Roger, here is some additional information which explains in part what I mean by “Earthquake forecasting politics.”

When you are dealing with natural disasters such as earthquakes which can obliterate an entire city in a matter of minutes, you try to do everything possible and affordable to see if there is some way to avoid the damage. And such efforts would have to include forecasting the earthquake. It is unreasonable to expect that developing nations will be able to construct strong housing for everyone. About the only way to save people living in impoverished areas at this time is to get them to safe locations when an earthquake is expected.

One of the least expensive things that you can do to get effective forecasting technology developed is to establish good lines of communications. That means that the people making decisions have to make a very aggressive effort to talk with everyone about the latest developments. And that isn’t happening.

For one example, no researchers here in the U.S. appear to me to know anything about the potentially invaluable sun shadow based forecasting technology that Shan has developed. For another example, there is an advanced electromagnetic energy field sensor called an MDCB instrument which is being used in China in their forecasting programs. They appear to have monitoring stations across a good part of the country. And I believe that they even conduct training classes on how to use the instrument and evaluate its data. But I doubt that many people, if any here in the U.S. even know that the instrument exists.

For a third example, your probability program could probably have been developed at any time in the past 40 years. We have had sufficiently powerful computer for that length of time. But even after all these years that program which might be quite helpful to earthquake researchers did not get developed until you posted a note about it here and I began helping get it developed, tested, and circulated.

You can't just sit there and wait for other researchers to come to you with new ideas or wait until they publish formal papers about their work. You constantly watch to see what is being developed around the world and then contact the people involved and try to see if something might have evolved which could be used to save lives.

Reseachers might complain that there is no funding available for efforts to develop good communications programs. That is absolute nonsense in my opinion. When you are dealing with major natural disasters such as earthquake and you need additional, relatively small amounts of funding to do things such as establish good communications systems then they are undoubtedly available.

The point is, decisions such as that regarding what is being done and what is not being done are in my opinion often being made based on political considerations rather than good scientific ones.

These are personal opinions.