文档介绍：Catastrophe:
Risk and Response
RICHARD A. POSNER
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
CATASTROPHE
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CATASTROPHE
RISK AND RESPONSE
RICHARD A. POSNER
1
2004
1
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Posner, Richard A.
Catastrophe : risk and response / by Richard A. Posner.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-19-517813-0
1. Emergency management. 2. Disasters. 3. Risk assessment. 4. Technological
innovations—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title.
2004
—dc22 2004009728
135798642
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Preface
Certain events quite within the realm of possibility, such as a major as-
teroid collision, global bioterrorism, abrupt global warming—even cer-
tain lab accidents—could have unimaginably terrible consequences up
to and including the extinction of the human race, possibly within the
near future. The scientific and popular literature dealing with possible
megacatastrophes is vast. But law and the social sciences, with the par-
tial exception of economics—there is an extensive economic literature
on global warming—have paid little attention to such possibilities.
This seems to me regrettable. I am not a Green, an alarmist, an apoca-
lyptic vision