Oxford University Researchers List 12 Global Risks To Human Civilization

An anonymous reader writes The 12 greatest threats to civilization have been established by Oxford University scientists, with nuclear war and extreme climate change topping the list. Published by the Global Challenges Foundation, the report explores the 12 most likely ways civilization could end. "[This research] is about how a better understanding of the magnitude of the challenges can help the world to address the risks it faces, and can help to create a path towards more sustainable development," the study's authors said. "It is a scientific assessment about the possibility of oblivion, certainly, but even more it is a call for action based on the assumption that humanity is able to rise to challenges and turn them into opportunities."

Comments

Peak oil?

[Anonymous Coward]

We're now forty years after the first oil shock, and, for lack of a valid alternative, oil still runs 98% of transportation.

How come peak oil isn't listed?

Re:Peak oil?

[Rei]

"We're now forty years after the first oil shock ... How come peak oil isn't listed?"

Your post contains its own answer.

People have been screaming "peak oil" since the late 1800s. Meanwhile, oil resource estimates just keep rising.

It's a naive perception of how the world works that envisions that mineral resources are like some cup with some fixed, limited quantity of a resource, and once you take it all it's gone. The reality is that for every resource, there's unthinkably, mind-bogglingly vast quantities available in total. The ease of extraction generally follows an exponential curve: the easiest stuff is incredibly rare, the next easiest an order of magnitude more common, the next easiest yet another another order of magnitude, and so forth. The amount you can produce depends on your technology and your current price point. Any hike in your price point or increase in your technology consequently puts exponentially more resource onto the market. Likewise, any hike in price leads to significant increase tech research to develop new types of resources, as the potential payoff becomes massive. The exponential scaling factor of difficulty of extraction versus availability strongly discourages supply peaks.

Now, the sort of resource availability curves aren't completely smooth - some order of magnitude transitions can be easier to achieve than others. Likewise, resource markets are always going to be inherently vulnerable to long-term price swings because you have such a long lead time between the start of new projects and the reaching of full production, and even longer time periods before the start of work on new technology and it becoming commercially viable. But regardless of the swings, the long-term picture is never one of scarcity. Making the scarcity bet is not a good idea.

Now, minerals can and do peak - but rarely from supply peaks. Rather, demand peaks are far more common. The stone age didn't end because people ran out of stones.

Re:Peak oil?

[blue trane]

The only real scarcity is our knowledge.

Re:Peak oil?

[renergy]

Making the scarcity bet is not a good idea? Quoting from wiki: "...However, economists later showed that Ehrlich would have won in the majority of 10-year periods over the last century,[2][3] and if the wager was extended by 30 years to 2011, he would have won on four out of the five metals..."

Re:Peak oil?

[BlackPignouf]

+5 Insightful?
No :
-5 for bullshit, willful ignorance and not reading the article you link to :

However, economists later showed that Ehrlich would have won in the majority of 10-year periods over the last century,[2][3] and if the wager was extended by 30 years to 2011, he would have won on four out of the five metals.[3]

You might want to take a look at this article about the energy trap : http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
You're talking about extraction price, you should talk about the energy return on investment : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Once it costs more energy to retrieve oil than to leave it in the ground, we'll have a big problem, and that hasn't been mentioned one bit by TFA.

Re:Peak oil?

[Rei]

EROEI is only relevant when looked at as an entire system perspective.

The Luftwaffe in the latter part of WWII was largely fuelled with aviation fuel made from coal. The primitive coal to liquids technology they used was very inefficient tech consuming way more energy of coal than it produced jet fuel (highly negative EROEI). Yet it kept the Germans in the air until the plants were bombed.

How can that possibly be? How could a negative EROEI work? Simple: because the net energy picture was still positive. Energy from coal in, less energy from jet fuel out. And the economic picture worked because you can't stick coal in a jet's fuel tank and fly it.

Oil doesn't have to be some super high EROEI fuel to work. It doesn't even have to be a positive EROEI fuel to work. So long as you can put it in your gas tank, and so long as the world can produce energy to make it, it can get alone just fine.

Even as it stands, oil is already a fuel whose value is many times higher than its raw energy value. Compare the per-BTU costs of coal or natural gas to that of oil - even in our current low oil price regime. Oil's value isn't it's energy value. It's the ability to drive an engine with it that makes it valuable. Changing other forms of energy into oil is a perfectly realistic economic proposition.

That said, in reality, oil is far, far from a negative EROEI, and won't be going negative for a long, long time, if ever - not that that matters.

Re:Peak oil?

[funwithBSD]

It is, but probably not for the reasons most people think.

The biggest issue is food security. There are probably 2 or 3 Billion people that cannot be fed unless we have oil for food production. More if you assume transportation is down, as there are concentrations of food where there are not concentrations of people.

 

You've got to hand it to them

[gdr]

From the article:

Finally, the researchers warn of “unknown unknowns” and call for “extensive research” into “unknown risks and their probabilities”.

Scientists researching field A call for more research into field A. Also, as there will always be "unknown unknowns" that funding should continue indefinitely.

What solution?

[Anon-Admin]

"The message here is that if politicians don’t come up with solutions to the other problems in the list, they are a risk in and of themselves."

Really?

So lets see. Government only has 4 solutions to every problem.

1) Pass a law making it illegal.
2) Tax it
3) Declare war on it
4) Throw money at it and hope it goes away

Which solution do you think they should use on these issues?

Re:What solution?

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to our glorious private industry leaders who:
1) Lobby the government to shut down the "competition" they claim to worship?
2) Lobby the government to minimize the "risk" the claim to embrace?
3) Seek rent?
4) Leverage every technology possible to reduce their costs while keeping prices the same?

Re:Islam

[Anonymous Coward]

The Islam that marches people to the beach and cuts off their heads?

Or burns people alive in a cage in a public square?

Or sells women and children in sexual slavery?

Or flies airliners into office buildings?

Or blows up buses, cafes, churches, synagogs, government buildings, hotels, or anything place else innocent people gather?

Or maybe they Islam that cuts the throat of film makers and then leaves a note attached to their chest with a fucking knife?

Then there's the Islam that breaks into a publisher's office and guns down 12 people because of a cartoon.

There are so many...or, is it really just one Islam that does it all.

The only that's responsible for nearly 300,000 deaths in Syria alone.

Re:Islam

[Anonymous Coward]

Which ones follow the Quran?

The "extremists" are the ones who DON'T want to kill nonbelievers.

Re:Fear Mongering FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, a religious argument that an evil SkyGod will set fire to a city is probably going to be mocked.

Explain in scientific terms the consequences of a fire spreading out of control in an urban area, and you will likely be more persuasive.

(Though not to the people who think the Fire Code is evil government oppression.)

Burst Forth, Publish Your Policy Report!

[eldavojohn]

If you look at this list, the majority of these problems are man-made. Other than a super volcano and an asteroid impact, the solution seems pretty simple. We must abandon all technology and kill all but a small percentage of the population. And those that are left must live in isolated groups. That way there will not be a world wide disease outbreak.

Yep, that's the only option. There's nothing between doing nothing and that option. It's all we have. And if anyone starts to talk about mitigation strategies, planning ahead of time or devoting a single cent of taxpayer money toward preparing for it, we are just all going to have a meltdown and throw a tantrum with teabags on our hats. Thank god we have these strawman arguments for what these ivory tower Oxford elitists are telling us to do: eliminate the human race to protect the human race. I cannot believe they would actually come to that conclusion but there it is, right in the article. Those environmentalists will have us starving in mud huts by the end of the month if we just sit by and let this academic report go unabated and without criticism!

*tortured sigh*

Re:TLDR - here's the list

[XxtraLarGe]

Future bad global governance

Unlike current bad global governance, which isn't a threat at all...

The greatest risk to human civilization is people.

[Ihlosi]

Yeah. Human civilization would be nice if it didn't involve all those people.

Re:Fear Mongering FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

The scariest scenario is that we end up in a stable state similar to how Europe languished for over 1000 years with tiny, feuding dukedoms and duchies, where because of the constant warfare, any attempts at trade would be impossible, since any traders would be killed and their goods taken for a dukedom's coffers... or killed and the goods burned so it doesn't go to the next dukedom on the list. This was a very stable state where no progress could be made in technology or the arts... until the Black Plague make it impossible for the ruling class to have enough backs to flog to keep themselves on top. Subsistance peasants could grow things like olives instead of crops needed for food, and up sprang the Renaissance when before the plague, large nations that had the means to do things were just a pipe dream.

This nightmare can easily hit us again. Europe and the US are a lot like Rome where instead of bread and circuses, it is beard oil and iPhones. The barbarians are already at the gate, and unlike a conquering Rome which "embraced and extended" Greece's civilization, they are interested in nothing but destruction. Knowledge can be saved, but with the ethic that groups [1] like the Taliban and ISIS have (destroying the Buddhist statues for example, as well as burning film archives), it will be a lot harder to preserve items from our current civilization than it was back after Rome fell and a lot of scrolls and libraries wound up in Persia for safekeeping.

Our civilization is robust. Europe was nearly eradicated by WWII, but it is the beacon of light for the world now. However, it wouldn't take much for a global war to start that would involve every nation out there [2].

However, if enough of the world got destroyed, the ability to get back to working on state of the art technology may not happen. One needs the tools to make the tools, ad nauseum. Destroying an energy infrastructure would put things back in a dark age for a long time, since coal and oil are musts to keep the lights on, and nuclear requires a civilization level to keep running. Transportation is also vital, for rare earths, coal, water, food, and other basics to keep a civilization active.

As for decentralized energy, they all have issues. Solar is good, but is one EMP blast away from being history.

Which leaves hydroelectric and geothermal... and those are only usable in only a few regions, which would leave the rest of the world sans power.

Without power and transportation, there would be starvation in the billions, since there is no way a densely packed city like Signapore, Dubai, or even London can support itself by food grown in a nearby radius. Even here in the US, if the trucks stopped going into NYC, in 1-3 days, the entire city will wind up a giant Donner party.

What can one do? Here in the US, one is fairly lucky -- arable land is available with wells to be dug. 5-20 acres can keep a family fed, with a critical mass of available livestock around so life can go on even if anything more high tech than a horse-drawn carriage was rendered inoperable. Getting out of the "hives" is a high priority since one's life is at the mercy of the city's administration if push comes to shove.

[1]: Again, one has to note that Islamic countries were the ones that kept Roman and Greek history from being lost in time while the average European had an average lifespan of a Justin Bieber fan (if they didn't starve to death, they were killed by the nobles for sport.) It is the extreme offshoots from the Wahhabi philosophy that view only setting up a thanatocracy as one's sole goal in life. It is ironic that the group/religion which preserved Western religion and culture for centuries, now has extremist sects devoted to its destruction.

[2]: This can easily be started. If Russia completely collapsed and neighboring countries started claiming territory, this would bring every single country in, either in hopes of a land grab, or preventing an enemy from doing so. We saw shades of this a century ago when countries came to Russia to fend off others. Even the US did this... and this is still a sore point with Russians, especially when Murmansk and Archangelsk are brought up.

Re:Fear Mongering FTW

[Daniel Hoffmann]

The problem is that globalization means that EVERYONE collapses at the SAME time, all those old civilizations collapsed over an extended period of time and most parts of the world were not affected directly by their downfall. I don't think our retrospective lessons of past events will help much for the future in this case.

Re:Fear Mongering FTW

[HornWumpus]

EMP is overrated as a hazard. In lab tests, typical cars needed to be power cycled to reboot their computers. Electromagnetic emission regulations effectively mean all consumer products are lightly EMP shielded these days. Power grid is another question.

General Jack Pershing made two really ballsy, fantastic decisions in his carrier.

1. He told the English/French high command 'Fuck no! You guys are incompetent jackasses. Just give us part of the front.' (para) when they wanted to use American soldiers as replacements in English and French units in WWI.

2. He told the US congress via the press: 'Get us the fuck out of here, this place is a mess and we are only making things worse' (para) when in command of the 'Allied Expeditionary Force' in Russia after WWI.

It's a safe bet he personally saved a million lives and shortened WWI.

If Russia collapsed, there would be a little nipping at the edges. Mostly nations taking their land back. Nobody want's to try to control Russia proper. Besides which; their nukes aren't going anywhere.

Russia's 'Government' is a show, same as everywhere. The real power there will not collapse in any case.