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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.'"
The research put forward by Giuliani is from the 1980s and 1990s and was found to be completely unusable as a predictor. People make predictions of quakes all the time and some of those will be correct just by chance, which is likely the case here. Furthermore, finding correlation with radon does not mean it can be used as a predictor. You cannot evacuate cities for long periods just to find out that it was a false alarm.
That is heard quite often: "even with science, you can't..."
You know, some day we just might. Maybe not today, maybe never, but please, when someone who knows more than you about a certain topic warns you, listen!
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
This is almost as ironic as when Bobby Jindal (governor of Louisiana and one-time preznitial hopeful) mocked funds for volcano monitoring in the federal budget, and a week later an Alaskan (monitored) volcano blew up, with an orderly response since the eruption had been predicted for some time. Attention politicians: science is not negotiable. It's part of that reality thing not on your side.
Remain calm! All is well!
Yes, but he said "the earthquake is going to happen in 6 to 24 hours".
And he was right, just not about the magnitude. According to another comment after the smaller quake he re-ran the numbers and predicted the larger one that hit a week later but was barred from telling anyone about it.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Nonsense. He made the prediction using methods which have been proven to be unreliable. All the current research is against him, and there was no substantive reason to believe his claims had any merit.
Besides, he predicted an earthquake a full week ahead of the one that actually struck. What if he had been listened to and people evacuated? They'd have watched his day pass and started to wonder. They'd be sitting in hotel rooms, or with family members or friends, and thinking about the food rotting in their fridges and the money they're losing by not being at work. A huge number of them would certainly have returned to town by the time the actual quake struck, and the death toll would have been similar.
The problem here is not that someone here using poor science happened to be sort of right, the problem is that Italy is a country with high risks of earthquakes and exceedingly poor construction and preparation.
Building structures that won't collapse and crush everybody inside isn't trivial; but it is doable now
It was doable 600 years ago.
Just go visit Machu Picchu, and you'll see.
It lays abandoned for half a millennium in a land of frequent earthquakes, and it's walls are still intact.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incan_architecture
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