All of Mike Cassidy's Comments + Replies

Thanks for the reply- sorry not a lot of time to address all of these points.

I think in a simplistic world- one in which we react to such threats as you expect with resilience and preparedness, then yes the risk of Tambora sized eruption could be minimal* (*by this I mean raising food and energy prices and dramatically impacting/causing excess mortality of poorer/vulnerable nations). 

Yes the world is more resilient and famines are better etc (note that a VEI 5 eruption in 1982 led to the droughts and thus famine in Ethiopia in 1983-5 that led to half ... (read more)

Hi there, Volcanologist here. Firstly, thanks for making the effort to look into this area and engage with it. 

TLDR: I agree that extinction risk from volcanic risk is extremely extremely low*… (*on its own). But this post comes up with a single probability number, based on one new (and not yet established) paper based on playing about with climate model parameters. You could do a dive into another volcano-climate paper and get a completely different view of impacts e.g. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2752-5295/acee9f/meta. In fact, you co... (read more)

Hi Stan, thanks for your response. I understand your main thesis now -seems logical provided those ideal circumstances (high global co-operation and normal trade).

VEI 7 eruptions could lead to up to 2-3 degrees of global cooling for ~5-10 years (but more elevated in the northern hemisphere). See here: https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL089416 

More likely is two VEI 6 eruptions close together, which may provide longer duration cooling of a similar amount ~2 degrees, like in the mid 6th century (Late antique ice age).

The Loughlin chapter didn't account for t... (read more)

In the report a footnote 2 states:
"In mild agricultural shortfalls such as those that may be triggered by crop blight, VEI-7 volcanic eruption or extreme weather, adaptations like redirecting animal feed, rationing and crop relocation would in theory be sufficient to feed everyone".

How did you come to that conclusion? We're only aware of 1 academic study (Puma et al 2015) about food losses from a VEI 7 eruption and it estimates 1-3 billion people without food per year (I think this is a likely an overestimate, and I'm trying to do research to quantify this... (read more)

Hi Christopher and Ewelina, thanks for this post, it's nice to see geoscientists in EA and advocating for the skillset that Geoscientists pose and you're right that it already plays a role in many of the EA causes. I may use this these examples to share with my undergrads!

I like the estimation calculation you do to equate the money proportional to planetary defense weighted to its odds. However you seem to use the Ord value of 1 in 8000 per century of a Supereruption. But Toby is talking here of a super eruption the size of Toba eruption which is 5000 km3 ... (read more)

Just to follow up this post, we want to confirm  that (like many others)  we did not recieve the funds from the FTX foundation for our project before the FTX collapse. 

We want to thank the Clearer Thinking team for all their hard work on this competition (a great example of democratized funding) and for seeing the potential for quantifying the global risk from large magnitude volcanic eruptions. 

If anyone is able to help us find funding to ensure this project goes ahead (or put in touch with people who could help), it would be really apreciated. Thanks all, Mike and Lara

Really nice post- Thanks for writing this! Lot of thoughts- but just a few below for now:

From my experience in Natural hazard research in various countries (Mexico, Indonesia, Carbbean, S America) I can certainly confirm this statement:

One of the major issues with natural disaster prevention is that many believe that the necessary work is already in place, which I don’t think is the case in many countries.

The impacts are also strongly weighted by population exposure and vulnerability, especially for Earthquakes. For example, the magnitude 7 earthquake in H... (read more)

Thanks for writing this post and your efforts to address these issues! As someone who works in  scientific research I have frustrations about the framework/criteria by which science is funded- so I'm really glad someone connected to effective altruism is looking into this, and I agree that this a really important cause area!

Often the criteria used to judge proposals is based on things like how innovative, novel, timely the science is, if it uses cutting-edge methodology and how suited the candidate is to that study area. Also, as a reviewer of proposa... (read more)

Thanks Ken! Glad you appreciate the importance of this topic.

I'm afraid I've not come across much research about the potential correlation between grand solar minimums and volcanic activity, but let me know where you've come across this and I can look into it.

Thanks for this Toby. I like your suggestion about factoring the risk in this way, and we'll keep you informed about where this all leads. Regarding civilisation collapse & recovery, there's certainly a lot of parallels to abrupt cooling from nuclear and asteroid winters, though the nearer-field hazards (and resulting cascading impacts), may be significantly different. One major uncertainty in this seems to be the location of a super-eruption, which will strongly dictate its effects on society, e.g. similar magnitude super-eruption occurring in the Med... (read more)

Thanks Jackson for forwarding on these interesting posts and info on this topic, I'm glad others have interest in this issue. I wonder if the topic is slightly underrated because its effects are often manifested as 'long-lived' insidious chronic issues, meaning that judging the cost-effectiveness of different interventions with relatively short randomly controlled trials is much more difficult compared to for instance infectious disease interventions. Perhaps that's where your short-term cognitive effects might be a really useful diagnostic/measure of effe... (read more)

Thanks Ramiro, I hadn't listened to that 80kh interview-so I'll do that! But yes it could fall into both 'Global health and well being', but also longtermism categories (bio-risk mitigation-wise). 

Also, sorry if this is stupid, but it seems that, unlike CO2, risks from many pollutants (like particulate matters and pathogens) could be significantly mitigated by effective dispersion; so even a normal ventilator could have observable effect on indoor air quality, right? Thus, I wonder if there are / could be any relevant policy recommendations along this

Quite timely - I've just noticed the first peer-reviewed 'real-life' study showing that air filters (HEPA) used in Covid wards in one hospital significantly reduced the presence of airborne SARS-CoV-2: Press-release:  https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/air-filter-significantly-reduces-presence-of-airborne-sars-cov-2-in-covid-19-wards 

Paper: https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciab933/6414657?guestAccessKey=248e14cc-d920-4782-99b7-634e47cdaa0e 

(For context: In the UK more than 11,000 people were thought to have died ... (read more)

Hi Marc, 

Clive Oppenheimer's, 'Eruptions that shook the world' is a great introduction to volcanoes and their role on society. Cheers!

Hi David, yes totally agree and meant to add this to my answer above. In fact, I think our post only strengthens the case for looking into resilient foods.

Hi Gordon, I think by reading the 'challenging assumptions and why we think the current risk may be underappreciated' and 'Conclusions and the future' sections, you'll get a summary of most of the main points. 

Thanks! 

As the authors put it in that paper: 

"Interventions that delay the eruption have the risk of making the future eruption more intense"

I think this is right, and until we can competently model how a magma will respond to any interventions that we might do, it's perhaps too risky to do at the moment. Nevertheless volcanologists have gone the other way and completely dismissed this whole concept of intervention. Personally, I think it be very worthwhile to investigate this concept in the lab and with numerical models, as after all, humans hav... (read more)

Thanks for your input! 

My main question is: How tractable are the current solutions to all of this? Are there specific next steps one could take? Organizations that could accept funding or incoming talent? Particular laws or regulations we ought to be advocating for? Those are all tough questions, but it would be helpful to have even a very vague sense of how far a unit of money/time could go towards this cause.

Yes we think there are tractable solutions to reduce the impact from these large eruptions, and we're currently planning these behind the scen... (read more)