An Accidental Anthropocene
By William R Travis
An Accidental AnthropoceneDec 13, 2020
Welcome to the accidental anthropocene
These podcasts consider risks and surprises that await us in the Anthropocene era as human systems and natural systems interact in novel ways. I'm Bill Travis, I teach hazards and risk analysis at the University of Colorado--Boulder, studying how people make decisions under uncertainty. In my classes we take lessons from the big and the small: failure of the hurricane protection system around New Orleans in 2005, meltdown of nuclear reactors at Fukushima after the 2001 tsunami, and the decision made by individuals, a rancher facing drought and deciding whether to buy extra feed for the herd or a county road engineer coping with increasing culvert washouts as intense rainfall events become more frequent. And we apply these lessons to future challenges and opportunities in a changing global environment.
#expandingbullseye: Growing exposure to hazards in the US
Losses from hazards like earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and wildfires are growing in the US even as we know more than ever about where and when such extreme events will occur. In our poster at the 2020 American Geophysical Union meeting, colleagues and I track the rate of development in the riskiest places, finding 57% of some 90 million structures (homes, offices, schools, etc.) in hazard hotspots, which only cover 31% of the contiguous U.S. This accidental convergence into hazards zones presages more losses to come, especially as climate change worsens hurricanes and wildfires.See the poster at: https://agu2020fallmeeting-agu.ipostersessions.com/default.aspx?s=AB-67-80-AC-31-46-DE-0D-CB-51-ED-DF-E0-68-71-5F
What is the true probability of system failure?
We use the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger and crew and explore the problem is assessing the risk of failure in complex systems, including decision making about those systems..
Forecasting uncertainty
In this episode we'll use the science of hurricane track forecasting to explore the big challenges of predicting extreme events, and making decisions using those predictions. We'll grapple with the iron law for forecasting: that accuracy and lead-time are inversely related.