Quake prediction – down to the weeks, days and hours is a dangerous game that I think is futile to win and dangerous to try to predict. Best to keep it like this (to protect your ass, I am sure I am leaving something out) –

“Sometime in the future, be it next week, the next few years or few decades, there is a possible likelyhood that there will be a large quake that might cause injury and death due to infrastructure failure. At any time there could be small quakes that might or might not relieve stresses and might or might not predict the coming of a larger event, so everyone should be prepared for a quake as they would any possible disaster that can strike at any time”

Scientists who offer advice to citizens or the government no longer work in the protective cocoon of pure research. If they present scientifically unsound information, or fail to present readily available information, there should be consequences. Any other type of consultant would be held accountable if their advice was wrong.

I would hold a meteorologist working for NOAA partially responsible if he didn’t send out a tornado warning when scientifically established criteria for such a warning had been met. I would hold a doctor accountable if he blantanly misdiagnosed a disease. On the flip side, I complain all the time when the government DOESN’T listen to scientists about global warming. There are real world consequences to what scientists do, and they need to be explicitly clear about what they know and don’t know.

Hopefully the scientists in this case did not provide unsound advice, and will be found not guilty.

You’re drawing some false conclusions about the simple facts of the case here. Apparently (based solely on what’s in the article) the seismologists didn’t make any public statements – they advised the Civil Protection Agency, whose spokesman then made the public statements which are the source of the trouble. “The scientists have since said the statement misrepresented their opinions”.

So a govt agency requested information from the scientists; their information was apparently complicated and inconclusive, as earthquake science tends to be; and then the govt agency made a statement that “The scientific community tells me there is no danger…” And now the scientists are on trial. The “misperception” you consider so damning was on the part of the govt official, not the scientists. In what way did the scientists not fulfill their “obligations?”

And how on earth can you feel the scientist are even partially responsible for what happened? It was an EARTHQUAKE. The people who were harmed live in a seismic zone – it’s not like they were completely unaware of that. They have chosen for generations not to improve their buildings or strengthen their building codes. What would they really have done differently if that govt official had said “The scientists tell me there is a small chance of a large earthquake”? And look at it the opposite way – what if the seismologists and the govt had come out and said “Run for your lives – there might be an earthquake!” And then the earthquake didn’t happen. Would they be responsible for the lost wages and travel costs of the people who fled due to their “failed obligation” in creating an unnecessary panic?

Despite one’s sypathy for the victims, it’s simply WRONG to hold people legally culpable for the simple act of studying and teaching about unpredictable natural events. There might be a vague case agaisnt the govt agent if he truly misrepresented the scientists’ statements – but even that puts an awful lot of weight on a person for making an educated guess about something outside his control.

When it comes to doctors being sued, I consider that a necessity, so those doctors who had become power-obsessed, realise that they are not almighty and that every patient´s life is valuable. Doctors can´t be sued, if patients were warned about risks of a potential operation or other medical treatment and provided with a contract to sign in reference to that matter. Doctors unlike patients are perfectly aware of these risks. Therefore it is their obligation to inform patients about them. But if doctors don´t even bother to warn patients about potential risks of a specific operation or medical treatment – well of course they are being sued. Patients have to defend their human rights somehow

People want to do what they want, and resent scientists coming along and telling them they should change their ways. Especially if the preferred behavior should cost them money or a change in lifestyle.

Apparently, it is not enough to predict that something will eventually happen. One must provide a date and time, and accurately predict consequences. Otherwise, anything said will be ignored, made fun of, or outright denied. And should the prediction be wrong, everything said after that will be ignored.

People seem to prefer warm fuzzy lies over cold, hard scientific truth.

You write a litany of ‘facts’ about tornado behavior that I am almost inclined to think you wrote your post while your tongue was firmly planted in your cheek.

Tornadoes are indifferent to what’s going on in the lowest, few hundred feet. After all, the tornado is not merely an appendage to a cloud base. Strong tornadoes originate in the mid-levels of a thunderstorm — which is why they can be ‘seen’ by doppler radars — more than 100km away.

This link is to a movie showing a long-tracked tornado descending into a valley.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEr2lCnQcow

Same tornado, different perspective:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ulMsPSQwIA&feature=related

Quad Cities time has not come….yet.

Back on topic, I am surprised the judge hasn’t dismissed the case already. Based on the litigant’s statement, they admit they have no standing.

Apparently Italian courts are different.

“When in doubt, say everyone’s in grave danger. It’ll keep things like this from happening and will help ensure that your work continues to get funding.”

I agree. All you need is one incident, somewhere in the world, and you can say “see?”. There’s always ways to prevent signal the damage against a natural disaster. Tornado deal virtually no damage to things underground, earthquakes can be combated with base isolation and distance from other buildings, Hurricanes can be combated with dome shapes, distance from trees, and being well above sea level, floods with stilts, high ground, and waterproofing.
We just have a Culturally definied definition of what a building should look like, then we herp-a-derp over heels and are shocked when buildings that groan when hit by a stiff breeze get flattened by something stronger. Sure, you can’t account for every variable – Hurricanes, flash floods and tornados have a nasty habit of picking up trees, cars, and houses to use as seige weapons – But we should be at least trying.

Sorry tangent…we get nothing out of prosecuting them, all we do is make scientists cscared of giving their true ideas.

In my area the tornado siren goes off if there’s a tornado warning anywhere in about a 5-10 mile radius of our town. Now, out in the rural parts of the state that’s good enough reason to go into your basement.

But we live in the Quad Cities, which spans the IA & IL sides of the Mississippi River, involves several towns nestled together, and all this sits in a valley. As a result, tornadoes almost never come into town, and when they do, then never touch normal neighborhoods. The most they’ll touch is stuff in the small towns surrounding us, or some of the houses on the outer edges of the metro area. They also never jump the river, so those of us on the IL side have never had a tornado in town, at least not in a hundred years or so.

The result becomes: most people ignore the siren. In fact, hearing the siren in my house means the storm is bad enough to check the weather really quick and make sure something insane isn’t happening (like Day After Tomorrow insane), and if it isn’t you close the windows and go back to whatever you were doing.

Warnings lose purpose if they aren’t genuinely warning of impeding disaster and only warn you MIGHT need to get mildly worried.

When in doubt, say everyone’s in grave danger. It’ll keep things like this from happening and will help ensure that your work continues to get funding.

I would argue that you’d be wrong on both counts. There’s no way to prevent an earthquake or its resulting damage. False alarms would inconvenience everyone and possibly cause a lack of faith in your work, thereby reducing funding.

Obviously I’m with the other posters here in thinking these seismologists are being used as scapegoats, but it’s an interesting situation that could have wider-reaching consequences.

The fact of the matter is that this alone will make a lot of people reconsider becoming seismologists and those who are consider changing jobs. After all, if they are wrong, and they will be, they will be indicted for manslaughter. Who wants that kind of job? So what’s next? Trying the scientists who didn’t know the exact trajectory of a tornado because they didn’t tell you which homes were going to be destroyed?