Welcome from the new Director

Left to right: Rich Pancost, Sir John Beddington, Paul Bates

I became the second Director of the Cabot Institute on the 28th of July, taking over from Paul Bates and planning to continue making Cabot one of the world’s premier environmental institutes. The past month has been rather exhilarating in terms of the breadth and quality of my interactions. My experiences have cemented my reasons for assuming this role - the Cabot Institute represents hundreds of brilliant people, working together and working with equally brilliant government, NGO and industry partners to better understand our environment, our relationship to it and the challenges of our co-dependent future. The central aspect of my job as Director is to continue to support those individuals and especially those collaborations.

My first month also confirmed that we have vital, illuminating and challenging ideas to share and we will all benefit from improved communications. Hence, this blog post and the many to follow it. There are many buried treasures, both clever insights and mature wisdom, on the Cabot Blog, and I encourage new visitors to explore those past posts. For example, see recent posts on Food Security by Boo Lewis and Energy Markets by Neeraj Oak. As for me, I’ll be bringing in a combination of personal observations and insights arising from discussions with Cabot partners, as well as ideas emerging in my own discipline.

Penn State University

As a bit of an introduction, I grew up in on a dairy farm in Ohio, and attended Case Western Reserve University, where I dithered back and forth between majors in political science and astrophysics before realising my heart was in Geology.... life decisions are complicated for all of us. I obtained my PhD from Penn State University , using geochemical tools to study past climates, and then continued that work as a post-doctoral researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research. And in 2000 I joined the Organic Geochemistry Unit in the School of Chemistry here at Bristol. Along the way, I played a fair bit of Ultimate (Frisbee ).

Ultimate frisbee GB masters beach team (2007)

I examine organic compounds in a wide range of materials, from soils and plants to microbial mats to ancient rocks. Those organic compounds can be exceptionally well preserved for long periods of time, allowing us to investigate aspects of how the Earth’s biological and chemical systems interact on time scales from tens to millions of years. The topics of my research range from understanding the formation and fate of methane to reconstructing the climate history of the planet (especially during times when carbon dioxide levels and temperatures were higher than those of today). It requires working with a diverse group of people, including climate modellers, mathematicians, social scientists and petroleum geologists. Those themes will become more prominent in this blog over the coming months, especially as I report back from a few conferences and around the release in late September of the Fifth Report from IPCC Working Group 1: The Physical Basis of Climate Change. But I will also be discussing Environmental Uncertainty and Decision Making: what it means, my personal perspectives on it, and why it is at the heart of the Cabot Institute’s mission.

Finally, this is meant to be an interactive forum. Do use the comments section and do suggest future topics. We especially welcome suggestions from our fellow Bristolians for potential visitors and events we could organise in our home town.

Cheers,
Rich

This blog was written by Professor Rich Pancost, Cabot Institute Director, University of Bristol

Rich Pancost

Converting probabilities between time-intervals

This is the first in an irregular sequence of snippets about some of the slightly more technical aspects of uncertainty and risk assessment. If you have a slightly more technical question, then please email me and I will try to answer it with a snippet. Suppose that an event has a probability of 0.015 (or 1.5%) of happening at least once in the next five years. Then the probability of the event happening at least once in the next year is 0.015 / 5 = 0.003 (or 0.3%), and the probability of it happening at least once in the next 20 years is 0.015 * 4 = 0.06 (or 6%). Here is the rule for scaling probabilities to different time intervals: if both probabilities (the original one and the new one) are no larger than 0.1 (or 10%), then simply multiply the original probability by the ratio of the new time-interval to the original time-interval, to find the new probability. This rule is an approximation which breaks down if either of the probabilities is greater than 0.1. For example

Cabot office weekly roundup – 20 July 2012

Herbert Huppert This week we have been holding our Cabot Summer School on risk and uncertainty in natural hazards . The week has gone very well and I have received some very positive comments from attendees. We had some fantastic speakers including Herbert Huppert, Jonty Rougier, Steve Sparks, Willy Aspinall, Li Chen, Tamsin Edwards, Philippa Bayley and Thorsten Wagener. Cabot would like to say a great big thank you to all of you for making the Cabot Summer School such a success. We’re very much looking forward to next year. Paul F. Hoffman This week, Cabot member Rich Pancost secured Paul F. Hoffman of Snowball Earth fame as the next Science Faculty Colloquium speaker in September. I saw the new templates for our website today. Its all looking good and I’m quite excited about the implementation of its new look. By the end of the summer I hope to have it all up and running. We would like to congratulate Cabot member Professor Mark Eisler and

Discussing Rio+20 at the House of Lords

Last month I went to the House of Lords for a meeting of the All party group for international development and the environment. The morning’s question was: Where next for sustainable development after Rio+20? I’ll give a brief resume of who said what, with some of my thoughts following over the next weeks.... Joan Walley , MP for Stoke-on-Trent North opened the morning's reflections on Rio. She chairs the Environmental Audit Committee which monitors action across different government departments. At the top level, Rio lacked vision and clear objectives. Her select committee really tried to engage with government, but there was no commitment from the PM that he was going, and no clear vision from them. She felt the process needs to be reinvigorated - connecting, collaborating, and understanding the details - e.g. how the proposed Sustainable Development Goals will link with the Millennium Development Goals. Stephen Hale from Oxfam asked how do we accelerate the p

Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

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