Even if scientists could agree on the contribution of global warming to the rising frequency of such disasters, it would still be hard to classify the causes of any given catastrophe.
Later, in a van on the road to Erbil, I asked Makiya what — given the catastrophe, given the impossibility of doing it over — could be done.
It is possible that given a catastrophe, people will independently invent these solutions.
If there were an international plan for how efforts could be coordinated to ramp up alternate foods given a catastrophe, the probability of success is expected to increase significantly.
The stakes may be unprecedented, given the potential catastrophes we may be unleashing, but the choice of greed over caring for the greater good would fit a well-established pattern.
And given those clear catastrophes dating back at least to Cambyses' Lost Army in 500 BC, not to mention the Roman Empire's adventures in Judea, one might think that before we launch a new war in that part of the world -- in this case Libya -- we as a nation would have a long, serious conversation about it.
Could Aum again develop the potential to give this catastrophe a nudge?
Yet the Senate wants to give this catastrophe of a company $11.6 billion in taxpayer dollars.
And thankfully, the same horrifying tactics that gave us Catastrophe Iraq! are on full display yet again, for fun.
Diski the essayist tells us that the "God-given catastrophes in her life" were mostly her fault, while the novelist bookends the whole with grisly scenes from Marie's Parisian garret of death-bed impoverishment in extreme old age.
In Appendix S1 we extend the model to allow catastrophes to strike at random times, with average waiting time until catastrophe given by the parameter T̅, which recovers the same qualitative results.
