Jail Italian seismologists

[marchesarosa]

www.spiked-online.com/site/article/13016/


Brendan O’Neill
A disaster that science brought upon itself

The jailing of scientists for failing to predict an earthquake is the sad conclusion to the scientific community’s depiction of itself as soothsayer.

Thursday 25 October 2012

The jailing of six Italian scientists and a government official for failing to predict an earthquake has caused uproar in the scientific community. The men were convicted of manslaughter on the basis that they failed to give an adequate risk assessment of the 2009 earthquake in the central Italian city of L’Aquila, which killed 300 people. Outraged by the court’s verdict, the CEO of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science wrote to the president of Italy to tell him ‘there is no accepted scientific method for earthquake prediction that can be reliably used to inform citizens of an impending disaster’. The verdict is ‘perverse’ and ‘ludicrous’, says the science journal Nature.

more.......

[alancalverd]

Bollocks.

The scientists, to a man, said that they could not predict an earthquake to any useful degree of accuracy. They were accompanied by a Government Spokesman (yes, even the Italians have chinless unemployables in the civil service) who in a later radio interview said that there was no scientific evidence for a forthcoming earthquake and his conclusion was that the area was safe.

It was the Official Government Spokesman who caused all the trouble, but you mustn't blame Government Spokesmen because that would damage Public Trust in Democratic Government, which as we all know is a lot more important than truth or human lives. However as it would be demonstrably unfair to imprison the scientists who honestly said they didn't know what was going to happen, they prosecuted the entire panel because one of them had misled the public.

No "scientific community" pretended to say any sooth. The guys who knew they knew nothing, said so. The guy who was paid to appear to know everything told a bare-arsed lie.

Moral: never brief a Government Spokesman, politician, journalist..... and certainly don't stand next to scum in public.

Interestingly, several American studies have shown that even if we could usefully predict earthquakes in populated areas, more harm would be done in an evacuation and subsequent pillaging, etc., than by doing nothing. The Soviets came to much the same conclusion and the Chernobyl lockdown, followed by a carefully coordinated evacuation, was a fine example of how to do it.

[marchesarosa]

Did you read the whole article?

I think the "soothsayers" referred to are the climate alarmists who claim, rather stridently, that they DO know what will happen a century hence and that it will be BAD. Why would we be crippling our economies, otherwise, by rejecting coal, gas and oil in order to put off the evil day?

Seismologists are clearly not of this ilk.

However, there is a difference between totally ignorant about a quake occurring and knowing that an earthquake is definitely due in the foreseeable future but not being able to pinpoint precisely when.

It is not easy to envisage what one would do if the message went out that a serious quake was due sometime in the next two years or so. Would you move out or what? Put up a tent in the garden, move in with relatives far away? It's a dilemma.

[alancalverd]

Very much a matter of experience and hope. There are parts of Iceland where people build summer houses to enjoy the spectacular view, knowing that the house is likely to suffer significant damage in a couple of years and be uninhabitable in ten years. Japanese paper screens, at least in folklore,are used as room dividers in areas where solid internal walls are considered dangerous. I have an uncle who designs quake-proof foundations for buildings in Los Angeles. Apparently normal people choose to live in areas where significant structural damage is likely every couple of years.

I think climate "science" should be written with inverted commas nowadays. Nobody who talks about trends in mean global temperature without explaining how it is defined or how it was measured before 1900 can possibly be considered honest, let alone a scientist. Working out how to sustain a desirable standard of living without fossil fuels is essential, but from a sociological, not climatological persective.

And I use "bollocks" advisedly. There is no scientific community. I've been a scientist all my life and have never participated in any communal activity. Occasional collaboration is one thing, but the essence of science, whether academic or commercial, is confrontation, challenge, competition and controversy. Practically every "scientific consensus" in history, from Aristotelian gravitation through phlogiston to the aether, has been demonstrated to be wrong: scientific method is not democratic, consensual, or communal.

[marchesarosa]

Italy is not a nation where earthquake-proof high-rises abound. When the ground shakes many buildings fall down in Italy particularly in historic town and small villages.

I take your point about Japan's "paper" houses. They must be less fussed over privacy than us!

[alancalverd]

I think privacy comes a poor second to survival in most cultures. Something about Darwin there....

[mrsonde]

Nov 4, 2012 22:55:41 GMT 1 alancalverd said:

There is no scientific community. I've been a scientist all my life and have never participated in any communal activity.

First of all, you received your qualifications in a highly regulated communal activity, taught and tested and adjudicated by products of the same rigidly socially coordinated system, passing on accumulated techniques, conceptual schemes, and rules of conduct that define the irreducible standards of your profession. Once qualified, you will need to earn a living. Nearly every scientist does so by receiving and having to justify grant funding, from government mainly, or other large private or charity funders. What projects qualify for grant fundings depends on a communally defined agenda, and on a communally granted assessment of your worth as a reliable "scientist". An essential feature of that greasy pole is in publishing articles in the scientific press - not quite as highly hierarcically organised and communally conformist a system as a religion, but it's getting that way.

In short, if you're a scientist you need to attract grant funding, for which you need academic status and the approval of your professional peers. If you step too far outside this mainstream system you'll soon find yourself unable to work.