Geoblogfeed: "Supervolcano" science and society

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Certainty vs. Uncertainty: What "Supervolcano" teaches us about science and society http://bit.ly/ev91DM

Certainty vs. Uncertainty: What "Supervolcano" teaches us about science and society

Erik Klemetti on April 21, 2011, 1:58 PM

"You put super in front of eruption and I don't image it makes it better." - FEMA Sec. Wendy Reiss in Supervolcano.

This week in my Freshman Volcanoes class here at Denison, we lauched 2005's Supervolcano, a so-called docudrama about a hypothetical eruption at Yellowstone Caldera. Now, the film itself has its ups-and-downs and having seen it as many times as I have, I still notice new themes that appear in the film. This time what really jumped out at me was the struggle between certainty and uncertainty at all levels, but mostly between science and society. While science is, for lack of a better world, comfortable with the fact that there is also uncertainty in our predictions and understanding of natural events, society wants the opposite from science: they want certainty.