A most unwise Gag Order
The usual official confidence that they know best:
"Before today's deadly earthquake in central Italy, authorities muzzled a scientist who warned of impending disaster. Seismologist Gioacchino Giuliani based his fears on large pockets of radon gas in seismically active areas.
He drove around the region in a van with loudspeakers last month telling people to evacuate. He was reported to police for spreading alarm, and forced to remove his findings from the Internet.
Italy's Civil Protection Agency dismissed the warnings, saying the tremors were: "part of a typical sequence... (which is) absolutely normal."
Giuliani now tells our sister network Sky News: "These people will have these deaths on their conscience."
Source
3 comments:
Predicting an earthquake is akin to predicting the weather - you know what it looks like it is going to do, but you can never be sure.
This guy was causing a panic - and there are so many people out there claiming they "know" when the next big one is going to hit that eventually one of them is bound to get it right.
The question is, how many has this guy gotten WRONG? How many times has he run around saying "I know there's going to be an earthquake within such and such a time" and been completely off kilter?
If he had predicted 100 earthquakes with 97 percent reliability within 30 days, I MIGHT take him seriously. If I predict an earthquake along the New Madrid Fault in central North America every day from now until it happens, will my MISSES be recorded and reported when I make the outlandish claim "I KNEW this would happen?"
Didn't that professor ever hear of the old adage:
"Never, ever yell theatre in a crowded fire!"
It would pay to examine the methodology of the guy before making any claims either for or against him. China claimed to be able to predict earthquakes a couple times too based on various things that looked promising at first but were later found to be spurious.
Post a Comment