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.'"

Comments

Re:earth sciences, who needs them?

[samkass]

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."

They STILL don't get it!

[Clandestine_Blaze]

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.

Over predicting

[linuxwrangler]

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.

Re:Yep

[Metasquares]

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.