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 was at the Royal Society meeting on climate and met some of the modellers. What surprised me was how much like us sceptics they are. They didn’t openly state as much but … well let’s just say they were not enthusiastic about the ability of their models to predict the climate a long way in advance.
The real enthusiasts weren’t these people “in the know” but the lackeys, bosses and NGOs who use these climate models. It was almost as if the only people who believe the climate models were those who have no idea what they actually mean.
Indeed, seeing one reading various sceptic blogs, I’m beginning to wonder just how many sceptics are actually working at the Met Office … sceptics in their private time … but officially still warmists when their (scientifically illiterate) bosses are watching.
I can just imagine the conversation these guys might have with their bosses ….
“So you’ve created this model” … “yes”.
“And it’s the best model available” …. “yes”.
“And you’ve worked out the certainty” …. “yes”
“And that certainty is very high” …. “yes”
“So that means the climate will warm 6°C this century” … “I don’t know”.
“What do you mean: ‘you don’t know?'” … “you said you had the best models and you give very high levels of confidence so everything looks great?” … “yes”?
“So why do you say: ‘you don’t know” … “because I don’t know what I don’t know”.
“But what you do know you have a great deal of confidence in” … “yes”.
“So that is what I’m going to tell the press” …“you’re the boss.”
It’s strange that I was reading Forgotten Civilization: The Role of Solar Outbursts In Our Past and Future by Robert M Schoch, Ph.D, just a couple hours ago about earthquake, Schoch brought up the name of Raffaele Bendandi who was “self-taught seismologist” from ITALY who apparently was able to come up with ways to predict earthquakes. Are we seeing another version of Alfred Wegener over earthquake? Amazingly, his prediction of earthquake was in 1924! Apparently, it was forgotten till recently when Christiano Fidani, a physicist with the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, Perugia, started looking into it and apparently took Bendandi’s work seriously. It’d be interesting to see where it leads to…
FYI, Dr. Schoch used Svensmark as a source quite a bit over cosmoclimatology in his book…
John another says above (at October 22, 2012 at 3:19 pm), “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.”
Casting everything as worst-case will only make matters worse. For one thing, worst-case is almost always wrong. As others have noted above, the audience gets numb and starts to ignore the legitimate warnings. The second aspect is that any given event almost always has two sides, making the definition of “worst-case” problematic. For example, a severe thunderstorm may also break a severe drought. You have to make a prediction but which is worst depends on your perspective.
My take-away is entirely different. Reading about both the ND case and the Italian case, the error was in trying to make a single simple prediction rather than to express the risk as a range. Had the weather service said “We predict the flood crest to be 49 feet but there is a 25% chance that it could be 54 feet or higher” (assuming that’s what the probability was), well, the local residents still may have elected to roll the dice but they would have no excuse to say they weren’t warned. Likewise, if the Italian scientists had stuck to what they knew and explicitly said what they didn’t know and if they had not let themselves get sucked into the black-and-white sound-bites that the media presses for, they would have been fine.
The error is not in the prediction or even in the way it is communicated but in the arrogance of assuming that your audience is stupid. Normal people are able to understand ranges and probabiliites. They understand uncertainty. We all make decisions under conditions of uncertainty every day.
Matt says:
October 22, 2012 at 2:07 pm
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.
Matt. What is the problem here? All that you have stated,except for the immunity part and the courts,is a feature.The only bug is the immunity/courts. Or do you like gubermints stealing your hard earned cash?
I am of two minds on this. But mostly I am of the mind that this judgement may be sending the correct message to the pseudo-scientists out there who are abusing science while making unscientific claims. I believe that jail is warranted for scientists who lie and enter the political propaganda realm when they otherwise should be exercising more sober reasoning.
As I have mentioned many times before here in Anthony’s blog, the victim here is the truth and the abusers of the truth have been those scientists who are exploiting their station in society to advance their beliefs.
Truth in science should be a blood oath, where offenders should outlaw themselves.
There is nothing worse than a hypocritical scientist, who mocks the medieval church for silencing Galileo, and does the same here and now in the modern world. The truth is the objective truth.
Lying is an offense to the intellect and causes harm to the public.
Whether in this case, a failure to predict an earthquake is harm by omission, is questionable to me. But “SCIENCE” brought it on itself by pretending, in so many ways, to be so certain about everything.
CJ Nelson,
The deaths at Lockyer had nothing to do with the Wivenhoe Dam, it was a totally differnt drainage system. What the water releases at Wivenhoe did was increase flooding downstream in Brisbane which was already receiving the floodwaters from the Lockyer and Bremer systems. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, had the Wivenhoe dam not been there flooding in Brisbane would have been worse.
Unfortunately there is a likelyhood of more deaths as the urban sprawl spreads into the rural valleys of SE Queensland.
I should have provided a link to the case to which I was referring…
here it is:
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Backchannels/2012/1022/Earthquake-predictions-and-a-triumph-of-scientific-illiteracy-in-an-Italian-court
I wonder if they will sue climate scientists one day. After all this issue seems to be about misleading people about what you don’t really know.
This is exactly why I always tell my analytical and instrumental students that numbers/results mean nothing without its associated uncertainty and no matter what pressure you get from someone, political or otherwise, the result is always reported with the associated uncertainty. If you have to explain what it means so be it, but there are no absolutes when taking measurements.
Well – what do you think, this is a hypothetical question. If some scientists told the powers of be, that ‘Look, mate we better begin to think what we can do, if Stephen S predictions of a coming ice age are true…’ Now Carl Sagan warned if we don’t stop using fossil fuels, we will start a new ice age?’ Get some info because we don’t know how another ice age will effect us, bu..er the rest of the world, (etc, etc). They Ally Gore got the message and started a new chapter… and made a few dollars on the side because of it, academy award, and a Nobel Prize. Frighten people to change their ways, and prepare to use less energy when it gets colder.
A warm period has always been followed by an ice age or mini ice age. We were not around in the last full glacial period, but we knew what happened during the mini ice age.
So alarmism is fine, while expressing the most likely scenario based on available information may be a crime.
Paul Westhaver says:
As I have mentioned many times before here in Anthony’s blog, the victim here is the truth
The truth … as if there is only one viewpoint that is valid and therefore the rest are false?
That is the problem. The problem has been this dogmatic viewpoint that there can only be one truth and because climate researchers believed they had found “the truth”, it therefore followed that everyone else must be wrong.
Paradoxically, the way out of this mess is to accept that there are many truths … or to be more exact there are many “best guesses” as to what could happen and that given our lack of experience, that they should all be considered. Only when we accept that there are many possible “truths”, can we hope that one of those views we encompass in our range of possible truths may just be somewhere near “the truth”.
Second guessing the public is unproductive for scientists.
There is a difference between influencing and informing, as the former immediately becomes political, and that game will be won by those with political skills, not scientific skills.
bushbunny says: “Well – what do you think, this is a hypothetical question. If some scientists told the powers of be …”
Bushbunny, the fact is that there is now a gap between what the climate researchers seem to accept about their knowledge of the climate and a group of people who are the “users” of climate projections. At the Royal Society meeting, I started thinking: “I wish they all had name badges saying: ‘warmist’ or ‘sceptic'” because it was so hard listening to them to work out which they were.
That however wasn’t true of those who didn’t understand the climate. They were very clear of their views and those were the kind of dogmatic things you get from the likes of Gore, Head of the Met Office etc.
There are several explanations:
1. The meeting I went to just happened to have a small minority of climate researchers who just happened to be the reasonable ones we never hear about
2. That something dramatic is changing but that changing mood has not spread out from those “in the know” to their users yet.
3. That climate researchers have always been sceptics at heart and they (like us) have just been misunderstood by their bosses and their PR departments & their politically motivated colleagues who create nonsense about certainty where none exists.
The third is quite worrying. When we hear calls for “better communication of climate science”, I’d always assumed it was the eco-zealots trying to convince us sensible people to adopt their nonsense. But, now I wonder whether it might be the sensible climate researchers trying to find a way to calm down their colleagues to communicate their sensible (sceptical) positions to their colleagues who have singularly misunderstood what they mean.
And then it becomes a catch 22. The climate researchers can only get funding to do the research that those who misunderstand their research don’t understand needs doing. The more pragmatic they are … the less inclined they are to get involved in the “politics” … so those with a pragmatic view have no real say over what happens … the result being that climate science illiterates (i.e. non pragmatists) like Gore control the agenda … boost the profile of a few eco-zealots like Hansen and Mann … and keep all the rest from having any real say.And once you get a few people of a particular point of view in charge, they can then have a vastly more influential role than their numbers. They can create an atmosphere where it is no longer acceptable to have other views … so forcing the silent majority to just keep quiet in the belief they are indeed a marginalised minority.
Can I add. The reason this is worrying is that if we have this problem whereby those at the “coal face” of science are not able to communicate to the public because that message is being misrepresented by their bosses, PR departments etc., this may be a systemic problem in science where we have created scientifically literate people who are communication babies.
We have great research, which is entirely going to waste because it cannot be effectively and accurately communicated to the public.
That could suggest the answer is to bring in “communications skills” to all science degrees. On the other hand, it could also mean we have to start the other end … that e.g. there should be a quota of scientists and engineers in parliaments much as there have been quotas for women on party shortlists. Likewise, the civil service ought to have say >10% of its intake from a science or engineering background.
I will credit my wife with this. I was saying that too many people don’t (or refuse) to understand that nature has the power and we really can’t do much about it. She said, ” Al Gore has convinced them that we can”. I had to laugh at that one.
Mike Haseler:
You make several good points in your series of posts throughout this thread, and I commend everybody to read those posts.
However, with respect, your arguments addresses a different subject to the subject of this thread.
In this thread we are considering how members of a public body (i.e. the Italian ‘Major Risks Committee) were held to account for their failure to fulfil their duty. I explain this in my post at October 22, 2012 at 3:56 pm.
If Pielke’s article is correct then the committee members clearly did not fulfil their duties
(a) to warn the public of what the committee members knew – or should have known – were the existing risks,
and
(b) members of the committee deliberately misled the public for reasons of personal career advancement/protection.
If the public had known the Committee assessed the risk to be minimal but real then members of the public could have made their own decisions using that knowledge. But the Committee advised the public the Committe knew the risk was so small that everybody should relax, drink a glass of wine, and ignore the tremors which were concerning them.
It cannot be known how many lives were lost because concerned people were induced by the Committee’s advise to change their minds about sleeping outdoors or leaving the area. But the number who died because they changed their minds is not likely to be zero. And the inducement to change their minds was a lie (as explained in my post at October 22, 2012 at 3:56 pm). The Committee members were successfully prosecuted for manslaughter (which seems eminently just).
But you are discussing the interaction of researchers and the public. That is a completely different issue. And governments are aware of the problems which you discuss.
Governments establish bodies such as the Italian ‘Major Risks Committee’ because politicians are aware of the issues you raise. It is the job of those bodies to provide clear and factual information which is independent of those issues. The Italian ‘Major Risks Committee’ accepted that job but chose to not do it because they put selfish interests before the duty they had accepted. Their refusal to do that duty had the result that people died who may not have died if the committee had not been derelict in its duty.
As I see it, the only point worthy of debate is whether 4 years in jail is sufficient punishment for those who were convicted.
Richard
Reminescent of Michael Fish, 15 Okt 1987: “Earlier on today, apparently, a woman rang the BBC and said she heard there was a hurricane on the way; well, if you’re watching, don’t worry, there isn’t, but having said that, actually, the weather will become very windy, but most of the strong winds, incidentally, will be down over Spain and across into France.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Storm_of_1987
The storm killed 18 in Britain. Apparently Fish needs to be sentenced to six years for manslaughter.
1997, and current, Grand Forks resident here. The article is spot on. The crest prediction of 49 feet was indeed met with little alarm. While the 79 flood caused more than a “little” damage, it was a manageable event and people were planning to act in response to how the 79 flood went. The NWS totally dropped the ball as they only increased the crest prediction WELL after it was clear that those numbers were incorrect. Since we didn’t have any reliable data, and many were QUITE pissed at the NWS even then, we continued trying to raise dikes when the correct course would have been to start moving anything that wasn’t nailed down to higher ground and then evacuating.
Instead my family had to evacuate with one to two hour notice. When we left I didn’t even have a pair of shoes, as I had left them at a friends house the day before, I only had a single pair of water boots. We lived east of Washington and the water was rising fast through the storm drains. My dad drove in front in the pickup with my younger brother and I was in the Tempo with my mom. My mom and dad were hoping that by following in the wake of the pickup, the car would make it through the deep spots. If it stalled, my mom and I were to immediately abandon the car and climb onto the back of the pickup. I remember that we did get some water seep into the car from the doors, but we made it to Washington and then drove to my uncle’s house north of Bismark.
politicians and bureaucrats in Italy are what the joke-books are full of, Provincial government elite with millions of Euros in bank accounts outside Italy, millionaire housing, dozens of exotic cars, salaries greater than Obama, thousands of bottles of ( FRENCH ) champagne at an invitation “party” in Rome (one nights fun US $12,000,000 ) “consultants on six figure retainers” are just a few of what the Italian newspapers are full of today,
AND NOW:
Quote “The deputy chef and scientists held a SHORT ONE HOUR MEETING and then a press conference”
That tells it all, having lived and worked in Italy for the past 25 years I would guess that the 7 people convicted would each be on the top end of $250,000 a year and a 10 hour a week 4 months a year.
‘Al baby’ Gore threatened with arrest
Is making global-warming claims unsupported by science a crime?
http://www.wnd.com/2012/10/monckton-threatens-al-baby-gore-with-arrest/
Mike Haseler says:
October 23, 2012 at 12:34 am
Paradoxically, the way out of this mess is to accept that there are many truths …
========
Consider the statement X causes Y.
This statement is only true if you ignore what causes X. As soon as you introduce a new statement, W causes X, then you have W causes Y, and X causes Y is not longer true. W causes Y, X is simply an intermediate result..
So, you could say the CO2 causes global warming, but what causes CO2? CO2 is a product of prosperity. The more prosperous a country becomes, the more CO2 it produces.
So, one could say the prosperity causes CO2, and thus prosperity causes global warming. So, the solution to global warming is to end prosperity. The truth of this can be seen in the US, where CO2 levels have fallen, as has prosperity.
cRR Kampen:
Your post at October 23, 2012 at 6:02 am completely fails to understand the issue.
Michael Fish made an error in a prediction during the conduct of his duty.
The Italian ‘Major Risks Committee’ were derelict in their duty.
Chalk and cheese.
Richard
I am still wrestling with the utterly bizarre outcome of this “trial” whereby a person was held accountable for having made a scientific prediction that turned out to be wrong.
And in something as unpredictable as earthquakes….. you have to be kidding ! What is going to be next ? Taking weather forecasters to court because it rained when they predicted sun ? It brings back uncomfortable images of the witch hunts of the middle ages ….. indeed a sad day for Europe.