Scout Tactical said:
McMullen said:
That seems to contradict with what the Economist, a highly trusted international news publication seems to think. Read the article.
However, this assessment appears at odds with what seismologists have known for at least 20 years?that small earthquakes increase the likelihood that a powerful event will happen in the near future, even if the absolute probability of such an event remains low. Indeed, Warner Marzocchi and Anna Maria Lombardi of the INGV showed that a few hours before the earthquake actually struck modelling would have suggested the chance that a powerful quake would occur within 10 kilometres of L?Aquila within three days rose from one in 200,000 (the background level) to about one in 1,000.
This is nothing personal against you, but they've done their research and have two credible and respected scientists backing up their statement, so I'm leaning toward trusting them more.
Fair enough, but the adjacent paragraphs also bear reading. For example, the article also says that the seismologists in question were trying to dispel a panic caused by the guy making earthquake predictions based on radon, which is known to be an unreliable indicator. In addition, the article mentioned that public policy in the area had not yet adopted probabilistic forecasting.
Basically, a lot of things went wrong. The local government didn't set up proper building codes or a reliable warning and evacuation plan. The people who built the structures in the town failed to make them earthquake-resistant. The seismologists were put in a difficult situation of choosing between increasing a panic caused by speculation by a non-seismologist, or getting people to calm down, and they chose the latter.
Still, whatever mistakes they made, the seismologists were not the architects of this disaster.
Volcanologists deal with this sort of thing too. A bad call either way has consequences severe enough to keep one awake at night. If a volcano erupts, and you don't evacuate people beforehand or are unable to convince them to evacuate, thousands of lives are lost, and you get to second-guess yourself about it for the rest of your life. If the volcano doesn't erupt but you evacuated the surrounding area because it showed every sign of erupting, then you've dropped an economic bombshell on the area, caused businesses and perhaps even entire towns to go bankrupt, the credibility of you and your entire profession is damaged, and people send you death threats.
Trouble is, volcanoes are almost maliciously cryptic, borderline deceptive, with the signals they put out. What 20 years of science seems to indicate is a fail-safe precursor to eruption can turn out to be a false alarm, and what appears to be a return to normal activity can become a major eruption in a matter of hours.
It's a very difficult call to make, and the simple fact is that seismologists, volcanologists, and meteorologists will occasionally get it wrong, for a variety of reasons. Avoiding a panic is among the right reasons. They should not be on trial for what happened, or if they are, then everyone should be: The government for not putting building codes and adequate plans in place, the masons for building deathtraps, the nuclear physics lab technician for interfering and fueling a panic, the seismologists for putting more weight on the panic than the probability of a quake, and the victims for not educating themselves and evaluating the risk on their own. Yes, the latter scenario is as utterly ridiculous as it sounds, but is the logical conclusion of this belief that people should be sued for natural disasters.
