Cabot office weekly roundup

Cabot office weekly roundup – 17 August 2012

What has been interesting today is watching this video by the charity Practical Action. The charity shows us that we can have simple solutions for complex socio-environmental problems. What we do in Cabot seems quite complex at times, trying to find complex solutions to complex problems. We have had visitors come to Cabot and show us their simple solutions, e.g. Kevin McGuigan who saved millions of lives by demonstrating how water can be sanitised in plastic bottles left in the sun, with the sun’s UV doing all the hard work. A very cheap, easy and effective solution to the global problem of water security. Cabot needs to think more about these simple solutions as well as the more complex ones.

Malcolm Fairbrother

This week has been very exciting. I recorded our very first podcast at Burst Radio with Dr Steve Simpson who talked about how climate change is affecting the oceans. This will be available for download in September.

A popular talk was given this week entitled ‘Climate, economic growth and preferences for geoengineering’ by Malcolm Fairbrother. You can view the slides here.

Neville Gabie, our Artist in Residence, filmed and interviewed me about a ‘thing’ which made me work in the environmental sector. My ‘thing’ was a book from 1991 entitled The Green Activity Book. It was my favourite book as a kid, probably because it had loads of stickers in it! I always remember putting my favourite sticker at the head of my bed – it read ‘Save energy, stay in bed’! It gave me a good excuse to try and lie in in the mornings, although my mum was having none of it! Reflecting back on the book, it made me realise how little has been achieved in 21 years. For starters, I seriously thought back then that there would be flying cars and hoverboards like in Back to the Future. A snowboard is as close as I’ve come to that! When looking at the content of this book – which told me about saving energy, being careful with waste, recycling, looking after nature, and telling me all about renewables such as solar, geothermal and wind and tidal power, the message has not changed. The technology doesn’t seem to have changed much either and that concerns me. We need to get our arses in gear and stop talking and start doing!

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

1-in-200 year events

You often read or hear references to the ‘1-in-200 year event’, or ‘200-year event’, or ‘event with a return period of 200 years’. Other popular horizons are 1-in-30 years and 1-in-10,000 years. This term applies to hazards which can occur over a range of magnitudes, like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, space weather, and various hydro-meteorological hazards like floods, storms, hot or cold spells, and droughts. ‘1-in-200 years’ refers to a particular magnitude. In floods this might be represented as a contour on a map, showing an area that is inundated. If this contour is labelled as ‘1-in-200 years’ this means that the current rate of floods at least as large as this is 1/200 /yr, or 0.005 /yr. So if your house is inside the contour, there is currently a 0.005 (0.5%) chance of being flooded in the next year, and a 0.025 (2.5%) chance of being flooded in the next five years. The general definition is this: ‘1-in-200 year magnitude is x’ = ‘the current rate for eve

Coconuts and climate change

Before pursuing an MSc in Climate Change Science and Policy at the University of Bristol, I completed my undergraduate studies in Environmental Science at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. During my final year I carried out a research project that explored the impact of extreme weather events on coconut productivity across the three climatic zones of Sri Lanka. A few months ago, I managed to get a paper published and I thought it would be a good idea to share my findings on this platform. Climate change and crop productivity There has been a growing concern about the impact of extreme weather events on crop production across the globe, Sri Lanka being no exception. Coconut is becoming a rare commodity in the country, due to several reasons including the changing climate. The price hike in coconuts over the last few years is a good indication of how climate change is affecting coconut productivity across the country. Most coconut trees are no longer bearing fruits and thos

Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

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