Location changes based on climate: cascade effect
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/science/on-a-warmer-planet-which-cities-will-be-safest.html
This article discusses the climate changes occurring in today’s society. This article claims that the West Coast and the Southwest are filled with droughts and wildfires, which the East Coast and the Southeast are filled with heat waves, hurricanes and rising sea levels. The question becomes, if all of these locations are filled with extreme weather conditions, where should all the people go to live? Alaska and Detroit, according to the article. There are very few options for people to live without risk of climate change. By 2050 and 2100, the country will feel completely different due to climate change. As people evaluate where they want to go to live in future years, an information based cascade effect is beginning to take place.
Lets think of Alaska and Detroit as locations A, and the East Coast as locations B. Lets assume that you choose location B based on information about restaurants, healthcare, housing facilities and educational resources. You exclude weather in this decision. However, when you arrive in location B, despite all of these resources, you find out about the heat waves, hurricanes and rising sea levels occurring. You hear there is a large crowd of people who have moved to location A. You assume that this crowd has more information about location A than you do and therefore you decide it might be rational to join the crowd in location A. If we assume that each member of the crowd in location A gathered information about it independently, we can assume that the information from their choices is stronger than your own personal information. You only gathered information about a certain number of resources in location B, but they might have information about even better resources in location A, one of those resources being better climate stability. For this reason, it would make sense for you to join them in location A, despite your personal resources. This is an example of an information cascade. Everyone in location A might have read this article and therefore they know Alaska and Detroit are the best places to live in terms of climate condition. In this information cascade, the decisions occurred “sequentially, with later people watching the actions of earlier people, and from these actions inferring something about what the earlier people know”(Network’s textbook, P. 484). Based on this information cascade, we will see all of the people in location B shift over and move to location A. According to the article, “I predict we’re going to have millions of people moving to those areas [location A]” (Kingson, 2014).