And, though you say many things in your post that are great, within your comments, this: “What good does such a scale do besides place a false sense of human control and constraints on something much, much larger than us?” was brilliant. Though you stated it within the context of earthquake impact (social and geophysical) measures, it actually applies to so many measures. What is most interesting to me about the way we measure things is that they often go more in line with our socio-political leanings than with scientific ones. What makes sense to measure, how to measure it, and how to analyze that measure is perhaps best understood through a socio-political lens (i.e. what makes sense to us) versus what is scientifically supported. So when you say that measures place a ‘false sense of human control’ — yes, but they also can create human control, because those measures are the same things that trigger response.

Anyway, well said and very much enjoyed.

All of Popular Science’s archives online for free. Going ALL the way back. Jet packs and flying subs galore!

Science explains realities and provides guidelines, but scientists are not necessarily good implementers. Idea implementation requires technologists, logisticians and communicators – these folks can have any degree or no formal education at all, as long as they fully understand what’s going on and Get Things Done.

Peace,

Tim

When you consider an earthquake’s Mercalli intensity (damage it caused) versus its Richter magnitude (number measured using seismographs), you are looking at a qualitative assessment versus a quantitative one. But again, that Mercalli intensity number is still very scientific in that it simply looks at damage and puts a number on it, much like an insurance adjuster. That said, I almost asked in the post if someone had gone beyond Richter and Mercalli to create a new intensity scale which considered variables such as soil type and building height and density, and also sociological factors, e.g. whether buildings were built to code, presence of emergency response measures and overall level of development. To answer your question, I don’t know if such a field exists, but I also don’t want to know.

What good does such a scale do besides place a false sense of human control and constraints on something much, much larger than us? Chile is better-developed and is a democracy of sorts, so suffered much less destruction and will bounce back quicker from a higher-magnitude earthquake than poor, post-colonial, dictator-run Haiti? Do we need “seismic sociology” to see that? Additionally, Chile has geologic and geographic mitigating factors like stronger bedrock and a spread-out population and, yet, we still don’t know the actual death toll because of downed communication lines, and how will they recover in these crappy economic times? On the other side of the world, China develops at a rapid pace but with very low quality of construction, hence buildings that topple at the slightest tremor and river dams that are ripe for collapse. To bring it back home, my house is a fraking fortress (exactly because it was not built by a developer, ha!) – should I put this datum on a graph and demand a cookie for it? But, should a whopper of a midwestern tornado come along, I am screwed because such is the nature of living where atmosphere and earth meet.

All this is to say: When a big one kicks the demography, high income level and vital democratic institutions of, say, sits-on-pudding San Francisco, in the rear, social science’s intersecting graphs are immediately null and void. Have we learned nothing from the “response” of our democratic institution after Katrina and during the Flood? Yes, science can, does and should help the public and governments make informed policy decisions, but I am very uncomfortable with it being dragged into half-baked pet social-Darwinian theories that do not consider all factors and possibilities and are ultimately useless.

Their time would be better spent coming to terms with the fact that rich, poor, black, white live at the mercy of the earth and that development should not entail just money and quantity of stuff but money earned and spent responsibly and the quality of stuff.