THE SUPREME IMPORTANCE OF GEOLOGICAL THINKING FOR COPING WITH NATURAL HAZARD EVENTS (Invited Presentation)

Recent natural disasters portend immense challenges for dealing with “Black Swans” (seemingly surprising extreme-impact events that exceed expected possibilities). These are currently dealt with by deductive/inductive modes of reasoning codified into models that generate “predictions” predicated upon the current state of knowledge, and qualified by “uncertainties” expressed as probabilistic risk assessments. This logic yielded the largest monetary-damage (supposedly) “natural” disaster in world history: the 2011 tsunami inundation of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The loss was caused by the deliberate refusal of responsible authorities to recognize that a geologically documented event of similar magnitude had actually occurred about 1000 years earlier, thereby ignoring the certainty that what has actually happened can indeed happen. Such certainty can only be realized through a geological approach. The logical deductions that get mislabeled as “predictions” (1) are only valid in an artificial world of idealized deductive logic that is divorced from ever-changing, real-world circumstances, and (2) will always be wrong when dealing with the real-world future that is of concern to human beings. Moreover, the paradigm of probabilistic evaluation of “uncertainties” deals mainly with the aleatory uncertainty associated with natural randomness. Much more important is the epistemic uncertainty associated with limited data and knowledge. Just because conventional records do not contain evidence of great, rare extremes does not justify the all-too-common assumption that such information does not exist. Yet, this kind of anti-scientific thinking dominates in much conventional hazards science. The remedy to this deplorable situation is to employ more of the abductive mode of inference that is central to discovery-oriented geological studies of natural hazards, thereby complementing the current overemphasis on deductive theoretical modeling and inductive frequency analysis. Moreover, the results of such an abductive/geological approach can provide the key element for achieving a kind of truly scientific thinking and a societal engagement that will make progress on many issues of current societal concern, ultimately leading to improved pubic understanding and wise political action.