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Wisconsin Poised to Gut Its Campaign Finance and Anti-Corruption Laws

by LinwoodSain Posted on November 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Scott Walker’s presidential bid may have failed, but the Wisconsin governor and his Republican allies are making a massive push to transform the way the state conducts elections and investigates illegal campaign activity. If they’re successful—and by all indications, they will be—by the end of this week, they will have uprooted Wisconsin’s anti-public corruption laws and lifted restrictions on the money pouring into state elections.

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Wisconsin Poised to Gut Its Campaign Finance and Anti-Corruption Laws

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America Has Lost Its Soul. This Unforgettable New Singer Has Found It.

by LeighW51ubkply Posted on October 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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Eric Taylor

The man now known as Fantastic Negrito is wearing a three-piece checkered suit with a crisp, mustard-yellow shirt. Two small holes mark the knees of his pants, and orange striped socks flow into his tan leather shoes. The 47-year-old singer-songwriter hammers away on his Goodwill-bought guitar in a ravaged section of downtown Oakland, California, talking about how this is the place “where the real shit comes from.” Need to test a song? “Hit the streets. It’s very unsafe, and that’s good—strangers tell you the truth.”

Xavier Dphrepaulezz (his real name) isn’t supposed to be here, not really. Ever since he made it to what people keep telling him is “the big time,” he’s had to sneak out. Last February, he beat nearly 7,000 contestants competing for a chance to perform in an NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert, and he’s been on a meteoric rise ever since: His EP of raw, impassioned roots music reached No. 7 on Billboard‘s blues charts in February and was iTunes’ No. 7 blues album in August. His managers want him to save his voice for the paying gigs. They’re asking him: Why would a venue pay 10 grand if you keep playing in the streets for free?

But this is where it all began—at train stops and doughnut shops—before the “international sensation” talk, the courtship from major record labels, and invitations to play music festivals like South by Southwest and Outside Lands. His success happened so fast, seemingly overnight: “I throw up before every show, man. Terrified.”

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America Has Lost Its Soul. This Unforgettable New Singer Has Found It.

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The Color Line Baseball Doesn’t Want to Talk About

by MikaylaBazile Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Earlier this month, the Seattle Mariners fired their manager, Lloyd McClendon, the only African American skipper in Major League Baseball. Now, for the first time since 1987, there isn’t a single black manager in the league.

Just six years ago, in 2009, 10 teams employed black or Latino managers. And while 37 percent of coaches on major league staffs in 2015 were African American or Latino, roughly equal to the percentage of black and Latino big leaguers, there is currently just one manager of color: the Atlanta Braves’ Fredi González.

This is exactly the scenario that former Commissoner Bud Selig was trying to avoid when, in 1999, he sent a memo to league owners that required every club to consider minority candidates “for all general manager, assistant general manager, field manager, director of player development and director of scouting positions.” The progress made since Frank Robinson became the first black manager in 1975 had started to fade; when the “Selig Rule” went into effect, three managers of color led major league teams. Three years later, though, there were 10.

Richard Lapchick, executive director of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, once lauded the Selig Rule and the NFL’s so-called Rooney Rule as “dynamic forces of change” for front offices. More recently, though, both initiatives have been criticized for not doing enough. At least the Rooney Rule requires NFL franchises to interview minority candidates; the Selig Rule, on the other hand, says that teams merely must include minority candidates on their lists of potential hires and submit those lists to the league office. (During Selig’s tenure as commissioner, which ended before this season, there were always at least three big-league managers of color.)

Earlier this year, Commissioner Rob Manfred sent out a notice to owners reiterating the league’s stance, hours before the Milwaukee Brewers fired manager Ron Roenicke. The team hired Craig Counsell to take over the team the next day without conducting a formal interview process. The move raised questions about the league’s ability to hold teams accountable for following through on its hiring recommendations.

Manfred later told the New York Times that the league would look at the rule, noting that he tried to get a commitment from teams that hired interim managers to conduct a full search after the season ends. (Although bench coach Dave Roberts served briefly as interim manager for the San Diego Padres this season, he has not interviewed for the full-time position. He’s reportedly a finalist to replace McClendon in Seattle, however.)

Baseball’s diversity problems go beyond the manager’s seat, of course. For the last three decades, the percentage of African Americans in the big leagues has declined (though that figure has remained relatively flat at 8.3 percent in the last five years, leaving a pinch of hope). And while the Selig Rule was intended to surface more minority candidates for front-office positions, a mere 13 percent of general managers are people of color.

Major League Baseball will continue touting its international pipeline and its efforts to bring the sport back to kids in America’s inner cities. But for now, managers of color may continue to feel, as McClendon told the New York Times in July, “like you’re sitting on an island by yourself.”

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The Color Line Baseball Doesn’t Want to Talk About

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This Deadly Hurricane Is the Strongest Ever in Our Hemisphere

by Myrna Posted on October 23, 2015

Hurricane Patricia will make landfall today. The strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere is barreling toward Mexico’s Pacific coast, where it is expected to make landfall later Friday. According to the National Hurricane Center (NHC), Hurricane Patricia now has maximum sustained wind speeds near 200 miles per hour and even higher wind gusts. That makes it a Category 5 storm—the highest rating on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale. Hurricane warnings are currently in effect for much of the Mexican states of Nayarit, Colima, and Jalisco, including the resort city of Puerto Vallarta, whose metropolitan area is home to 380,000 people. Tens of thousands of people are being evacuated, according to the Vallarta Daily. National Hurricane Center Category 5 hurricanes are terrifying. According to the NHC, during a typical storm of this strength, “a high percentage of framed homes will be destroyed, with total roof failure and wall collapse. Fallen trees and power poles will isolate residential areas. Power outages will last for weeks to possibly months. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months.” The NHC is predicting that Patricia will make a “catastrophic landfall,” dumping up to 20 inches of rain in some areas, which will likely result in “life-threatening” flash floods and mud slides. There will also be an “extremely dangerous” storm surge that will cause substantial coastal flooding “accompanied by large and destructive waves.” The remnants of the storm could even help produce heavy rainfall along the Texas coast in a few days. Hurricane Patricia’s incredible power may be part of a disturbing pattern. As Chris Mooney reported for Climate Desk a couple years ago, a number of the world’s major hurricane basins have set (or have arguably set) new hurricane intensity records since the year 2000. Just yesterday, #Patricia was a tropical storm. Now it’s the strongest hurricane in E Pacific history. A reminder of our weird new normal. — Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) October 23, 2015 See the original article here: This Deadly Hurricane Is the Strongest Ever in Our Hemisphere ; ; ;

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This Deadly Hurricane Is the Strongest Ever in Our Hemisphere

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Can Paul Ryan Save the GOP From Itself—and Save Himself From the GOP?

by ByronLandreneau Posted on October 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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House Republicans are currently grappling with a fundamental philosophical question: What happens when an ungovernable group must elect a new leader?

A month after Speaker John Boehner announced his plan to resign, the Republican majority in the House has been unable to find a replacement for him. Boehner’s deputy, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), was the favorite to succeed Boehner, but he was forced to step aside amid opposition from the caucus’ most conservative members. McCarthy’s exit left the party in chaos and led to calls for Paul Ryan to become the next speaker. On Tuesday, the Wisconsin Republican told his caucus he would consider taking the job, signaling that an end to the party’s leadership crisis might finally be near. Ryan, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012, has credibility in both moderate and conservative circles.

But there’s a catch. Ryan will take the job only if every caucus in his party—including the right-wing 40-member Freedom Caucus that helped force Boehner out of office—unites behind him. In short, the Republican Party has to promise to be governable. And the hardliners have to promise to stop being such hardliners. It’s a tall order—and Ryan wants an answer by Friday.

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Can Paul Ryan Save the GOP From Itself—and Save Himself From the GOP?

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Jim Webb Is Considering Running as an Independent

by Steven Posted on October 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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The race for the Democratic nomination may have already claimed its first victim—sort of. Jim Webb’s campaign announced on Monday evening that the former Virginia senator will hold a press conference tomorrow—probably—to discuss “his candidacy, the campaign and his views of the political parties in the current election cycle.” According to Webb’s campaign, he’s considering a run as an independent.

Webb’s lukewarm views on the Democrats aren’t much of a secret. Though he ran for Senate as a Democrat, he’s a former Republican who served in the Reagan administration. At last week’s debate, he said he ran for president as a Democrat because it’s “the party that gives people who otherwise have no voice in the corridors of power a voice.” But for him, America’s truly voiceless people are poor rural whites like his own family. That means he clashes with the party’s mainstream over major issues like gun control, affirmative action, and environmental regulation. Neither his views on those issues nor his frequent demands for more speaking time went over particularly well at the debate.

Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, a longtime advisor and friend of Webb, says Webb’s sometimes petulant debate performance was likely the “culmination” of the candidate’s anger at being sidelined by the party. “I think the frustration that Jim showed on the stage the other night, I think it had built up over a long time,” says Saunders, who’s not playing a role in Webb’s presidential campaign. But he also casts an independent run as a matter of Webb’s principles. “‘Duty, honor, country’ is what it’s about it, and he thinks this is the best thing for him to do.”

But if running as an independent gives Webb more freedom to say what he likes, there’s no evidence he’ll be able to do much with that freedom. Webb has no campaign offices in Iowa or New Hampshire, raised the second least of any active presidential candidate during the last quarter (we’re not counting barely-there former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore for these purposes), and is still polling at only 1 percent after the debate last week.

“Jim’s no dummy,” Saunders says. “He know’s it going to be tough, I’m sure.”

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Jim Webb Is Considering Running as an Independent

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The GOP’s Problems Go Way Deeper Than the Speaker Mess

by Lenore55Fuug Posted on October 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hudson Christie

Has any piece of legislation in American history held on by its fingertips more dramatically than the Affordable Care Act? Let’s review the tape.

In 2009, it passed in the Senate by a margin of zero votes. In 2010, thanks to some fancy parliamentary maneuvering, it survived the loss of the Democrats’ filibuster-­proof majority after Sen. Ted Kennedy’s death. In 2012, it squeaked through a Supreme Court challenge after Chief Justice John Roberts reportedly changed his vote at the last minute. It hung on again later that year when President Barack Obama won reelection. In 2013 came the disastrous rollout of its website, and in 2015, yet another unsuccessful Supreme Court challenge. And along the way it outlasted more than 50 attempts by congressional Republicans to repeal all or part of it.

For six years, Obamacare has been the ultimate Republican punching bag. It helped win the party a landslide victory in the 2010 midterms. Repealing it has consistently been an applause line for conservative politicians. And even now that it’s up and running pretty successfully, poll after poll shows at least 40 percent of the public still disapproves of it.

All this means that Obamacare should be a killer issue for Republicans in 2016. It’s fragile, it’s unpopular, it’s hated by the base, and this is their last realistic chance to repeal it. If they don’t take the presidency and both houses of Congress next year, they’ll have to wait until 2020 for another opportunity. By that time, the law will have been in place for a decade, and it will be covering upward of 20-25 million people. While that might not be enough to make it as beloved as Social Security or Medicare, it’s certainly enough to make it politically unassailable. Conservatives have been warning for years that if Obamacare doesn’t get repealed this instant, it will soon be too late. This time they’re finally right.

And yet, so far the issue has been oddly MIA in the Republican primary. Chants of “repeal and replace” are still around, but they have a distinctly pro forma ring to them. Obamacare was barely mentioned in the first two Republican debates, eclipsed by Donald Trump, border walls, and ISIS. And even if a Republican wins the White House next fall, conservative health care wonks have nearly given up on enacting anything more than a partial rollback of the law.

So what happened? What killed off the frenzied demands to destroy Obama’s signature achievement?

The most obvious answer is that conservatives have been whipping up outrage about the law for so long that even its most ardent haters are exhausted. What’s more, it’s much harder to take away a benefit that lots of people are actually relying on than to repeal a theoretical one.

But Obamacare’s foes running out of steam is just the most obvious sign of a larger trend: A lot of traditional conservative issues are losing their momentum. Gay marriage lost its fear factor years ago and was taken off the table once and for all by the Supreme Court in June. The economy is probably in good enough shape to not be a big campaign issue. Taxes have already been lowered so much that the average family pays only about 5 percent of its earnings to the IRS. And 14 years after 9/11 and four years after Osama bin Laden’s death, accusing liberals of being spineless on terrorism no longer packs the same punch.

True, Republicans still have a short list of hot-button topics that inflame their base, but increasingly these are wedge issues that promise nearly as much downside as upside. Immigration is the most visible example. Hysteria over border walls, birthright citizenship, and anchor babies risks losing Hispanics to the Democratic Party for good—something the GOP can ill afford. And the problems go far beyond immigration. Republican voters aren’t sold on the idea of Iraq War 2.0, and as a result even the most hawkish candidates are unwilling to propose sending more than a few thousand troops to fight ISIS. Even abortion runs the risk of becoming a wedge issue for the party as activists demand that candidates take extreme positions such as opposing exceptions for rape, incest, or the life and health of the mother—even though these are popular among most Republican voters.

This is the point at which liberals are supposed to sneer that the GOP is now the party of no new ideas. But that’s not really fair. The difference between the two parties isn’t so much one of ideas, but of unity behind those ideas. Thirty years ago, Democrats were the ones torn apart by wedge issues: affirmative action, crime, abortion, taxes. These tensions haven’t gone away completely—just look at Black Lives Matter activists heckling Sen. Bernie Sanders over the summer—but they no longer dominate the party. Now the tables have turned. A recent survey showed that nearly half of Democrats agreed with their party’s core position on at least six of seven major issues. Only a quarter of Republicans were in such broad agreement with their party. And the discord is coming at the worst possible time, just as long-term demographics are starting to seriously eat into their base.

Millennials, the most socially liberal generation ever, are increasing their share of the electorate as more conservative cohorts die off. And every year, the racial minority share of the population rises by 0.4 percent. The net result is simple: Every four years, roughly 2 percent of the population leans further left. It’s a slow enough process that Republicans can still win presidential elections, but in a 50-50 nation even small changes in support are enough to make these wins more difficult. Gerrymandering and incumbency effects may keep Republicans in partial control of Congress for a while longer, but the presidency is slipping out of their reach.

There are no obvious solutions. If Republicans move to the center—as Democrats did in the ’80s—they risk losing the support of their base. If they move to the right, they lose moderates and independents. Arthur Brooks, president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, acknowledged this conundrum recently when he told the Washington Post that “Republicans need to recognize this and change the terms of the conversation—or they’ll pay the price for decades.”

Every party faces conflict between its center and its base, but the emergence of the tea party and the Fox News echo chamber has put this dynamic on steroids. Moving even to the moderate right, let alone to the center, is all but impossible for the GOP. Its base demands not just a border fence, but the repeal of the 14th Amendment; not just opposition to gun control, but rejection of universal background checks, which even the National Rifle Association used to support; not just skepticism about climate change, but insistence that global warming is a grand hoax perpetrated by liberals to subvert the free market. This conflict between party and base entered uncharted territory earlier this month when Republicans literally couldn’t find a single plausible candidate willing to be Speaker of the House. No one wanted to deal with the bomb-throwing antics of the reactionary wing of their own party. Even candidates who consider themselves tea partiers didn’t think they could control a caucus dominated by tea partiers. Among Republicans, becoming Speaker is now considered a career death sentence.

It’s hard to see any way out of this. If Republican candidates appeal to nativism, they lose the Hispanic vote. If they appeal to social conservatives, they lose the millennial vote. If they appeal to older white voters, they energize black voters and do the Democrats’ grassroots organizing for them. And if they throw up their hands and rely on endless hysteria about Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s email server, the tea partiers will turn out in droves but they lose everyone else. In an era when the inmates are running the asylum, it’s not just Obamacare bashing that’s become a double-edged sword for Republicans. It’s nearly everything they’ve relied on for the past three decades.

Increasingly, this is the GOP’s true dilemma. It’s not the party of no ideas; it’s the party of no escape.

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The GOP’s Problems Go Way Deeper Than the Speaker Mess

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This Devastating Chart Shows Why Even a Powerful El Niño Won’t Fix the Drought

by ThelmaPenman Posted on October 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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In California, news of a historically powerful El Niño oceanic warming event is stoking hopes that winter rains will ease the state’s brutal drought. But for farmers in the Central Valley, one of the globe’s most productive agricultural regions, water troubles go much deeper—literally—than the current lack of precipitation.

That’s the message of an eye-popping report from researchers at the US Geological Survey. This chart tells the story:

USGS

To understand it, note that in the arid Central Valley, farmers get water to irrigate their crops in two ways. The first is through massive, government-built projects that deliver melted snow from the Sierra Nevada mountains. The second is by digging wells into the ground and pumping water from the region’s ancient aquifers. In theory, the aquifer water serves as a buffer—it keeps farming humming when (as has happened the last three years) the winter snows don’t come. When the snows return, the theory goes, irrigation water flows anew through canals, and the aquifers are allowed to refill.

But as the chart shows, the Central Valley’s underground water reserves are in a state of decline that predates the current drought by decades. The red line shows the change in underground water storage since the early 1960s; the green bars show how much water entered the Central Valley each year through the irrigation projects. Note how both vary during “wet” and “dry” times.

As you’d expect, underground water storage drops during dry years, as farmers resort to the pump to make up for lost irrigation allotments, and it rises during wet years, when the irrigation projects up their contribution. The problem is, aquifer recharge during wet years never fully replaces all that was taken away during dry times—meaning that the the Central Valley has surrendered a total of 100 cubic kilometers, or 811 million acre-feet, of underground water since 1962. That’s an average of about 1.5 million acre-feet of water annually extracted from finite underground reserves and not replaced by the Central Valley’s farms. By comparison, all of Los Angeles uses about 600,000 acre-feet of water per year. (An acre-foot is the amount needed to cover an acre of land with a foot of water).

The USGS authors note that the region’s farmers have gotten more efficient in their irrigation techniques over the past 20 years—using precisely placed drip tape, for example, instead of old techniques like flooding fields. But that positive step has been more than offset with a factor I’ve discussed many times: “the planting of permanent crops (vineyards and orchards), replacing non-permanent land uses such as rangeland, field crops, or row crops.” This is a reference to the ongoing expansion in acres devoted to almonds and pistachios, highly profitable crops that can’t be fallowed during dry times. To keep them churning out product during drought, orchard farmers revert to the pump.

The major takeaway is that the Valley’s farms can’t maintain business as usual—eventually, the water will run out. No one knows exactly when that point will be, because, as Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at California Institute of Technology, never tires of pointing out, no one has invested in the research required to measure just how much water is left beneath the Central Valley’s farms. Of course, averting this race to the bottom of the well is exactly why the California legislature voted last year to end the state’s wild-west water-drilling free-for-all and enact legislation requiring stressed watersheds like the Central Valley’s to reach “sustainable yield” by 2040. The downward meandering red line in the above graph, in other words, will have to flatten out pretty soon, and to get there, “dramatic changes will need to be made,” the USGS report states.

Meanwhile, one wet El Niño winter won’t do much to end the the decades-in-the-making drawdown of the Central Valley’s water horde. And people pining for heavy rains should be careful what they wish for—parts of the Central Valley, especially its almond-heavy southern regions, are notoriously vulnerable to disastrous flooding. Then there’s the unhappy fact that El Niño periods are often followed by La Niña events—which are associated with dry winters in California. The region could be “whiplashed from deluge back to drought again” in just one year’s time, Bill Patzert, a climatologist for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, recently told the Los Angeles Times. “Because remember, La Niña is the diva of drought,” he said. The last big El Niño ended in 1998, and as the above chart shows, what followed wasn’t pretty.

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This Devastating Chart Shows Why Even a Powerful El Niño Won’t Fix the Drought

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Have You Ever Thought About the Republican Party? I Mean, Really Thought About It?

by LouisGoldstein Posted on October 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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As much as we’ve talked about it, I wonder if we’ve really gotten our heads around the fact that Paul Ryan is literally being begged to be the leader of the Republican Party. He is Literally. Being. Begged. To be the leader of one of America’s two major parties! And he doesn’t want it, no how, no way. Because he knows there’s a substantial faction of his party that’s insane. And who would know better?

I feel like this is one of those things that maybe you can only truly comprehend after a couple of blunts:

Boehner: Dude, have you ever thought about the Republican Party? I mean, really thought about it?

Ryan: I know. I know. It’s, like, insane, man. (Giggles, coughs.) This is good stuff. Medical, right?

Boehner: That’s it! Totally insane. I mean, completely batshit fucked up.

Ryan: But awesome. Insane but still awesome. I mean, seriously, it’s our only defense against, like, total socialism.

Boehner: Oh man, you been reading Atlas Shrugged again? You’re bumming me out, dude.

And while we’re on the subject, I have another idea. As thousands of people have pointed out, nothing in the Constitution says the Speaker has to be a member of Congress. This has spawned a whole cottage industry of jokes. Donald Trump! Bibi Netanyahu! Rush Limbaugh! But I have another idea: does it have to be one person? Here’s the relevant text:

The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers….

Sure, “Speaker” is singular in that sentence, but “Speaker and other Officers” suggests that maybe leadership of the House could be shared. How about a triumvirate, like Rome in its glory days? Ryan could be one, some tea party nutcase could be another, and the third could be, um, Mia Love, who’s a black woman and the daughter of immigrants. I’m not sure how they’d make decisions, but I guess they’d figure out something. Maybe rock paper scissors.

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Have You Ever Thought About the Republican Party? I Mean, Really Thought About It?

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Media disaster reporting can throw a wrench in the way you process disaster risk

by IsidraThynne52 Posted on October 9, 2015

Media disaster reporting can throw a wrench in the way you process disaster risk

By on 9 Oct 2015 4:59 pmcommentsShare

The last time I read about a BASE-jumping accident, I remember thinking to myself, Huh, BASE jumping. I could use a little more adrenaline in my life. Maybe I should give that a shot. And thanks to science, now I can take solace in the fact that this kind of baseless (sorry), idiotic risk-accounting isn’t that rare: A new study in Nature Climate Change suggests that reporting on natural disasters can actually encourage people to move to more dangerous places. Way to go, brains! (Spoiler alert: I still have yet to BASE jump and likely never will — largely because it’s an objectively dumb thing to do — but I did rent a canoe last weekend, which has to count for something.)

Natural disasters have cropped up in the news a lot lately. And for good reason: There are plenty of them out there. To get at the question of how these reports affect people’s risk perceptions, researchers from Australia, the U.K., and Israel designed a psychological experiment that allowed study participants to make decisions about where to live, given fake reports of disaster frequency and location.

Participants were awarded points for living in one of three different villages, with more points awarded for riskier situations — akin to, say, a beachfront home generally being lovely, except for when those pesky hurricanes start wreaking havoc. Lead author Ben Newell explains the experiment over at The Conversation:

One group only found out if their own dwelling was hit, a second group found out if any of the dwellings in their village was hit, and a third group found out if any dwellings in either risky village were affected.

These three groups were designed to mimic information people could get in real life from personal experience, local sources, or from afar via media or authorities.

The key result was that the third group – people given the most information about recently experienced or avoided disasters – took more risks and were more likely to choose regions prone to disasters.

Getting full information about all the villages, as is possible in real life through media and authorities, appeared to reinforce for people that “most of the time nothing bad happens in the risky areas”.

There’s also a good amount of empirical evidence out there for this kind of effect. Newell cites a study suggesting that new home buyers after the Loma Prieta earthquake “reduced their assessment of risk as information concerning the location and rate of earthquakes” was released. “A similar pattern was found following the Tohoku tsunami of 2011, with unaffected residents exhibiting lowered risk perception about the heights of waves warranting evacuation,” he writes.

Anecdotally, there’s also the fact that here in the Seattle Grist office, we chose to laugh off the news of impending Pacific Northwest earthquake doom, hunker down at our standing desks, and order another round of doughnuts instead. (To be fair, there’s a pretty great doughnut place across the street.)

Part of what’s going on here is that people are generally just kind of awful at estimating risk. Probabilities mean different things for different people, and we rarely take time into account when assessing these probabilities, anyway. The field of behavioral economics is rife with examples of poor risk accounting. Low probabilities, in particular, are usually overestimated. There’s also that tricky gut feeling that says, “Oh, that will never happen to me.”

“Statements often seen in the media such as a ‘one-in-50 or one-in-100-year’ event could lead people to assume, incorrectly, that there won’t be another event for 49 or 99 years,” writes Newell. “This perception is compounded by their typical daily experience of nothing bad happening.”

The solution? “Risk messages need instead to focus on the accumulation of events and the increase in their associated risks across time,” writes Newell. “For example, people should be reminded how many major floods or severe fire days occurred between specific points in time – such as ‘four events between 1900 and 1949,’ or ‘ten events between 1950 and 2000.’”

Of course, we could also just try to develop the common sense not to move to disaster areas. And if that’s too much to ask — which seems likely — the least we could do is invest in real risk management. That means actually implementing tsunami preparation advice, demanding that buildings are up to the latest earthquake codes, and using sound landscaping techniques and maximizing defensible space in the event of wildfires. For many of us, climate change is already here. We ought to be ready for its effects.

Source:

Disaster reporting may encourage people to live in riskier places

, The Conversation.

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Media disaster reporting can throw a wrench in the way you process disaster risk

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