Hazardous Extreme Events: How can we check and revise “old good” paradigms to ensure better decision-making aimed at reduction of natural disasters? (climate phenomena, earthquakes, volcano eruptions, etc.)

“It is frightening that in our technocratic times baseline principles are not subjected to questioning, so that when they built the basis of trivial or, conversely, delicately-designed model, it is considered as a full replacement of natural phenomena.” (I.M.Gelfand 1989).

By definition, an extreme event is a rare one in a series of kindred phenomena. Even nowadays, usually, it implies investigating a small sample of case-histories with a help of delicate statistical methods and data of different quality, collected in various conditions. Many extreme events follow “strange” statistics far from usually accepted by contemporary theories.

Losses from natural disasters continue to increase mainly due to the lack of knowledge and poor understanding by the majority of scientific community, as well as by decision makers and people, the three components of Risk, i.e., Hazard, Exposure, and Vulnerability. Contemporary Science is responsible for not coping with the challenging changes of Exposures and their Vulnerability inflicted by growing population, its concentration, etc., which result in the observed steady increase of social Losses due to Natural Hazards. Scientists owe to the Society for lack of knowledge, education, and communication. Many recent disasters appear to be on the limit of a bloody fault committed by technocratic authorities and their advisers.

Based on the recent, enormous progress in real-time data retrieval and monitoring of distributed multiple geophysical characteristics world-wide, Contemporary Science can do a better job in disclosing natural hazards, assessing risks, and delivering such info in advance catastrophic events. Geoscientists must initiate shifting the minds of community from old-good paradigms of pessimistic disbelieve to optimistic challenging issues of predictability of extreme events.