Playing against Nature: Integrating Science and Economics to Mitigate Natural Hazards in an Uncertain World

5Communicating What We Know and What We Don't

When in doubt tell the truth. It will confound your enemies and astound your friends.

Mark Twain

5.1    Recognizing and Admitting Uncertainties

For natural hazard forecasts to be fully useful, people need to know how much confidence to put in them. However, as we have seen, although scientists know a lot about hazards, there is also a lot that they do not know. As seismologist Hiroo Kanamori (2011) noted:

the 2011 Tohoku earthquake caught most seismologists by surprise … even if we understand how such a big earthquake can happen, because of the nature of the process involved we cannot make definitive statements about when it will happen, or how large it could be.

Thus while scientists try to learn ...