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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

Misunderstanding risk

Americans overreact to Ebola threat, while ignoring far greater dangers

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The inability of Americans to understand relative risk is a danger in itself. Take the overblown threat posed by Ebola, which is already having economic repercussions right here in the North Country.

One local outfitter recently told us he had already seen two cancellations for winter excursions in the Ely area because the people involved were afraid of contracting Ebola on the flight up.

Never mind that the people involved were far more likely to die driving to the airport, flying on the plane, or from any of thousands of other potential illnesses or accidents that could strike them along the way. They were, statistically speaking, at least as likely to die on their dogsled trip of a grizzly bear attack. That’s not to suggest there are any grizzlies around here (there aren’t)— it’s just to point out that their risk of contracting Ebola on their trip to Ely is so close to zero that it’s at the same statistical level as a grizzly rampaging through the northwoods, in winter. And certainly no more of a risk than, for example, alien abduction from the frozen surface of Knife Lake.

Unfortunately, for most Americans, reality is what they see on television or read on the Internet, and both sources have been hyping the Ebola threat for weeks now. And for all the hype, the current death toll of people who contracted Ebola in the U.S. is exactly… zero.

This is not meant to suggest that Ebola can be ignored. But Americans need to put the threat in perspective. If you’re not traveling to one of the handful of African countries where Ebola is now epidemic, and you aren’t planning to touch the bodily fluids of active Ebola patients in those countries, your risk of contracting Ebola is, essentially, zip. Anyone cancelling or re-thinking travel plans anywhere in North America over fears of Ebola is badly in need of a statistics refresher.

There are things, of course, that Americas should worry about— yet studiously ignore. Two weeks ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its latest synthesis report summarizing a vast amount of scientific research on the causes and impacts of climate change. Their bottom line was unequivocal. “Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent [human-caused] emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history. Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on humans and natural systems. Warming of the climate system is unequivocal and many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and sea level has risen.”

The IPCC notes that many of the changes are now irreversible and that the situation will only continue to worsen without major steps to reduce emissions of CO2 and other heat-trapping gases. We realize that it’s been cold this week in the Upper Midwest, which the ever-shrinking number of unserious people who still deny the reality of climate change will undoubtedly point out. But 2014 is currently on track to surpass 2010 as the warmest year in global history. And it’s not a fluke. The top-ten-warmest-years globally have all been recorded within just the past 16 years. It’s an unmistakable signature of global warming, which is why the IPCC report’s conclusions are backed by approximately 97 percent of climate scientists around the world.

Yet while Americans are vastly overreacting to a threat that they currently have a zero-in-350-million chance of experiencing, they respond to a threat that 97 percent of knowledgeable scientists say will have catastrophic, society-threatening consequences within mere decades, with a collective shrug. And, on Election Day, by putting climate change-denying Republicans in charge of every environmental committee of Congress. It’s like putting ISIS in charge of America’s national security.

This is an example of the dangers of ignorance and of the current backlash from many Americans, particularly among conservatives, to the very concept of science and knowledge. There has always been a strong strain of anti-intellectualism in the U.S., which is one reason that we are among Liberia and Myanmar as the only three countries in the world that have yet to adopt the metric system.

But ignorance about risk has its consequences. When we, as a country, can’t tell the real dangers from the imaginary ones, we’re less likely to take the steps needed to address actual threats, while we spend too much time and resources worrying about the small stuff. And when issues like Ebola become politicized and used to fear-monger, as happened in this fall’s campaign, it makes a bad situation worse.

As tough as it is to do amidst the constant distractions of the daily news, it is more important than ever that Americans consider the real risks we face— because they are real, and because we don’t, at least at present, seem to notice or care.