
Global warming is another topic of interest. Glaciers are melting right now. The gravity of the problem is increasing. However, it would be very expensive to do anything about it. So, not much is being done to correct the problem. Even if we reduce emissions into the atmosphere, the build-up is cumulative so that the problem increases even with reduced emisssions. Heavy taxes on CO2 emissions would be scientifically helpful, but politically impossible.
Scientists tend to be either too pessimistic or too optimistic regarding the future. The reality, actually, is somewhere in the middle. Yet, the risks tend to be misstated.
How does the marketplace respond to future risks? Reinsurance companies are very concerned about global warming. The risk is difficult to quantify. Global warming will effect the weather in the future.
The author talks about the risks of terrorism. His position is that terrorism is very difficult to prevent. Our borders may be too porous.
The author covers possible future disasters in this book which include biodiversity loss, sudden global warming, bioterrorists, asteroid impacts, and nuclear meltdowns. The core problem in dealing with these extinction threats is the need to spend large amounts of present resources for speculative future benefits.
Science (C-Span 353/1)
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