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Scientist Forced To Remove Earthquake Prediction
Hugh Pickens writes to mention that Italian scientist Giampaolo Giuliani, a researcher at the National Physical Laboratory of Gran Sasso, recently gave warning about an earthquake that was to happen on March 29th of this year near L'Aquilla. Based on radon gas emissions and a series of observed tremors he tried to convince residents to evacuate, drawing much criticism from the city's mayor and others. Giuliani was forced to take down warnings he had posted on the internet. The researcher had said that a 'disastrous' earthquake would strike on March 29, but when it didn't, Guido Bertolaso, head of Italy's Civil Protection Agency, last week officially denounced Giuliani in court for false alarm. 'These imbeciles enjoy spreading false news,' Bertalaso was quoted as saying. 'Everyone knows that you can't predict earthquakes.' Giuliani, it turns out, was partially right. A much smaller seismic shift struck on the day he said it would, with the truly disastrous one arriving just one week later. 'Someone owes me an apology,' said Giuliani, who is also a resident of L'Aquila. 'The situation here is dramatic. I am devastated, but also angry.'"
Particularly brain dead politicians. Wasn't it also a local Italian prosecutor that decided the best way of dealing with a video of some kids bullying another one, was to sue Google?
I'm not saying Italy has a monopoly on boneheaded politico's but their particular brand of antics seem to stick on my mind.
Actually, he didn't alert anyone of the one that happened today/yesterday because he was warned that he would be arrested if he raised an alarm again, even though his last alarm was accurate, even if it wasn't as large an event that he initially thought, the mini-quake relieved some of the stresses his model was predicting. But his model predicted that the massive event was to happen as it did now, but he could not raise the alarm about it.
He is absolutely right that the officials should be apologising, not only to him, but to all the people who lost their lives or were injured.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Bobby Jindal didn't mock spending money on volcano monitoring
Here's what he said. You decide if he was suggesting that monitoring volcanoes is "wasteful spending":
"While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes ... $140 million for something called "volcano monitoring." Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C."
E pluribus unum
Here's quote from a USAToday article.
Pezzopane, the provincial president, said residents may have been lulled into complacency because so many smaller quakes had jolted the area, including two or three earlier in the night.
"Considering what happened, a bit more concern, more attention might have saved lives," she said.
National officials insisted no quake can ever be predicted and that no evacuation could have been ordered on the basis of the recent jolts.
"There is no possibility of making any predictions on earthquakes. This is a fact in the world's scientific community," Civil protection chief Guido Bertolaso told reporters
Talk about saving face...
They're not completely wrong - there currently is no scientifically acceptable method of predicting earthquakes that is time-tested, but at the very least, they could give some credit to Giuliani for seemingly predicting this earthquake, and offer him a full apology for calling him an imbecile.
Best "String" Ever!
There's a guy in the Bay Area who claims he can predict earthquakes with high accuracy and offers up the fact that he has predicted every recent large earthquake. But as one scientist commented (borrowing from somewhere, I believe) that, "indeed, he has predicted 150 of the last 8 earthquakes."
Based on what we know so-far, he predicted a destructive quake on March 29. This did not happen. Prediction failed.
But there was another earthquake that day. Big deal - isn't that what "seismically active" means?
Just looking at the current Northern California map I see over 170 quakes listed. And that's only the last 7 days where this predicted event was 9 days before the quake. I'm not surprised there was a "smaller" quake that day. There are usually quite a few every day.
As to the charge of "silenced", I'll wait and see what that really means. If he was ordered to destroy scientific publications with his claims or cease his research discussions it's one thing. If they declined to once-again drive vans with bullhorns around town having falsely reported an imminent quake just a month earlier, it's another thing entirely. It will probably end up being somewhere between those extremes.
Radon emission changes have preceded earthquakes. But they have also "preceded" non-quakes. And quakes have been preceded by the lack of change in radon as well. Hardly a reliable predictor, so far.
One should not lambaste officials without looking at the scientist's track-record. I have yet to see a single item suggesting that he had a serious track-record of predicting with any reasonable level of accuracy the time, place and magnitude of an event as well as "safe" periods.
I think it would have been more responsible to just lay out the facts. There is evidence that certain events we are monitoring (radon, ground-water changes, full/new-moon, ...) tend to precede an earthquake. We feel the risk is higher than normal. Please be sure you are as prepared as possible with the usual recommended supplies of food, water, tools, etc. and consider training if you haven't done-so in the past.
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Yep, sensitivity and specificity. Your solution would have 100% sensitivity, since it would predict every earthquake correctly, but it would be useless because the specificity would be 0%. To accurately assess the correctness of a predictor, you need to know both figures.
You are right, the scariest thing about this story is the fact that he was forbidden to speak. As already mentioned by others, earthquake prediction is not an exact science (yet), so it wouldn't have warranted evacuating a whole city. But I think it wouldn't have hurt too much if because of his 'scaremongering', some people would have been reminded to review their emergency plans. If he would have given such warnings every month without anything happening, people would ignore him in the end. The irony of the gag order is that because of his predictions of a medium level earthquake last week that didn't happen as predicted, he was forbidden to tell anything in the last 3 days when his detector went "ofscale high".
It was also reported in the Italian media that the seismic was so high in the last month that people had trouble sleeping and some people were actually sleeping in their cars. This event was thus hardly a 'thunder from a clear sky'. Interestingly, there was a reasonably strong quake (magnitude 4.6 on Richter scale) a few hundred kilometers to the north near Bologna at 10 pm, followed half an hour later by a medium one (magnitude 4.0) pretty close to the big one that followed at 3 am (magnitude 6.2).
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L6566682.htm
yep, that might piss a few people off!
Besides, he predicted an earthquake a full week ahead of the one that actually struck.
No, he predicted an earthquake that struck exactly on the day he said it would, but turned out to be much, much smaller than he anticipated. Then, after improving his methodology with the information gathered from what actually happened, he predicted another earthquake which also struck exactly on the day he said it would, but nobody listened to him because he had been wrong before (about the magnitude, not the date).
The ability to predict using science gets fine-tuned with each mistake. Unfortunately, in this case, politicians saw the small flaw in his first prediction as "proof" that all subsequent predictions were completely flawed. That reasoning, however, is the real flaw.
In a word, no.
In a few more words, NASA's budget peaked at less than 10% of the DoD's budget.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
It is called "procurato allarme" in italian legislation. Wikipedia (in italian) http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procurato_allarme
Type "radon earthquake" into google.
True, he was born 17 years after the South Sea Bubble had its dramatic collapse...
Maybe we could agree that both theories have their own share of credibility?
After all, modern political theory tends to be heavily concerned with reconciling the needs of the individual with the "greater good" of society.
Humans can indeed be fiercely individualistic, though you could just as easily argue that we're inherently social creatures under certain circumstances. (You'd also be daft to argue that the overall condition of society doesn't affect the individual -- even if you're a subsistence farmer living alone in the wilderness)
I would argue that, by historic standards, both the US and Europe are far better off now than they have ever been, both in terms of personal liberties, as well as the general health of society as a whole.
Sure, we pay a lot of taxes. However, our post-tax income is still pretty darn high, in terms of the purchasing power that it carries. Similarly, we do receive tangible benefits from those taxes (even though you might argue that those benefits might not be a good value for the money)
We can't carry guns, but have powerful mechanisms for resolving personal conflicts in a peaceful manner. If the government is corrupt, 20th Century history contains numerous examples of peaceful revolutions taking place under non-democratic governments (India, and the fall of the USSR most notably come to mind)
Are there improvements to be made? Sure!
Is the answer to swing far to the left, or far to the right? Probably not. It's been tried repeatedly on both ends of the spectrum, and has never been particularly successful.*
*I'm going to ignore ancient Sparta for the sake of this discussion. Although it makes a great case study, it's a single data point, and a bit of a paradoxical one at that.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I thought that adding some local view would add some colour, so here's my 2âc
There's been some back and forth on the national papers about this earthquake prediction, liberally mixed with rumors about stray dogs wailing, etc etc. I fully expect this to continue, since basic scientific method is not the order of the day here.
As much as I think that further research by the guy in question will be valuable, the history of earthquake prediction has been rather dismal, insofar as many times over, after a quake, it's been relatively easy to find some scientist having predicted it, while the actual "before the fact " experience has materially changed in the ability to foresee what ( we do have seismic maps, etc.), but not the when.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
If the government is corrupt, 20th Century history contains numerous examples of peaceful revolutions taking place under non-democratic governments (India, and the fall of the USSR most notably come to mind)
I'm not really a general advocate of armed revolt or anything (certainly not in democratic western nations), but historically the examples you cite are more exceptions than the rule.
In both cases the revolts were only effective because those in power chose to lay down their authority peacefully. Essentially the oppressed appealed to the oppressors and the oppressors said "ok, you have a point." There are far more examples of tyrranical rulers where those in charge simply wiped out the protestors, or where they were so clearly interested in only their own power that the people never bothered to stage a mass demonstration in the first place. Could you see something like this working in half of the Middle East or in a place like North Korea? It already failed once in China - I'd think that as China becomes more influenced by Western culture it might be more likely to actually work there now or in the future.
Don't get me wrong - peaceful resistance does work sometimes. I suspect that it would have eventually worked in the formation of the US since the English Parliament was at least sympathetic to their aims. Even nations that you think would be basically peaceful have at times in history become very suppressive and warlike. Just look at WWI - half of Europe was just looking for an excuse to go to war and one guy getting shot in a very minor country was enough of a pretense to end up getting 37 million people killed.
On the other hand, most armed revolts only succeed when those in charge willingly lay down their arms, or if some external power intervenes. It wasn't like the Continental Army actually destroyed the British's ability to make war - if anything the US campaign was more of a series of defeats, but the cost to the British was enough to make them have to keep thinking twice about the issues until they gave in. The intervention of the French had a huge impact as well.