Simple Pump hand well water pump, motorized, solar.Being prepared is NOT fringe behavior. Here's why...Is Heightened Concern about Preparedness a Sign of Being on the Lunatic Fringe?NO IT ISN'T — and here’s why...
If the consensus of experts is that water supply disruption risks are stable or going down, but you think they are going up, you would be part of a lunatic fringe. But that’s not what the experts are thinking. “Stationarity is Dead”“Stationarity” is the assumption that, statistically speaking, the future looks like the past. It can apply to any prediction about the future -- for hydrologists, it means their models for precipitation, runoff, or other flows in the hydrologic cycle. Hydrologists are the experts on water supply risk. They have the unenviable job of planning for the future of our water supply. Their forecasts play a major role in the decision-making about everything from dams to agricultural investments. A few years ago, a prominent hydrologist proclaimed, “Stationarity is dead!” If this is true, then heightened concern about the future of our water supplies is NOT the thinking of any lunatic fringe. For example, stationarity says that the average annual rainfall for the next 50 years, and how much it varies from year to year, will hold to the patterns of the last 50 years. Planning is much easier when this assumption is valid. If stationarity is a valid assumption, then, if there is enough data for the last 50 years, the size of dams needed, to take one example, can be predicted with a high degree of confidence. Hydrologists have known since they first started using stationarity as an assumption in their models (in the 1950s) that human activity ensured that the future would be different from the past. However, in their models, they could account for measurable factors, like changes in runoff due to increased development. However, prominent hydrologists say that climate change is rendering stationarity invalid, in a way that cannot be accurately adjusted in their models. So a completely different approach to forecasting water needs must be found. The Problem Goes Beyond Water SupplyStationarity is a bedrock assumption in planning models, in everything from building codes to home insurance. Making matters worse is something that has always been a problem with predicting the future from the past — we have data for only a few past decades. Huge floods up and down much of the Mississippi are happening far more frequently than models assuming stationarity predicted. But the levies, canals and gates build by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were all designed based on such models. Is this really a problem? A big Problem?The U.S. is the only industrialized nation where the fact of climate change is still questioned. The old saw “I’m from Missouri; show me” speaks to traditional American skepticism. We are, by predisposition, skeptical of any major change in thinking. However, on this issue, we go with the smart money. Investor Vinod Kholsa and Google have invested millions into a new breed of insurance company, Weatherbill, They push the edges of software technology to address the increasing need to insure farmers against crop loss, because of more erratic weather. In other words, TRADITIONAL RISK ASSESSMENT (i.e., underwriting) NO LONGER WORKS. Only with new technology can insurance companies responsibly insure crops against bad weather. This is millions of dollars of investment taking as a given the fact that our old models will fail us, and new ones created. In the meantime, all of us should be mindful that we are living in a more unpredictable world. Until companies like Weatherbill figure out how to make accurate predictions, the answer to a lot of questions concerning risk from failing infrastructure is: WE DON’T KNOW! The uncertainty of not knowing what will happen is the very definition of risk. Since the one thing we know is that we know a lot less about what is going to happen, we need to plan accordingly.
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