Roger,

Yes, knowing the global total would help if you wanted to bet on the percentages. But then a probability of 7.5% aren't very good odds if you were betting that a larger quake would follow the M >=5 event.

The problem is that we aren't trying to make bets out here on this board. We are on this board with the goal of coming up with a useful prediction methodology.

That 7.5% is an interesting number but it is not useful for making accurate earthquake predictions. It isn't even useful for disproving non-global trends.

Dennis