Just in. Wow, this is a surprising verdict…
Story here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20025626
This will put a chill on all sorts of forecasts where life and property are at risk.
Given this precedent, it likely puts an end to the science of earthquake forecasting…at least publicly.
But that’s a catch-22 also. If a scientist suspects a quake based on his measurements and experience, and says nothing about it for fear of retribution, does that make the scientist also guilty of manslaughter?
UPDATE: Roger Pielke Jr. supplies some background on the issue here
If the Italian appeals courts allow these convictions stand the Italian national government will likley find itself having to povide legal imunity to the positions the defendents had in order to get anyone to apply for them.
From the Corriere del Mezzogiorno, edizione di Napoli, June 2017.
Journalist: Professor, can you give us advice in view of the persistent seismic activity at monte Vesuvius; should we leave town or is it safe to stay?
Professor: No comment.
Journalist: But surely you must know if or when an eruption is imminent?
Professor: No comment.
Journalist: I can’t believe you have nothing to say.
Professor: That I have: you are on your own.
Remember Amanda Knox?
Italian justice is never conclusive.
In court, the presence of a jury is no guarantee that the judgment will be fair and accurate … Jury members can act with political and/or self-interest, as well as the judges.
Given recent history, It seems to me that The Italian prisons must be full of innocent people.
Sounds strange, but I am feeling incomplete data, something is missing from the story. The BBC is also not explaining what is indeed the case.
The media is sometime spinning stories in their ways, so when details are missing I do not feel comfortable with it.
Thinking of it, I ask myself what are the standards for building earthquake safe homes in the area? Why did all those building collapse with a 6.3 magnitude earthquake? Should buildings not be able to withstand that, or was the quake closer to the surface and thus more devastating?
Opportunity for lawyers?
In Italy, someone is ALWAYS responsible for each death regardless of accidental nature. As in the case of an internationally famous racing driver at San Marino in 1994. The driver went off the track unassisted, hit a wall and was killed instantly(surprisingly, the Italian authorities did not go after the wall builders!). Arrest warrants were issued for the racing team owner and mechanics, also on charges of manslaughter, although they were not Italian citizens. The case dragged through the courts for ten years and they were eventually aquitted. These scientists just need better lawyers for the appeal.
Other posters above should be careful what they wish for. Just because the Mann/Hansen/IPCC model predictions have never been fulfilled, does not mean the court tables could still be turned towards the d_____s!
Welcome to Middle Ages. Results of “public education,” in your face.
The fact that Italian government paid people to predict earthquakes is bad enough.
But throwing them to prison for being not able to predict an earthquake?
I thought I couldn’t be surprised any more by the cretinism of the modern society. I was wrong.
This is a win for all ALARMISTS
Lars et al.,
The cause of all this mess has a name and a Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Giampaolo-Giuliani/83197100090?ref=mf.
In a rational world voices like these would be relegated to padded cells filled with Napolean wannabes. Today Giuliani is feted as a hero because folks sleep in their cars for two weeks at a time, declaring that it’s better to be prepared and safe rather than listen to cynics who say we can’t predict events like earthquakes. I hope their cars are comfy, because those who listen to deluded clairvoyants like Giuliani will be spending quite a long time out of their houses.
He’s even leaving declarations of “justice done” to the eager press.
As for the building codes, unfortunately there were not very rigorous seismic construction codes following the devastating earthquakes of 1315, 1349, 1461, 1646, 1672, 1703, etc. The post-war buildings are in some cases the worst examples of how not to build in an earthquake zone. The codes are updated continuously, but new structures are relatively sparse in all Italian cities. So, most new structures will not feel the effects of these relatively strong quakes, but most of the houses are not new. It is very expensive to retrofit or reinforce existing buildings, although that is what the country is doing little by little with its historical centers.
By the way, the geology of the Italian hills means that relatively low-energy tremors are felt at the surface. The Mercalli scale gives a better idea of what’s going on in the city than simply the Richter. The Aquila quake was not your run-of-the-mill tremor.
How much time will Al Gore do in pokey for causing massive energy price rises around the world with his falsified information?
In the middle of Atlas Shrugged after a couple of decades, this fits right in. Moratorium on Brains.
Anthony;
Actual Scientists (people that practice the scientific method) should not be alarmed by this ruling.
There is a LOT more to this story then the media is putting out at this time.
Let us look back to 2009.
—
A scientist’s claim to have forecast an earthquake that killed dozens of people in central Italy has been challenged by authorities and experts.
Italian researcher Giampaolo Giuliani said he had forecast a major quake in the area by measuring emissions of a radioactive gas, radon.
But the head of Italy’s civil protection agency dismissed the claim.
Other scientists have also cast doubt on the possibility of predicting earthquakes with any accuracy.
Shortly before Monday’s earthquake in and around the city of L’Aquila, Mr Giuliani was reported to the authorities for spreading alarm when locals apparently took fright at his warnings.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7986585.stm
—
[Hard upon the news of the earthquake came news that a Giampaolo Giuliani had predicted this earthquake, had tried to warn the public, but had been muzzled by the Italian government]
http://www.ajr.org/article_printable.asp?id=4751
—
Key in these (and other report) at the time are:
1. Giampaolo Giuliani was not an Earthquake Prediction Expert.
Giampaolo Giuliani was a laboratory technician at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso. As a hobby he has for some years been monitoring radon (a short-lived radioactive gas that has been implicated as an earthquake precursor) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_prediction)
2. The Consensus of the Experts was that Giampaolo was not an expert and must be ignored.
These are the Experts (the people going to jail today) that silenced the non-expert:
Franco Barberi, head of Serious Risks Commission
Enzo Boschi, former president of the National Institute of Geophysics
Giulio Selvaggi, director of National Earthquake Centre
Gian Michele Calvi, director of European Centre for Earthquake Engineering
Claudio Eva, physicist
Mauro Dolce, director of the the Civil Protection Agency’s earthquake risk office
Bernardo De Bernardinis, former vice-president of Civil Protection Agency’s technical department
NOTICE: Giampaolo Giuliani is NOT in the list.
3. They are going to jail, not because they failed to predict the earthquake, they are going to jail because they colluded to prevent a Giampaolo from making a public statement that contradicted their authority.
4. Closing ranks by the ‘Scientific Community’ against the charge of suppressing a dissenting opinion did not sway the court.
[Earlier, more than 5,000 scientists signed an open letter to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano in support of the group in the dock. (from today’s BBC story)]
In short, what has happened is:
Experts put in jail for suppressing dissent.
Not
Experts put in jail for not forecasting an earthquake.
Holding Experts (even self proclaimed Experts) Accountable for their actions is a good thing.
This case pales in comparison to the failure of the Hawaii-based tsunami warning center (I don’t know its official title) to issue a warning after it detected the 9-handle Indonesia undersea earthquake.
Seems nobody is allowed to say they ‘just dont know’,w hiuch w0uld have been the right thing to say by the scientists first investigating the earth tremors in Italy.
Politicians want a yes or a no, they don’t like ‘I dont know’, because they are then seen to not be doing anything (which is the correct thing to do if one doesnt know-same goes for catastrophic global warming at some distant time hence-it should be left in the h0nest catergory of ‘we just dont know’, until better evidence arrives-the evidence to date is weak and contradictory).
There is another good example of this, away from western politics. In PNG I worked for some years, and I was told that there is barely a word in the language in some places for ‘I dont know’. If you ask a question they will invariably answer ‘yes’ to everything (whether the answer is ‘yes’ or not-such as ‘did it rain this morning’-they will often say ‘yes’, even if it didn’t), rarely they will say no, and virtually never ‘I don’t know’. This is because by admitting one doesnt ‘know’ something, one is admitting weakness or failure in their culture, especially to a foreigner which admits shame, loss of face and loss of pride. Many 3rd world countries apparently have this cultural problem of never saying ‘I dont know’, so by inference, a government that has a culture where ‘I dont know’ is unacceptable is a culture of politics, face, and pride, and nothing to do with data and science.
Thanks for that, Andrew30.
I’m wondering about the great silence from the USGS about very interesting, and potentially omenous activity in SoCal generally; however, not along the San Andreas from roughly Parkfield to Palm Springs. Since the Baja earthquakes in 2009 and 2010 [1,2], the Salton Sea region, the Mojave, and eastern Sierra have begun to produce very frequent small earthquakes that didn’t occur as frequently before these events.
After the baja quakes, it occurred to me the activity might move north, and if so, we would see increasing earthquakes in the region. I have been monitoring the USGS CA/NV earthquake site since. Early,on, there were few events as far north as the Salton Sea. Now they are very common. The activity more recently spread to the Mojave/Tehachapi area, and now is moving into Mammoth and western NV. Any one map view doesn’t tell the story, but watching for a few months makes the pattern emerge. Of course, events always occurred in these areas; the difference is they are more frequent now.
Interestingly, a change in earthquake reporting on the USGS site tends to hide these emerging patterns. The old CA/NV site [3] shows 1 week of events down to mag 1. The new site by default shows mag 2.5 and higher [4]. If you know to do so, you can view all events for the last 30 days down to mag 1. Then the pattern becomes pretty clear. But what it actually means is still a question.
Of course, we don’t know when the “big one” will occur. The biggest event on this segment was the 1857 Ft. Tejon earthquake [5,6]. Big earthquakes don’t occur frequently, but this heightened activity indicates SoCal is moving. Whether that means a larger segment of the San Andreas will rupture soon or not, we don’t know. Perhaps this activity only means stress is building. We already knew that.
It seems unusual the USGS is apparently avoiding the discussion. They recently denied the earthquakes in SoCal (e.g. Yorba Linda [7] and Mexicali [8]) were protentous [9,10]. Of course, that’s technically true since the science of earthquake prediction is not advanced. The Brawley swarm was discussed out of context of broader increased activity, compared to another similar swarm in 2005. I’d like to know whether the seismologists are ignoring the larger pattern (missing the forest for the trees), or honestly believe this clearly more active period has no significance regarding the likelihood of a larger event on the southern San Andreas.
1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Gulf_of_California_earthquake
2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Baja_California_earthquake
3) http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqscanv/
4) http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/
5) http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/parkfield/1857.php
6) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_California
7) http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/08/earthquake-in-la/
8) http://earthquake-report.com/2012/08/26/powerful-earthquake-swarm-in-southern-california-mexico-border/
9) http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/08/southern-california-earthquake-swarm-slowing-down.html
10) http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqinthenews/2012/brawleyswarmAug/
Vince Causey says (October 22, 12:08 pm) ” One hopes that such a miscarriage would not happen in a true western democracy.”
Agreed. But neither Italy nor Greece is a “true western democracy” any longer. Both have had their prime ministers replaced with new world order “technocrats”, whose job it is to force through the “austerity” programmes mandated by the international banks whose policies destroyed their economies in the first place. The outward form of government remains (the technocrats have adopted the title “prime minister”), but probably only as long as they do what they’re told and support the legislation being forced on them. Expect this sort of situation to become more common.
Italian justice usually follows the going popular consensus. The consensus was someone had to be blamed, evidently it should be those scientists who ‘failed at their job’.
This sentence is going to be overturned with ease in appeal. move on folks, nothing to see here.
If earthquakes cannot be predicted, keep your mouth shut. Lesson learned.
This is indeed rather strange, but recall they are sitting on a time bomb, Mount Vesuvius, just finished a masters unit in the fate of Pompeii and Herculaneum and I can tell you, that they do have emergency evacuation procedures for just 600,000 people around the Bay of Naples where 3 million live. The area is subject to terrible earthquakes too, probably connected to MV and its tectonic and magma basin movements under the sea. In 1980 they had a very bad earthquake in Italy and ten years later 10,000 people were still to be placed in homes. What they reckon that they would have several weeks notice in Mt V exploded again? One scientist believes that that is not the case, minor seismic activity is an indication for sure, But – look at St.Helens in Washington State, well AD 79 Vesuvius eruption was hundreds of times larger. Even worse that Mt.Pele.
And they can’t get insurance in parts of Campania because of the risk factor?
To try to predict the unpredictable can only be an Italian concept. Perhaps the Mafia should have a go, they run most things in Italy.
Andrew30,
You may have a (very convoluted) legal point but the public perception of the court’s decision in this case is simple:
Scientists are being jailed as scapegoats because they were “in charge of the earthquake prediction” and “failed to prevent a catastrophe”.
Reminds me of the old Russian ritual of rolling a priest over a field after crop failure. Harvest and weather are God’s business, right? Priest is in charge of communicating people’s needs to God, isn’t he? Therefore, bad harvest is priest’s failure. He was lazy or doesn’t know his trade. You cannot punish God for your privations but surely you can punish His servant! Next year God would have to pay more attention!
Andrew30′ s remarks are very interesting, and do open a new can of worms. Prediction of the future has always been part of politics. If it is the case that the scientists muzzled the researcher for reasons of professional pride and power, then they are paying the price for the same kind of arrogant foolishness we criticise here in the area of AGW. I’m not sure that 6 years in prison is appropriate, but maybe simple outrage at the report of ‘scientists jailed for getting it wrong’ is also misplaced.
Of course, it still smacks of an infantile society demanding that its ‘right to life’ be ‘respected’. The notion of an all-knowing scientific and political establishment that will always protect the people from harm is a childlike nonsense which is no less characteristic of modern countries in the West than in Alexander Feht’s feudal Russia.
The tragedy here is that the whole affair was caused by and is sustained by mass hysteria fueled by terrible ignorance. The scientists did not arrogantly put down some outsider possessing vital information usefully predicting a disaster. They responded in the best way they could to mass panic, partially caused by a certain scientist with a bad case of hubris.
In the month leading up to the big earthquake in Aquila there were constant tremors in the central Italian region of Abruzzo. The population in that region was living in a constant state of fear, and they were looking for reassurance from the authorities (btw, not something I would ever advise in Italy). They found no security in the official government offices, since they couldn’t say much about what would be coming down the pike. There was one voice, however, sounding the alarm: our now famous Mr. Giuliani, who was working on earthquake prediction schemes in his free time in a national nuclear physics lab, was picked up by all the local and national media warning of an imminent earthquake that would devastate the territory. He had just the right mix of qualities to be hailed by the terrified populace: a scientist with a reasonable sounding predictive method, an outsider, an underdog, and enough arrogance to prove he could stand up to The Man.
Now, I believe Mr. Giuliani’s analyses may have something to offer seismology, but I also think it’s best we leave it to the experts to decide whether or not they can be incorporated into a useful system. All we know is, Mr. Giuliani’s warnings disseminated panic in Abruzzo. Just so we’re not splitting hairs here: Giuliani declared (and still declares) that his system PREDICTS events and magnitudes to a time resolution of 6 to 24 hours with 80% accuracy. I’m not aware of declarations regarding spatial resolution, but clearly the man is way off base with respect to seismology.
On the last Sunday of March he was put through the police in direct telephone contact with the mayor of Sulmona, in Rome at the time, who was quickly alerted that there would be a devastating quake in his city within hours! What’s a mayor to do? Evacuate the town? Sound the alarm? Call the wife? It doesn’t really matter what the mayor should have done, though, since he was probably the last one to hear the warning; the city was already delirious with panic.
Naturally, Sunday passed, Monday passed…more than a week passed, and the tremors continued. Mr. Giuliani was served papers for inciting public unrest. The Big Risk Commission met and mumbled something to the public about how they can’t predict earthquakes, but that the constant low energy events are releasing enough pressure not to worry too much. That’s not enough for panicky people, especially when Giuliani is becoming something of a martyr and folk hero.
Then Aquila collapses. And guess who gets to say “I told you so”? Naturally the hero is washed off, the villains who would not listen to this simple voice crying out with true prophecies are dragged into the gutter. Anyone who was still sleeping in the car now is vindicated, since these are the people who survived their houses’ collapse.
For the same reason we gamble our money away part of the local population signed on to the martyr/prophet/David/Goliath story and sticks to it ’till today. Yesterday there were victims’ families dancing and crying in the streets of Aquila for the justice they were so justly served.
So, you have a guy with a hunch and some really cool radon sensors who correctly predicted the destruction of a town–except that the big event occurred ten days late and 85km away from what he foresaw. How useful do you think his instrument is? What purpose can it serve with this sort of accuracy? Or was it just luck–everybody and his grandmother was screaming “Big One” at the time.
One local official put it best when he asked dryly after the event what would have happened if the city of Sulmona had heeded Giuliani’s call and evacuated? Most likely half the population would have been with relatives in Aquila.
Stephen Fox says: October 23, 2012 at 10:08 am
[Andrew30′ s remarks are very interesting, and do open a new can of worms. ]
Stephen, Experts suppressing the analysis of informed people is not new.
It blew up Challenger in 1986.
However no one went to jail, so the jail part is new