Coping with Deep Uncertainty: jellyfish, super-storms and nuclear stewardship [Audio]

Speaker(s): Professor Leonard Smith, Dr Trevor Maynard, Professor Robert Rosner | Science gives us predictions and probabilities that are sometimes remarkably accurate. And sometimes not. Our ability to use scientific information in decision-making is explored in a variety of real world contexts, from monitoring the risks jellyfish pose to nuclear power stations, to framing policy on carbon emissions to avoid dangerous climate change. Interestingly, it turns out that scientific evidence can be both useful in decision-making and fundamentally misleading from a mathematical point of view. Is the challenge in the maths? In the science? Or with the decision- makers? Leonard Smith is Director of the LSE Centre for the Analysis of Time Series (CATS). His research focuses on real world challenges to academic concepts of nonlinear dynamical systems and predictability. This includes the role of probability in decision support, and the implications uncertainty, ambiguity and ignorance hold when