#globalcatastrophicrisk — Public Fediverse posts

What places on Earth are most resilient to global catastrophic risk? Our new review in Global Challenges is the first study to look at this across nuclear war, near-Earth objects, large volcanic eruptions, cyberattacks, high altitude electromagnetic pulse, geomagnetic storms and pandemics.

Australia is plausibly the most resilient place, but even it is reliant on trade for fuel, medicine and fertiliser. There is no place on Earth which is a complete refuge.

Four factors appeared most consistently: geographic isolation, self-sufficiency in food production, governance quality (democratic institutions, low inequality, low corruption, social cohesion) and decentralisation. The first two are largely fixed. The last two are modifiable through policy, improve resilience against every category of catastrophe we examined, and also make societies better places to live. All of them are currently trending the wrong way, which is bad, but also means we can work towards a more resilient and more livable society at the same time.

Open access in Global Challenges: https://doi.org/10.1002/gch2.70146
Longer summary on my blog: https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/no-place-to-hide
Data and code: https://github.com/allfed/gcr-resilience-map

#GlobalCatastrophicRisk #NuclearWar #NuclearWinter #Supervolcano #Food #Resilience #Inequality

New preprint!

We reviewed global catastrophic risks: nuclear war, volcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts, cyberattacks, EMP, geomagnetic storms, and pandemics. Which places on Earth are most resilient?

The short answer: nowhere is safe from everything. Australia and New Zealand come closest, but even they have serious vulnerabilities (trade dependence or volcanic exposure).

The key finding is that resilience factors actively trade off against each other. Geographic isolation helps in pandemics but hurts during infrastructure collapse. A large industrial base helps produce emergency food but increases digital vulnerability.

What could help across scenarios: democratic governance, low inequality, decentralized systems, food self-sufficiency, and preparation. Most of these are policy choices, not geographic fate.

You can find the whole preprint here: https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/12373/

#GlobalCatastrophicRisk #NuclearWar #Pandemic #GeomagneticStorm #Resilience

New preprint!

Global inequality is on the rise, and so is global catastrophic risk. These two problems are not independent: inequality drives societal instability and increases catastrophic risk. We show this by drawing on historical and empirical research highlighting the corrosive effects of inequality.

The danger comes via two pathways: 1) inequality erodes trust and information sharing, making collective action much harder; 2) inequality is especially damaging to democracies, which are our best bet for surviving future hazards.

This means, if we want a society more resilient to global catastrophic risk, we need more democratic participation and less inequality.

See the paper for the full argument: https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/12164/

#inequality #wealth #GlobalCatastrophicRisk #History

Who actually shapes global risk?

One common answer is to focus on individual apocalyptic actors, like terrorists aiming to end the world. But are these groups really what we should be on the lookout for most? Or should we not also consider institutional actors, like states, large militaries, or companies, who actually have the power and resources to meaningfully tip the global balance?

Find out more in post: https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/who-shapes-global-risk

#GlobalCatastrophicRisk #ExistentialRisk #Terrorism #Military

Had a great conversation with Samuel Arbesman on the podcast "The Orthogonal Bet" about all things collapse. If you are curious about the interdisciplinary nature of collapse studies, how it connects history to global catastrophic risk, and how societal resilience increases and decreases, check it out.

You can find it as podcast (https://pod.link/1796494444/episode/MGZlMTY2MmItZmVlOC00ZmE3LWJkNDUtMWE5MmEwYTVjMGU4?view=apps&sort=popularity) and on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayPkVL7wj4s&feature=youtu.be).

#collapse #resilience #GlobalCatastrophicRisk

One important factor to understanding the impact of global catastrophes is economics. How might agricultural prices rise? What are the general economic outlooks? In the next post in my living literature review I try to explore exactly this. The literature is scarce, but I still think we can learn some interesting things here.

https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/end-time-economics

#economics #NuclearWar #GlobalCatastrophicRisk

(1/4) We modeled how global food trade would collapse after catastrophic events like nuclear war or infrastructure loss. It matters enormously where damage occurs, not just how much. Especially, in nuclear winter many countries would loose the majority of their trading partners.

New paper in Earth System Dynamics (@EuroGeosciences): https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/16/1585/2025/

#FoodSecurity #GlobalCatastrophicRisk #AcademicMastodon

New paper is out: The State of Global Catastrophic Risk Research: A Bibliometric Review.

I am quite happy with this one. I think the paper gives a nice overview of what people in the global catastrophic risk community think about and what their research focuses on. So, if you are even remotely interested in global catastrophic risk research, this paper is worth checking out. I don't think you will a more exhaustive overview anywhere else.

You can find the whole paper here: https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/16/1053/2025/esd-16-1053-2025.html

If you want to just get a quick overview, I also wrote a summary: https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/the-state-of-global-catastrophic

And for a super quick overview, just take a look at the visual abstract attached to this post.

#GlobalCatastrophicRisk #GCR #ExistentialRisk #Review #bibliometrics

And thanks to @OpenAlex for their great database, which made this project possible!

Happy to share our new #preprint—the first-ever #SystematicReview on global catastrophic risk. 🌍

We explores the growing field of #GlobalCatastrophicRisk and #ExistentialRisk, which focus on global threats like #NuclearWar. This bibliometric analysis shows how the field has expanded and diversified over the past 20 years and has made substantial contributions to understanding and preparing for #humanity's biggest risks.

https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/8145/

3/ 🔍 Our findings highlight the need for enhanced preparedness to protect global food trade from #GlobalCatastrophicRisk.

📚 Read the full preprint: https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/7339/

I'll be at #egu24 in Vienna until Friday. If you are also at the conference or in the area and want to have a chat about the interactions of #GlobalCatastrophicRisk, #FoodSecurity and #EnvironmentalScience or similar topics, just reply here or write me a message and we can schedule something.

What is the best place to weather the aftermaths of #GlobalCatastrophes? I explore this in a new post in my #LivingLiteratureReview. So, if you want to find out what makes a location resilient against such events, check it out:

https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/the-best-places-to-weather-global

#Australia #NewZealand #SouthEastAsia #resilience #GlobalCatastrophicRisk #Oceania

🌾🌍 New preprint: https://zenodo.org/record/8198966 We looked at how #yield will change after events that would disrupt our #ElectricalGrid globally, like a #SolarStorm. Yields could drop 40-50 %, with some regions like #CentralEurope declining by up to 75 % #FoodSecurity #agriculture #GlobalCatastrophicRisk 🌾🌍

@johnwehrle It's on my radar, though that radar is rather crowded ....

As for fringe / cultish things: there is a long history of such schemes existing Largely To Separate Rich Idiots From Their Money, and it turns out that you can also find a through line through much cultish-thinking generally that it's a #MakeMOneyFast scheme.

All the more so if there is #InsanelyComplexReasoning behind the core notions, in which we find again that #SmartPeopleAreMoreEasilyFooled. I've been meaning to mention #Kant and his #CritiqueOfPureReason in this thread before, so let's do it now. If what Kant showed is that #reason is very often inferior to #epmiricism, that is direct #evidence and #experience, then the field of #GlobalCatastrophicRisk, for all the reasons (ahem, go with me here, please) given above is absolute fucking catnip because there can be no definitive evidence.

That's the fundamental problem of forecasting, prediction, and/or prophecy: it's inherently non-empirical. At best you can point to a track record of past successes, though that has some obvious issues:

• Sufficiently vague / subjective predictions that judging is a crapshoot. A/K/A the Nostradamus and/or Cold Reading problems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading (I suspect that much the success of current LLM Generative AI models has foundations here.)

• The Stock Picker's Scam: Find 1,024 marks, send each a stock pick prediction, half saying it goes up, half down. Whichever proves correct, repeat the mailing to the remaining 512, then 256, then 128, then 64. Finally offer your next set of predictions for some fee to the final 32. Each of those 32 has just seen a record of five perfect predictions. What they don't see are the 992 others who received incorrect predictions. So a full prediction history is required.

Beyond that, as noted above, similarities, mechanisms, mathematical foundations (e.g., thermodynamics), etc., are the best guides we have.

@johnwehrle Here's my earlier discussion of E.R. / GCR, and the Posner quote:

https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/109712403433781694

I'm finding it holds up well.

That's actually an argument against another form of idiocy: panglossianism, particularly of the Steven Pinker variety. But the underlying mechanism is more or less the same: getting confounded with exhibited probabilities (nil, in the case of CGRs Not Yet Realised), or potential impacts (infinite, in the case of GCRs generally), and failing to consider other dimensions of the question:

• Chains of causality in arriving at some specific risk.
• Scope over which a given risk is "existential". (The "existence of what exactly?" question.)
• Potential exogenous bounds on growth, capacity, and/or attainment regardless of the risks in question.

If humans are bad at addressing risk generally, we are globally, catastrophically, existentally BAD at dealing with global catastrophic and/or existential risks.

#Risk #GlobalCatastrophicRisk #ExistentialRisk #Pangloss #Panglossianism #StevenPinker #StevenPinkerIsAnIdiot #MyInfinityIsBiggerThanYours

Of Risk, Traffic Accidents, and Giant Flaming Meteors of Death

...The question of risk, and risk pricing has been on my mind. In particular, the difficulty in portraying the significance of small, contained, individual risk vs. global, catastrophic, highly correlated, and/or existential risk. This is a distinction which is poorly captured in much discussion....

Here's the fallacy: the risk of you dying is not in fact the equivalent risk. The asteroid impact risk is one of everyone on Earth dying, or possibly, all life on Earth. That is, the comparison is of two entirely different outcomes.

[This is] the false equivalence of a risk affecting one person vs. the entire human race (or planet)....

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6vh47p/of_risk_traffic_accidents_and_giant_flaming/

#risk #GlobalCatastrophicRisk #FalseEquivalence