First 2 more paragraphs from the OP link:
But risks increase as the environment changes: some coastal cities are subsiding; sea levels are slowly but surely rising as the oceans warm and the glaciers melt; and for two decades researchers have repeatedly warned that what used to be “extreme” events such as once-in-a-century floods are likely to arrive considerably more often than once a century.
But as disaster professionals have learned again and again, governments, city authorities, investors and even citizens tend not to listen to prophecies of doom: scientists and engineers repeatedly described what could happen to New Orleans if it was hit by a powerful-enough hurricane, and in 2005, as Hurricane Katrina arrived, the levees gave way, with catastrophic results.
And this excellent comment on the OP link from Marian Griffith, discussing Cassandra versus the short term profiteers & politicians only looking ahead to their next election.
First nobody ever listened to Cassandra either, so why should scientists warning of impending disaster expect to be treated any differently?
Second, any warning that is about something more than 3 months in the future is summarily dismissed as it does not affect the next quarterly report (and thus income of the people in a position to actually do anything about it). For politicians this planning horizon tends to count down for about two years until the next reelection campaign is up (and television news is trying really awfully hard to start the next election cycle before the previous is even finished, effectively turning the planning horizon of politicians to zero days: anything that is going to happen in the future is ignored because suggesting to spend money on a problem would negatively impact the next election regardless of how many years in the future that actually is).
Ok, so a third comment applies as well: too many people are numerically illiterate and operate their calculations on a daily bases using the age old 'one two three many' method of numbers. Anything that involves bigger figures than the number of fingers causes their brains to freeze until the scary numbers have gone away again. Almost nobody has an innate understanding of the difference between a thousand, a million, a billion or a trillion and they all understand those are 'really big numbers that have no bearing on me'. When people talk about three hundred thousand they really are thinking about three hundred because that kind of amount they still have some visceral grasp of, but the factor thousand kind of gets glossed over. Same as people tend to 'feel' that a tenth of a million is much less than a hundred thousand. It also is why people are blase about banks being bailed out for a trillion dollars but would be much more upseet to learn that they received a thousand billion dollars.
And finally, to make a mockery of the initial claim of two points, people typically are really really bad with estimating chances and risks. We all tend to confuse the severity of the danger for the chance of it happening (which is part of the reason why people tend to be afraid of flying but not of driving a car). And unless we can apply the consequences to ourselves we tend to not see much of a risk. The politicians and rich who run the country (or a city of state) tend not to live in the potential 'ground zero' of a disaster and as such have a lot more difficulty with understanding the actual risks for -other- people. So what if the low lying areas of New Orleans flood? That is where the poor live anyway. Same with New York. Not much grasp of the risks that the coastal communities are running. Lower Manhattan flooding is inconvenient so something gets done about that, but for the rest? The risk does not 'click' to actual people being economically devastated or killed because it is not 'us' that is at risk.
= new reply since forum marked as read