The following (indirect) Web pages have now been updated for perhaps the final time before I start circulating information regarding them to governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and individual researchers around the world.

http://www.freewebs.com/eq-forecasting/DSAT.html

http://www.freewebs.com/eq-forecasting/Science_Organization.html

It would be absolutely impossible to explain how badly those two (or more) organizations are needed.

If you step back and try to look at the international scientific community from a distance, then what you see in general, and also within individual countries, looks like the sky on a clear night. The various scientific groups and individual researchers even within a single country are like bright points of light with no apparent connection with them.

Groups and individual researchers simply don’t talk with one another or share data and resources etc. They feel from long experience, and often rightfully so, that it is in their own best interests if they go about their business without having other people and groups within that government pay too close attention to them.

The result is an indescribable amount of inefficiency with important things not getting done and with multiple scientific groups in different agencies wastefully duplicating one another’s efforts.

I am sure that Roger would agree with me 100% about that. And we hardly every agree on anything!

Earthquake science and earthquake forecasting have without any possible doubt suffered immeasurably because of that “failure to communicate” to quote a famous movie line. It is so bad in my opinion that a half dozen scientist in Italy were charged with, tried, and then convicted on manslaughter charges and sentenced to 6 years in prison each in connection with their statements or lack of statements before a deadly earthquake in Italy back in 2009.

That might be one of the first times in the entire history of science that a group of scientists were convicted on criminal charges in connection with their behavior that didn’t involve a common crime such as theft.

People within the international scientific community need to get better with their communications. They can’t simply wait until a scientific paper has been published about something before they pay attention to it. And they need to do a better job of communicating accurate information to their government employers. When the government officials are headed in the wrong direction with regard to something that is important to science such as climate change, the scientists need to say something rather than just keep completely quiet for the sake of job security.

With a little effort and experience, tact, and practice, government scientists can let their employers know when things are going wrong and not get fired in the process. Those two proposed types of organizations are intended to help make that possible.

These are personal opinions.