Risk management -- Reduce, avoid, transfer, accept and budget
"Unfinished business" study -- Question -- How striking is this contrast, really?
Journalists and risk
John D. Graham -- Harnessing Science for Environmental Regulation -- "Science plays an essential role ... [but] the norms of science can obstruct regulatory progress and threaten some of our cherished democratic values..."
Risk communication - Slovic and Fischoff / risk heuristics (outrage factors )
How journalists can better report on risk
How great was exposure ?
How likely was exposure and what safety measures in place?
Daniel Gilbert, "If only gay sex cauased global warming" -- NO ONE seems to care about the upcoming attack on the World Trade Center site. Why? Because it won’t involve villains with box cutters. Instead, it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium.
The odds of this happening in the next few decades are better than the odds that a disgruntled Saudi will sneak onto an airplane and detonate a shoe bomb. And yet our government will spend billions of dollars this year to prevent global terrorism and
Why are we less worried about the more likely disaster? Because the human brain evolved to respond to threats that have four features – features that terrorism has and that global warming lacks.
And some common sense on DDT by Sonia Shah -- Not one month after DDT's launch in the consumer market in September 1947, experts were calling DDT "injurious to birds," according to the New York Times. "Experts warn new insecticide also may be fatal to fish--further tests urged," the Times headline read. USDA scientists were urging Congress to ban DDT use on dairy animals by May 1947.
Nothing But Nets is a grassroots campaign to save lives by preventing malaria, a leading killer of children in Africa. While the UN Foundation has been working with the UN to fight malaria for years, it was a column that Rick Reilly wrote about malaria in Sports Illustrated, challenging each of his readers to donate at least $10 for the purchase of an anti-malaria bed nets -- and the incredible response from thousands of Americans across the country -- that led to the creation the Nothing But Nets campaign. http://www.nothingbutnets.net/
On Assessing Chemical Risks
Arsenic (generic issue)
13 mm high risk, 58 mm moderate risk
Dw Standard 50 ppb (est 1942)
NAS study 50 ppb lifetime, 1 in 100 cancer risk
Usually no more than one in 10,000 risk factor
500 ppm (.5 ppb) 1 in 10,000
DNT at Radford Arsenal
Spike (1992) 1,200 ug/L 1 in 100 (dw) or 1 in 1,100 (fish)
Dw Standard 1.1 ug/L 1 in 100,000 *(better 1 in 1,000,000)
Fish standard 91 ug/L 1 in 100,000
Accute immediate toxicity fish 330 ug/L
Chronic (long term) 230 ug/L
Effluent 1.3 million gallons per day. Diluted in river by 900 million gallons, we still have 1,200 ug/L. River at 10 year low concentration 3x
I think one of the biggest challenges of our current struggles with tackling climate change and global warming is that the risk associated to humanity is too far sighted. To enact policy we need political pressure. To gain political pressure we need educated civic participants. To engage civic participants we need people who care about what will happen if we don’t act. In order for this, we need environmental journalists and media to take this initiative and try to start framing these issues in to how they affect people personally. Relating to family values (we are doing these things so that our children and family lines can live on with the luxuries that we do), or people’s wallets (look how much money you can save if you invest now in energy efficient appliances!) seem to be effective approaches.
One interesting response I’ve found from journalists to yesterday’s lack of federal government bail out is that this provides room for investments in the green economy which could provide 2 times more jobs than the bailout could ever save (arguable of course). Maybe now the urgency is starting to hit home for folks and now that government is failing to act one way, might set stones for people to pressure alternative bailout plans or strategies to save our economy. I would love to see media jumping on this and framing the risk in that people will lose their jobs and lives without pushing for another option such as investment in a green economy now!
The portion of the chapter criticizing the press for its focus on the “bizarre, mysterious, that which people have difficulty imagining happening…” (p.46) is an important point to make. Broadcast media (and now, “Narrowcast Media”—which referrs to channels, like C-SPAN or ESPN, that focus on a narrow particular interest and appeal to varying sets of values, FOX, ehem) has largely displaced print media, further impoverishing peoples knowledge on issues. By reading just one page of the paper you would be more informed than watching a week of the evening news. This is clearly because there are thousands of words on every single page of the paper (minus ads) vs. a relatively few messages on TV which are repeated over and over.
The “pressure pushed both on reporters and editors” is in large part due to the private nature of our television companies. Since TV networks are private businesses, they must remain “competitive.” Needless to say, there are pressures of another kind on journalists and editors under communist regimes. Nonetheless, if its entertainment rather than long term trends and developments that get stations the higher ratings they need to surive, then that’s what will be served on TV in America tonight for dinner....
--DEANA
This is a good point. Just to add to it, there are more than two models for a public information system. BBC, PBS and some of the Scandanavian countries have publicly funded independent news organizations that are somewhat more free from both commercial and governmental pressures.
Its an ongoing project for communication theorists to come up with new business models for public service information systems.
I think the most interesting part of this chapter was about journalists and risk. James Bruggers said "I don't think there is anything wrong with scaring the public, as long as there is a good reason to do so." I think that this is the wrong type of metality for a journalist to have. The news is used to inform the public not to scare them. People read the newspaper because of the conflict, human interest, prominence,proximity, relevance and timeliness (p.47) These are significant because the people skip through parts of the news that bore them or they do not find relevant to their lives. I think that the news should be used to take risks with what should and should not be said. I think that all news can be said in a dignified way without having to push peoples buttons and denounce others. All media should have the chance to report on facts without making a large stir or controversy with the citizens that read, hear or watch the news. Journalists should take risks and leaps of faith, but they have to remember that with risks sometimes comes false information and libel suits.
Atomic.lab.risk.pdf
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