… and that is not hyperbole:
The trial for seven people accused of manslaughter in connection to an earthquake that killed more than 300 people in the Italian city of L’Aquila was pushed back Saturday to mid-October.
The seven — six scientists from the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology (INGV) and a member of the Civil Protection Agency — were members of a governmental panel that prosecutors accuse of giving a “rough, generic and ineffective assessment of the seismic risk” before the earthquake struck in April 2009.
… too bad they weren’t as skilled in predicting as Global Warming WWF scientists.
Well kids, you now know at least one carrier choice to take off the list.
Career
Since earthquakes, tsunamis and cat scratch fever are all caused by global warming I wonder why they are not going after the warmist ‘scientists’ /sarc
A 6.3 is not a gigantic earthquake by any stretch of the imagination. What’s more damning is that 300 people died in what should be an indictment of Italian infrastructure.
I’m sure the Italian government will have no trouble in the future when it tries to recruit scientists to its ” major risks commission”. I mean, what could possibly deter anyone from volunteering?
Well, they won’t sue God because:
1. They probably don’t believe in one.
2. It’d be hard to get him to pay up if they win.
On the other hand, governments don’t believe in God either and have deep pockets in the here and now.
The results are much more an indictment of engineering than forecasting. But, remember, the Italians were the ones who – quite some years ago – insisted on building a hydro dam in the ‘Mountains that Move’. You can guess the result.
Maybe this is the beginning of the end of scientists pretending they know more than they really do.
Naw.
What cgh said was right and I’m sure the lawyers of these scientists will point that out, maybe with a picture of Haiti juxtaposed with the Dominican Republic.
Well science can thank the people who created the global warming idea out of political convictions rather than science. For the fact now that they have lost any protection. Science at one time was honored because they kept their snouts out of politics. Like so many professionals they couldn’t help the greed or power feeling infallible brought them. Now their just schmuck’s like the rest of us with an agenda. Protection, respect, honor, all given up for the Great lie of Global warming, has now made science look like just another political lobby. Looking for peoples tax dollars while sounding like oracles. Calling for deniers to be jailed or even killed, is what put the bullet in their own brains.
How could the brains not see this as the outcome of meddling in politics, of pretending to godhood?
I doubt any conscientious seismologist or vulcanologist would be willing to offer an earthquake prediction so time-constrained that it could be used to order an evacuation.
One can study ground movement and microshocks, and say, with some degree of certainty that an earthquake is coming, but how large and at exactly what time, will remain unknown.
The whole of Italy is seismically active, and the silly bastards should build accordingly.
Anybody catch the interview on the CBC the other night with a man who lost his wife and daughter in that quake.
I only had it on to listen to the Ontario leaders debate, and the interview followed.
Anyways most of the victims where the younger generation as most of the older population thought it wise to sleep outside that night, as there was strong tremors hours before the big one if I remember correctly.
The man actually blamed the authorities reassurance of safety as lulling the younger population into thinking all will be well the reason being they got their news through the internet and other modern ways of communication, and the older generation didn’t so they took precautions because they weren’t brainwashed by the experts special news bulletins. And yes he mentioned his building was supposed to be built to code.
“Vulcanonlogy”?
Don’t we mean “volcanology”?
Or are they suing Mr. Spock too?
I don’t understand why they blame the scientists.
I am fairly certain that it was politicians who pushed for and insisted on “don’t spread panic” messages. And the politicians covered their behind, scientists did not.
Anyway I am rather certain that none of geologists or vulcanologists can predict exactly how big the tremor/earthquake/eruption will be. They can only say that there is a large probability that it might be big.
Science is never clear-cut as some think it is.
with the poop…erm…pope living so close by, why didn’t he just ask god about it??
The Italians tend to enjoy assessing blame no matter what the circumstances. When F1 driver Ayrton Senna was killed in 1993 (4?) there were charges against the team, the track, the governing body of the sport, etc.
The real reason that he was killed was because several attempts by the track owners to remove trees and push back the run-off area fell on deaf (and very dumb) government eco-ears.
We’ve just seen how Italian justice works with the prosecution of Amanda Knox.
Does this remind anyone else of the Salem witch hunts?
Just imagine the law suit when Vesuvius blows and takes out Naples but who will they blame, if all the scientists have bailed out of Italy in the next year or so for fear of being the next target of this witch hunt. Hey wasn’t it the Italians that sentenced Galileo to ten years in prison because he kept saying that the Earth was not the center of the solar system. I see the Italian attitude toward science hasn’t changed much over the millennium.
Hey I have a great idea, who will join me in a class action lawsuit against Al Gore when this winter turns out to be another cold one. After all he’s predicting global warming so I’ll be preparing for warmth and not the cold.
The last time I looked into the area, earthquake prediction was in a very primitive state. Given the chaotic nature of earthquakes, it’s quite possible that we’ll never be able to predict when the big tremor occurs except to pin it down to a period of a year or so. WUWT had some interesting material recently on prediction of really big quakes; ie the recent Japan quake, but they’re working with an N=1 observation.
People have the following options when they live in an earthquake prone area:
(a) leave
(b) build earthquake proof housing
(c) go with their gut feelings about when they shouldn’t be sleeping inside.
From some of the comments above it appears that some of the long term residents utilized option (c) and it turned out to be the right course of action. Looking at the situation in evolutionary terms, those individuals who chose to sleep inside won’t be breeding and thus the gene pool was enriched in genes leading to increased survival in seismically active areas.
The medical equivalent of earthquake prediction is forecasting when someone with a serious illness is about to die – I’ve learned through hard experience to never give a specific date. There are certain things in life that have massive uncertainties associated with them and, now through chaos theory, know why the uncertainties exist. Only if the scientists had claimed to be able to precisely predict the quake should they be prosecuted. It sounds like the government is searching for a scapegoat.
@ Loki, “It sounds like the government is searching for a scapegoat”. You mean something like Stalin’s “wrecker trials”?
Ken, you’ve got me there about Stalin’s wrecker trials. Have a faint memory that it was one of the numerous show trials that took place in the USSR during the 1930’s. My impression was that the show trials then were to blame specific individuals for what were really government failings, and it would appear that the same thing is happening with this particular trial in Italy.
Loki, your memory serves you well. The wrecker trials were held, as you recall, to blame specific individuals for what were really government failings and also to purify industry and commerce of “specialists” (former old regime engineers and other bourgeois educated professionals, etc)from the system and replace them by the new Marxist cadre. Kind of like our universities, school boards and other areas of endeavor today.
The seven are the ones who fished the moon out of the lake too.