People love to live in places that are at risk for disasters, ‘and this is what happens’
By Joel Achenbach and Mark Berman
There are more people and property vulnerable to natural forces. And climate change doesn’t help. Scientists know that global warming does not create a specific hurricane or a wildfire, but climate change, which has been driven significantly by the burning of fossil fuels, primes the pump for extreme weather.
A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture and produce heavier deluges. On a hotter planet, droughts can be, and have been, more severe. Coastal flooding gets worse as seas rise.
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“Most of us evaluate risk based on our gut feelings,” said Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon. When we rank potential threats, “natural hazards tend to be relatively low considering the amount of damage that they pose and their frequency.”
Disasters such as wildfires, hurricanes and floods have been around forever, so we’re familiar with them, he said. People tend to be worried about new, unfamiliar threats, he said — such as terrorism and the kind of mass shooting that took scores of lives in Las Vegas.
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