After learning of the guilty verdict today, Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. sends this along noting that “it is a little bit more complicated than not being able to
forecast earthquakes”.
From: bridges vol. 31, October 2011 / Pielke’s Perspective
By Roger A. Pielke, Jr.
In 1997 the city of Grand Forks, North Dakota, saw devastating flooding that caused billions of dollars in damage. Remarkably, that spring flood could be seen coming for months in advance, since the rising waters were the consequence of melting snow that had accumulated over the winter. Yet, even with the ability to anticipate the record flood crest long in advance, the community was taken by surprise by the flood, with some residents having to evacuate in the middle of the night as rising waters threatened their homes.
Following the disaster, I was a member of the US National Weather Service team sent to investigate the production and use of forecasts where something had obviously gone badly wrong. The lessons from that experience can help to shed some light on the current situation in L’Aquila, Italy, where seven officials are currently embroiled in a lawsuit brought by the affected community over statements the officials had made prior to the deadly earthquake in April, 2009.
On March 31, 2009, in L’Aquila, six days before a deadly magnitude 6.3 earthquake killed 308 people, Bernardo De Bernardinis, then deputy chief of Italy’s Civil Protection Department , and six scientists who were members of a scientific advisory body to the Department (the Major Risks Committee) participated in an official meeting and press conference in response to public concerns about short-term earthquake risks.
The public concerns were the result of at least two factors: One was the recent occurrence of a number of small earthquakes. A second factor was the prediction of a pending large earthquake issued by Gioacchino Giuliani, who was not a seismologist and worked as a technician at Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics.
The deputy chief and scientists held a short one-hour meeting and then a press conference, during which they downplayed the possibility of an earthquake. For instance, De Bernardinis went so far as to claim that the recent tremors actually reduced earthquake risks: “[T]he scientific community continues to confirm to me that in fact it is a favourable situation, that is to say a continuous discharge of energy.”[1] When asked directly by the media if the public should sit back and enjoy a glass of wine rather than worry about earthquakes, De Bernardinis acted as sommelier: “Absolutely, absolutely a Montepulciano doc. This seems important.”[2]
As news of the L’Aquila lawsuit has spread around the world, many scientists have rushed to the defense of the Committee by highlighting statements made during the meeting that emphasized the uncertainties in any sort of earthquake prediction. For example, Nature reported that at the one-hour meeting the scientists made the following nuanced statements: “A major earthquake in the area is unlikely but cannot be ruled out,” and “in
recent times some recent earthquakes have been preceded by minor shocks days or weeks beforehand, but on the other hand many seismic swarms did not result in a major event,” and also “because L’Aquila is in a high-risk zone it is impossible to say with certainty that there will be no large earthquake.”[3] In the face of these various statements, the lawsuit takes note of the “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” in its allegations of culpability. While the case is still to be adjudicated under Italian law, some practical lessons can already be drawn by comparing the experience to that which I observed back in 1997 in Grand Forks, North Dakota.
One lesson is that the message sent by the government and its scientists might not be the same one received by the public. In the case of Grand Forks, the weather service issued a forecast of a flood crest of 49 feet – a record flood – two months in advance. The point, they explained to our investigative team, was to communicate to the public that they should expect a record flood and, thus, be very concerned. However, the previous record flood was only a few inches below 49 feet, so instead of causing concern, the forecast prompted the opposite reaction. Residents recalled that the earlier flood had caused relatively little damage, and concluded that a flood cresting only a few inches higher would be no big deal.
Similarly, in L’Aquila, the government and its scientists seemed to be sending a different message to the public than the one that was received. Media reports of the Major Risk Committee meeting and the subsequent press conference seem to focus on countering the views offered by Mr. Giuliani, whom they viewed as unscientific and had been battling in preceding months. Thus, one interpretation of the Major Risks Committee’s statements is that they were not specifically about earthquakes at all, but instead were about which individuals the public should view as legitimate and authoritative and which they should not.
If officials were expressing a view about authority rather than a careful assessment of actual earthquake risks, this would help to explain their sloppy treatment of uncertainties. Here, too, the North Dakota experience is relevant. The actual flood crest was 54 feet at Grand Forks, exceeding the 49-foot outlook by 5 feet, and caught the community by surprise as they had only built their levees to 51 feet. The average error in previous flood outlooks in the region was a very respectable 10% (about 5 feet, if applied to the 49-foot outlook), but this information was never shared with the public. When we asked officials why this information was not released with the forecast, they told us they were worried that if information about uncertainties was known then the public would lose confidence in the forecasts.
The L’Aquila court case has prompted much discussion and debate in the scientific community. Many scientists have explained that there is no possibility of offering accurate or useful earthquake forecasts, as was expressed in an open letter to Silvio Berlusconi signed by 5,000 scientists: “Years of research worldwide have shown that there is currently no scientifically accepted method for short-term earthquake prediction that
can reliably be used by Civil Protection authorities for rapid and effective emergency actions.”[4] Yet such a view is not universal in the scientific community. For instance, Stanford University issued a press release discussing the case in Italy and countering that earthquakes could in fact be anticipated in some cases. Greg Beroza, chair of Stanford’s Department of Geophysics, has called for more forecasts: “[W]e have to make earthquake forecasting as routine as weather forecasting.”[5]
This context holds several lessons for the scientific community. First, effective communication of nuance and uncertainty is difficult in the best of cases, and there is often a wide range of perspectives on the state of the science. But it becomes even more difficult when messages are being sent to the public via information that may be heard one way among experts and another among the public. When forecasters in Grand Forks intended to send a message of alarm, the public instead received a message of complacency. Similarly, scientists in L’Aquila seemed to want to send a message about authority and proper expertise, but the public received a message of complacency in the face of an ever-present risk.
Another lesson is that debates over forecasts and uncertainty often overshadow knowledge that is far more certain. Paul Somerville and Katharine Haynes of Macquarie University note wryly that “no action has yet been taken against the engineers who designed the buildings that collapsed and caused fatalities, or the government officials who were responsible for enforcing building code compliance.”[6]
The real tragedy of L’Aquila may not be that scientists led the public astray with their bumbled discussion of predictive science but, rather, that our broader obsession with predictions blinds us to the truths right before our eyes.
###
Roger Pielke, Jr. is the former director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado (2001-2007). He has been on the faculty of the University of Colorado since 2001 and is a professor in the Environmental Studies Program and a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences (CIRES).
References:
1. http://www.economist.com/node/21529006
trial-opens-against-scientists-accused-giving-misleading-big-132746544.html
Reference for quote: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/20/italian-scientists-trial-predict-earthquake
3. http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100622/full/465992a.html
4. www.mi.ingv.it/open_letter/
5. http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/september/systematic-earthquake-forecast-093011.html
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I’m Italian, and ashamed of what I heard this night about that on TV.
But in Italy that’s not the only case, you should live here to know.
This is a good write up and frankly after reading this and some more details about the case I think this event will overall be a good thing. Too many government officials spend most of the time telling everyone how important and right they are and how dare you challenge them. This message of accountable should hopefully make these nutbags who are only interested in pushing a power trip and collecting a pay check while doing into to take a look at themselves and ask “could this be me the next time I open my mouth”.
People who take taxpayer money need to be held accountable, period. Thought history to many “scientists” have escaped jail after stealing taxpayer money to push agenda’s. Clearly “ethics” “education” is not enough. Putting people like Mann, Ehrlich and other “doomers” in jail would send a message that crime doesn’t pay.
Anthony:
Pielke raises several important issues.
The one that made most impression on me was the politics (with a small ‘p’) which he reports. He writes
In such a situation it is not possible for the public to be given the clear information which they really need. Indeed, if that was the situation then providing that needed clear information was not a priority for those employed to provide it.
Simply, if the “impression” reported by Pielke is true then the “Major Risks Committee” deserved to be prosecuted. They put their personal interests above the public interest which they were employed to protect.
As someone who was employed for decades as a research scientist in a government-owned research facility, I think the members of the Major Risks Committee deserved what they got if Pielke’s “impression” is correct.
Richard
I have had a long exchange with the Met Office at their blog where I couldn’t make them understand a two-decimal measurement shouldn’t hide a first-decimal uncertainty.
Nothing will ever change.
In the US, lawyers have helped make it very expensive to receive medical treatment. A well seasoned doctor may be very confident that the patient has a sinus infection leading to bronchitis. In the past, he would prescribe some antibiotics, rest and lots of fluids, then send the patient home. But thanks to the our litigious society, the doctor will also call for a cat scan to be absolutely certain the patient doesn’t have lung cancer; and blood work to rule out 150 rare, tropical diseases. He can not afford to overlook anything, so he must check for everything.
Now this litigious culture is threatening to move into science. Some of us might think this is a good thing. All those warmists will have to pay up for their ridiculous and costly rantings about CAGW. But the result will be an endless spewing of useless donkey blanket statements, that will be of little use to society or individuals. This is already impacting the warning criteria for the National Weather Service, who regularly issue warnings if there is even the slightest chance of severe weather with a thunderstorm. Soon, people will generally ignore these warnings and then be surprised when the severe weather actually happens.
The possibility of being wrong when predicting the future state of a complex, chaotic, non-linear system is always present. The public needs to be educated on this fact and science must be free to find a balance between acting omniscient and being forced to list every conceivable permutation when making a prediction.
When we asked officials why this information was not released with the forecast, they told us they were worried that if information about uncertainties was known then the public would lose confidence in the forecasts.
I believe this would also apply to the CAGW theory.
I think there are situations where a scientist could be held liable for public policy that results from their work, but the bar would need to be set extraordinarily high. Its simply wrong to prosecute scientists for bad predication. A scientists would have to do really bad things, like publish results where they the results failed some verification test (like R^2, for example) but then covered up the adverse result. .Or maybe he sent a researcher who was trying to replicate his results a fake Excel spreadsheet to cause the researcher to make a mistake that the first scientist would then use to try to tar the replicating researcher with. Or maybe the scientist used a never-before-seen statistically method that was custom-designed to a knowingly produce false result from random noise. Or maybe the scientists used data that he dishonestly manipulated (turn it upside down, for example) to produce a false result. Or maybe the scientist diverted research funds into a massive PR campaign designed to demonize his critics and create a false impression with the public that all criticism of his research was funded by his political adversaries. But this would be extraordinary grievous conduct and no community of scientists would ever stand for it. That’s why I feel comfortable in the knowledge that the professional societies can police themselves.
From what I have read the defendents in this case are all government employees. In the US, government employees in general have broad imunity for official acts. Italy may find that they have no qualified applicants willing to fill these positions until explicit imunity against similar future procecusions is provided.
Criminal and / or civil courts are not the place for holding government employees acountable for acts legaly within their scope of duties. If Italy or any other country goes down this road they are likely to find themselves in the position where no one is willing to work for the government.
Jim Clarke: All the doctors that I have used and am aware of don’t seem to have got the memo. Its like pulling teeth trying to get anything done beyond “go home and take two aspirin, come back if it gets worse”.
They are much more frightened of insurance companies than the myth of attack lawyers.
Because of CSIRO (Australian Government Scientists) models predicting that Global Warming would result in ever decreasing rainfall, operators at Wivenhoe dam near Brisbane permitted water levels to rise to the point that when the deluge (totally unforeseen by BOM) arrived, the dam could perform no flood control function as originally intended. Worse still, to save the dam from destruction floodgates were opened and the community of Lockyer was obliterated and multiple deaths as a result.
If any ‘s’cientists needed to go to prison, these should be pretty near the top of the queue.
Well, as I commented on the other thread ”if it as appears in the report..” but even so I still think this smacks of scapegoating?
There is another thing which strikes me as very odd – which is that ‘telling the public what they need to know’ is entirely different to simply telling the public facts…..the public usually want to know everything will be ‘just fine’ and ‘we will do everything to sort it out’ – they do not want to be told to evacuate and leave all their belongings! Even when they are, in such situations many have to be forcifully removed!
As I see it, and without detailed knowledge of the specific geological facts of this case – the scientists should be allowed to make predictions based on whatever current knowledge is available. For something such as this, which is of course ENTIRELY unpredictable in real terms – and prediction for or against an earthquake must be taken by the government and individuals alike with the half tonne of salt required! If this has been a political ‘decision’, both in the manipulation of predictions and the way they are presented, and in the scapegoating of the actual scientists involved – then there needs to be a very high feeling of shame from those concerned in applying that political stance.
I will not condone the scapegoating of scientists (if that is what it is) UNLESS they have done something so grossly wrong as to clearly indicate malfeasence or indeed gross misconduct (somewhat like CAGW, huh?) – but in such a situation, unless it was a combined fraud, I fail to see how gross scientific incompetence is likely to have taken place………
regards
What impressed me most about the Grand Forks flood was the number of fires that conveniently started at the height of the event. Keep in mind that ordinary property insurance does not cover flooding, but it does cover loss by fire.
I have found that properly stated people will listen. We talk about a 100 year flood and people ignore us as that does not resonate with them. But we can say the same thing in a different way, there is 1 percent chance your home will be destroyed this year, and every one starts to pay attention.
This all ties in with a very recurrent theme in climate science of how to convey uncertainty to non scientists. This, in my opinion is a flaw in the comprehension of the scientists, not the public. They don’t seem to realise that uncertainty equals ‘don’t know’.
If you sold a car that only worked some of the time then the new owner would very cross if you didn’t admit fully and openly that it wasn’t to be relied upon before the purchase. Had you been honest then it would then be up to the purchaser to decide how much they wanted the car. You might find it hard to sell but you wouldn’t get an angry customer trying to rearrange your face.
Science has set itself up as a source of knowledge and as something useful to society. Scientists are not always making their sales pitch as pure theory. There won’t be a disclaimer saying ‘this is for entertainment purposes only, we take no responsibility for the end user’s interpretation’ at the bottom of a paper, report or memo. The reason for this is obvious – a lot of scientists would be unemployed if those funding them thought that there would never be a useful or reliable outcome.
Now a lot of the people who read WUWT are probably quite happy to fund pure science, I know I am. However, as warmists hate to admit, sceptics are actually quite an intelligent, educated bunch. Our gripe with climate science is not that there is uncertainty but that with their ‘consensus’, the scientists are faking success they haven’t achieved. They’re even faking consensus, because there are a great many issues under debate. A point that they’ve worked quite hard to hide.
Climate science and its orbital sciences have grown huge over the issue of CAGW. If it turns out to be wrong, then nobody should hope to claim uncertainty as a defence.
My take away from Rogers approach is that all things natural should, from the political/media sense (how can one separate the two since the media is now lapdog instead of watchdog), be treated as worse-case scenario only.
For what it’s worth, Wiki has human population increasing from 1 billion to 7 billion in about 200 years. How much is from a slight warming (the coolest warming in this Holocene) or our new found ability to adapt with fossil fuels I profess not to know. What has been the success of other life forms in the last two centuries?
Bottom line for me is should Italy have leveled the country and rebuilt to double, triple the earthquake code? Should North Dakota level riverfront cities and raise the grade above any foreseeable flood. Should the rest of the world pay for people who insist on building in places that have extensive histories of disaster (volcanoes, ocean front, major fault lines, etc.).
All my questions are moot since we have already saddled our progeny with so much debt, ignorance and misinformation that it’s going to be up to generations that can’t even make change for a dollar to adapt without even the skills to reason. Talk about a mother bird plucking the feathers off it’s own chicks.
Can natural science survive a capricious but severe legal gauntlet, in addition to the political gauntlet it must already run?
It also seems indicative of a public that is led to believe that whatever emanates from “scientists” mouth and pen must be true. It seems these scientists did nothing to convince the public otherwise: hubris and arrogance in their own knowledge and infallibillity perhaps? There is a general trend by the public and politicians to put absolute faith in science. It’s exacerbated by a media that seeks and interviews “experts” on the subject. The experts are not invited for subsequent interviews if they say they don’t know. It seems apparent everywhere and no less so than in the discussions on global warming. Scientists should not be afraid of being proven wrong. Political favortism, grant funding and public opinion has other ideas.
Dr. Pielke says too many air-dynamic words about it.
This is a savage witch hunt, pure and simple.
Not that the accused were not guilty of witchcraft, mind you.
How many shops and megastores had stocked up with BBQ sets and related items for the barbeque summers that never came in the UK, year after year? And how many customers were fooled to purchase these items?
Should the meteorologists at the Met office all go to jail?
Roger’s point about a communication problem is well put. That said, I think it is only half the problem.
The other half is that too many boys have “cried wolf” too many times about too many things. I’m old enough to have survived world disaster from ozone depletion, acid rain, toxic rain, global cooling, the population bomb, and now cagw. None of these has amounted to anything substantive in the public mind. Add to that the daily inundation of advertising we are all subjected to every day 24 x 7…. internet, tv, radio, billboards…. you can’t take a leak anymore without an add in your face…. a constant deluge of over promised, under delivered, goods and services, may of them trying to convince us they can fix problems we didn’t even know we had!
We’ve become nearly immune to information being pushed on us, we’re over loaded with it, and commensurate with the human condition, we tend to filter out anything we don’t want to hear, particularly things that seem like yet more fear mongering. When bad stuff happens, humans tend to lash out at the people who, in their minds, should have gone the extra mile to get through their “filters”.
Flood control engineer:
Your post at October 22, 2012 at 2:37 pm is so noteworthy that I copy it to draw attention to it.
You say
Indeed, so. And that is the kind of information the Major Risks Committee or any similar body exists to provide.
In the specific case which resulted in their prosecution, the very least the Major Risks Committee should have said is,
“We don’t know whether the tremors are or are not an indication of an impending quake. Our best judgement is that the tremors are not such an indication. The tremors are most likely a continuous discharge of energy with resulting reduction to risk of an imminent quake, but we could be wrong.”
Instead, Pielke’s article says that is not what they did. He says they did this
And, importantly, they seem to have downplayed the possibility of a quake for reasons of personal agrandisement. As Pielke says
These people were public servants employed to protect the public. Their situation was similar to soldiers during a war (they are also public servants employed to protect the public).
Dereliction of duty is a serious offence.
Richard
Too many people loosing focus here thinking about their own personal hobby horses.
These scientists should not be jailed, they were asked for an opinion and gavVe it. (aguely or not, does not matter).
By the same logic used to sentence them, the politicians involved should be jailed, for incorrectly interpreting the discussion, or not seeking answers further afield.
Pure primitive madness, and not helped by some clown comments in here.
After a quake in So. Cal. this commenter was serving at a Red Cross evacuation camp. When the “all clear” was given some didn’t want to return to their homes. (We had some veterans of the Mexico City disaster of 1985 and they remembered the aftershocks). We told them to stay put if they wanted — it was their lives, after all.
IMHO a lot of people are overlooking what probably got these people convicted: Telling the public to have a glass of wine you have no need to worry. That is a soundbite message that will stick in peoples minds and completely overshadows anything else they said, it is the equivalent of the CAGW phrase of unprecedented warming while showing a HokeyStick graph.
If they got up there and stated that:
“minor quakes can lead to a major one but we have no way to tell. The science of Earthquake prediction is still not mature and we believe ______ is overstating his case. However since you live in a high risk area make sure you are prepared everyday for one since they can come out of nowhere.”
If they had stated something like that no lawsuit would have been filed and if there was there would be no grounds for conviction. Instead they blew off the possibility of a Major Quake in favor of point scoring in Soundbite Science.
richardscourtney says:
October 22, 2012 at 3:56 pm
“These people were public servants employed to protect the public. Their situation was similar to soldiers during a war (they are also public servants employed to protect the public).
Dereliction of duty is a serious offence. ”
Agreed this issue is less about science and more about government. “Scientists” can come out and claim and do whatever they want that should not be interfered with.
However these people were government employees and thats a hugely different standard. If your a government employee even if your role is that of a “scientist” you either are held accountable or your collecting a pay check for doing nothing. Its pretty clear that these people were not interested in doing the job they were supposed to be doing but however were spending a great deal of time talking about such a wonderful job they were doing. They completely ignored a prediction about an earthquake to talk trash to the person making it. Unlike normally where the events happens and its not far enough outside of the prediction to ay the pay check collectors were wrong this event happened to be extreme. Since these employees were so busy trying to justify the pay check they collect through attacking and smearing someone else instead of through doingthe job they were supposed to do its perfectly reasonable to go after them.
Just like with most things its all well in good to believe something or claim thing its perfectly fine. However when you start involving the government in the belief through taxpayer money or trying to get the government to do something based on your “research” thats no longer science. Those actions needed to be properly held accountable.