There are still two appeals processes to go through
Funny how the lawyers will still continue to banquet whilst the scientists suffer.
Why the hell has it even been allowed to get to this stage?????
The precedent now set by this successful application of legal action to the lack of undersanding of natural "phenomena", will probably now prevent the free and fair provision/distribution of "data", as scientists wonder if it is now "safe" to present their current "imperfect" findings.
Its an absolute travesty that will come back to bite us all
( At which time we will probably go and get a lawyer
and they will get some new tyres for their Bentleys )
My reading (admittedly via New Scientist) was that the eathquakes hazards guys had prefaced the statement with, 'while we can't rule out the possibility of a large quake', before going on to say that the series of small shocks was normal. It seems that there was also a 'free agent' earthquake predictor who got it half right as well, right time, but wrong place, and this has provoked further criticism of the real pros.
Given that the backbone of Italy, the Apennines, is an uplifted fold and thrust belt above an active subduction zone with extensional tectonics to the west and compression to the east, it's a very unhappy chunk of continental lithosphere. Only a fool would say that a massive quake wasn't 'imminent', and those guys aren't fools. Unfortunately a gesocientist's idea of imminent isn't the same as a local politician's, and we can only imagine the pressure on them not to trigger mass panic everytime they go near a TV camera.
Sadly, despite several proposed mechanisms for 'precursor' events, like EM pulses or patterns of microseisms, nobody has accurately predicted an earthquake on timescales less than a decade. Just when it looks like we've figured one fault system out, the earth breaks along a previously unmapped fault, so strain monitoring isn't working out very well either.
Still - I guarantee nobody will get any grants to further the research after this triumph of sophistry over science.
cheers,
Andrew.
I've been trying to find exactly what the scientists said, and what they were accused of, but the reporting is terrible. My best understanding is that the events were:
1) Scientists meet, analyze the data and come to the conclusion that the tremors "don't provide any evidence of increased risk" but there are no other conclusions about the likelihood of an earthquake.
2) Civil defense guy says on the scientists behalf "There is no risk, it is safe to stay inside".
3) People in the village usually slept outside if there were any tremors, but because they had been told there was 'no risk of an earthquake' they didn't.
Obviously there is a different between "no evidence of increased risk" to "it's definitely safe".
However, it still sounds like they're being used as scapegoats in place of the builders who constructed substandard buildings that didn't meet earthquake resistance standards.
It's no worse than the economists who didn't see the GFC coming which put millions out of work and out of their homes. It was far more predictable.
Or the banks that lent money to people who couldn't pay it back telling everyone that it is OK.
I'm also unsure exactly what happened but this morning SMH referred to 'miscommunication', which stacks up pretty well against what Dan and Andrew say. How often do we hear of scientific statements being misconstrued? Too often IMHO (global warming anyone).
John, I think the analogy would be more like the banks lubricating the faults, jumping up and down on them a few times and then selling off the land as prime real estate. The GFC was a totally human construct bought about by speculative investments and dishonest assessments by institutions who had more money on their hands than they could responsibly use. The criminality involved dwarfs anything these scientists could achieve even if they were deliberately malicious - which of course they aren't.
I'm also unsure exactly what happened but this morning SMH referred to 'miscommunication', which stacks up pretty well against what Dan and Andrew say. How often do we hear of scientific statements being misconstrued? Too often IMHO (global warming anyone).....
Isn't it ironic that here we have a case of scientists being imprisoned over supposedly not divulging information, yet in the case for global warming climate scientists have been anything but ambiguous over the data. Yet these poor individuals are accused of everything from scaremongering, to falsifying the data, to plotting sending the human race back to the stone age.
The middle-ages attitude towards scientists is very much alive and kicking.
The way I see it is if this kind off thing became the norm that scientists will just stop trying to predict these things and then a lot more people will die. The Italians have gone back to the days when it was your death to say that the Earth circled the sun
That's not entirely true. They are being imprisoned because their negligence and indifference attributed to the deaths of more than 300 people.
If the scientists are "negligent" or "indifferent" then the same can be said for local governments issuing building permits in earthquake prone areas or engineers designing structures that are not earthquake proof?
Have any local government officials or engineers been sent to prison?
Many more people died in the Christchurch earthquake of 2011 which was an aftershock of the 2010 earthquake. No scientists have been prosecuted or imprisoned to my knowledge, yet aftershocks are very common, perhaps being more predictable than the swarm of small earthquakes preceding the large quake scenario that occurred in Italy.
As much as I dislike to make unsubstantiated conclusions one cannot help but think that the scientists have been made the scapegoats.
Regards
Steven
Last edited by sjastro; 24-10-2012 at 09:53 PM.
Reason: Clarification
I'm also unsure exactly what happened but this morning SMH referred to 'miscommunication', which stacks up pretty well against what Dan and Andrew say. How often do we hear of scientific statements being misconstrued? Too often IMHO (global warming anyone).
John, I think the analogy would be more like the banks lubricating the faults, jumping up and down on them a few times and then selling off the land as prime real estate. The GFC was a totally human construct bought about by speculative investments and dishonest assessments by institutions who had more money on their hands than they could responsibly use. The criminality involved dwarfs anything these scientists could achieve even if they were deliberately malicious - which of course they aren't.
I think you nailed the issue there David.
Unless the scientists deliberately went out of their way to conceal that an earthquake was imminent (payed off for example) there is no way they can be
charged.
personally I don't think they deserve jail time, but there does seem to be a hint there that this isn't just about failing to predict an earthquake, a govt official not being able to weezal out of blame makes me wonder if these guys got roped into a situation they should never of been in, the REAL reality of all this risk management crap that we endlessly get drilled with has nothing to do with making the world a safer place imo , its about aportioning blame away from were responsibility really lies ... in this case local govt ..town planners ,, disaster management .. etc..etc.
