Emerging Risks with the Potential For Catastrophic Losses

I am particularly concerned with emerging risks with the potential for catastrophic losses, which will be, in my view, an integral feature of an increasingly globally-interconnected world. Of course, this is an overriding concern for both the insurance and reinsurance industries as well as for governments (in their capacity as insurers of last resort for their citizens). In my presentation at the iNTeg-Risk conference I mentioned three such events in the past three years: the global financial crisis (ongoing since late 2008, with no end in sight and with almost incalculable levels of realized and projected losses around the globe); the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico (2010); and the nuclear industry crisis in Japan (2011).

This is the opening paragraph from Dr Leiss’ opening remarks at the iNTeg-Risk/IRGC Joint Session on Emerging Risks in Stuttgart, 6 June 2011. A copy of his full talk is attached.

Emerging Risks

Just published…

“Modern Science, tadalafil Enlightenment, tadalafil and the Domination of Nature: No Exit?” In: Critical Ecologies, ed. Andrew Biro (University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 23-42.

http://www.utppublishing.com/Critical-Ecologies-The-Frankfurt-School-and-Contemporary-Environmental-Crises.html

WikiLeaks and the Mushroom Industry

There has been a fair amount of frothing at the mouth by media commentators, drug including some academics, nurse about the latest trove of documents. Great quantities of damage have been alleged, although (unlike the information in the WikiLeaks documents) these are entirely speculative in nature; huge risks have been postulated, but again, with little intimation of what or who is allegedly at risk (apart from those persons associated with WikiLeaks).

A Canadian diplomat offers to resign for having told his masters that Afghan President Harmid Karzai is a crook. What a surprise! Are these deep thinkers among the commentators really unaware that the President’s office in Afghanistan is and always has been a hub of money- laundering, bribe-taking, and narcotics trafficking? Are they unaware that, no matter what noble sacrifices our soldiers, and those of other countries, have and will make before they finally depart, the country in question will revert to some version of a failed state, run by warlords and manipulated by our stalwart ally, Pakistan’s so-called intelligence service, immediately upon their departure? That then the helpless women of Afghanistan will be subjected to the same vicious brutality and mutilation – see the current issue of National Geographic – they have always endured, with a little extra thrown in for their presumption in seeking a modicum of relief during the foreigners’ occupation?

One or two rotund sheiks from the oil kingdoms urged the U. S. to obliterate the Iranian regime. Here some confusion might be engendered in the public mind: Were they motivated out of concern for the welfare of the Israelis? Probably not. It’s more likely that these pious Sunnis were thinking of how much more peaceful the Islamic Umma would be if about seventy million of their heretical co-religionists were abruptly wiped off the face of the earth.

Pakistan is a failed state, where the fractious government makes promises to their foreign benefactors that they know they will never keep, while gleefully cashing their cheques for vast new stocks of military equipment, and while slyly encouraging popular opinion to blame foreigners for all their woes. Russia is indeed a mafia-controlled state where massive corruption occurs among the political and economic elite. These are truths well-known to all who have eyes to see, and now we realize, courtesy of WikiLeaks, that some diplomats are also aware of them. What an astonishing revelation!

To his credit our own Stephen Harper backed his diplomats in Afghanistan. As far as most other politicians are concerned, their real interest in maintaining secrecy in such matters is to dupe their own citizens about the realities of global affairs. For politics is a subsidiary of the mushroom industry, the modus operandi of which is simplicity itself: Keep the product in the dark and feed it on horseshit. Throwing a bit of light on this dark industry is not good for mushrooms but is always an excellent tonic for the public.

So far as Mr. Assange is concerned, he probably has little to fear from Canadian-based assassination squads, but he really ought to turn himself in to the Swedish justice system and answer the charges against him. After all, it’s not as if it’s the Chinese authorities who are after him. Or is that another unpleasant truth that we shouldn’t talk about?

Reconciling

For the particle physics community the notorious “Higgs boson” is the Holy Grail: This entirely theoretical construct is thought to give mass to matter – without which the material world wouldn’t amount to much, pharm obviously. They hope to find it with the help of the massive and massively expensive Large Hadron Collider built by CERN along the Franco-Swiss border. Outside the scientific community it is whimsically referred to as the “God particle.”

In the March 8 Globe and Mail Rolf-Dieter Heuer, advice the director of CERN, is quoted as follows: “The Higgs particle is not easy to find. We know everything about the Higgs particle, except if it exists.”

Sort of like God, no?

Those who hope for the reconciliation of monotheism and modern science should be very pleased.

Airline Security and Risk Management

Judging from the various articles in this Tuesday’s Globe and Mail, there remains a fair amount of confusion, here and elsewhere, about airline security in the wake of the latest terrorist plot.  Those of us who are “risk junkies” have been expecting something like what happened on Northwest Flight 253 since early last September – and, we fervently hope, government security officials, especially in the United States, have too, even though they missed Mr. Abdulmutallab.

What’s next? Click “(More…)” below, and let’s do some serious risk management.

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