Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
the roads, airports, bridges, railroads, and shipyards are destroyed? Would Los Angeles become
like Port-au-Prince, Haiti, with people living in tent cities for months on end, widespread
deadly cholera outbreaks spread by untreated human waste, with little hope and no change in
sight? Even though the 2011 Japan earthquake was centered about 80 miles (130 km) off
Japan's east coast, and 240 miles (400 km) from Tokyo, this massive 9.0 magnitude quake and
its ensuing tsunami wiped out several small cities, leaving a total of over 25,000 people dead or
missing. Had the epicenter of this quake fallen inside a major metropolitan area, in all likeli-
hood it would have killed, crippled, or displaced several million people.
The Perfect Storm
If these four scenarios are not enough to persuade you that the time is at hand to get your disas-
ter plans and preparations in order, I suggest that you consider the following six trends that ap-
pear to be combining to form the perfect storm for global catastrophe, each of which is a poten-
tial civilization buster in its own right, if left unchecked. You may not agree with the scientific
foundation for all of these trends, and it may turn out that scientists' concerns about one or
more of these trends are unfounded, but is it not prudent to plan for the potential that one or
more of these trends might significantly damage or disrupt the complex global systems that we
rely upon to keep ourselves comfortably fed, clothed, and sheltered?
1. Peak Oil
Our global economy and culture are built largely upon a reliance on cheap oil. From the
cars we drive, to the jets we fly, to the buildings we live in, to the food we eat, to the clothes we
wear—almost everything that encompasses the fabric of our modern life is either powered by
oil, built from oil, or made/grown via machines powered by oil. When the price of oil rose
above $140 a barrel in 2008, the world's economy went into a tailspin—collapsing local eco-
nomies, reducing consumption, and bringing the price of oil back down to a fraction of what it
had been just a few months earlier. Global output of traditional crude oil peaked around 2005-6
and is currently declining. Expensive alternative oil and oil-equivalent sources, like tar sands,
deep ocean oil wells, and biofuels, have taken up the slack for the time being, but these are lim-
ited resources and their utilization is not growing as quickly as necessary to fill in the gap
caused by the shrinking output from the world's mature oil fields. In 2008 the International En-
ergy Agency (IEA) estimated the decline of output from the world's mature oil fields at a rate
of 9.1 percent annually, with a drop to “only” 6.4 percent if huge capital investments are made
to implement “enhanced oil recovery” technologies on a massive scale (Hoyos 2008).
