Hi Boyko,

What this Web site report that I am working on proposes is that over the years, so many inaccurate earthquake forecasts have been generated and they have caused so many problems for government officials that most of them don’t want to have anything to do with this science. And they are highly resistant to allocating critically important funds needed for earthquake forecasting research and development.

The basic problem with inaccurate forecasts being circulated will never change. For example, according to an attorney I consulted with, here in the U.S. they are protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. And I am personally glad that they are.

The international scientific community gets much of its funding from government agencies. And when government officials say, “We don’t want to hear about any inaccurate earthquake forecasts,” many scientists, unfortunately, go along with them and insist that they cannot be predicted. The scientists don’t want their income being threatened. I am scientist myself. And I would not go along with that type of logic. But many others are choosing to do that.

As a consequence, if earthquake forecasters want to get governments and the international scientific community to take an interest in their forecasting methods they need to be extremely good sales people. They have to make their product look attractive just as if they were selling a refrigerator or a microwave oven.

I have been checking your forecasts and have not seen anything that would convince me that your forecasting procedure works. And I am probably one of the most active people around for trying to get other forecasters to develop effective methods.

For example, we just had a very powerful and moderately destructive earthquake occur off the coast of Honduras. I checked your forecasts for May and did not see anything pointing to a high magnitude earthquake in that area on May 28. And I looked at a few other past high magnitude earthquakes and did not see anything in your forecast lists pointing to them.

If you are going to convince people that your method works then as I said before, you need to demonstrate that it is accurately predicting these high magnitude earthquakes. However, I also believe that I might know more about your method than you do as it appears to me to have some similarities to the forecasting method I have developed during the past decade. And if my understanding of what you are doing is correct then at best all you are really doing is identifying higher probability time and location windows for an earthquake to occur. There is almost no chance that you will get a magnitude correct even if your location and time information are correct.

Without seeing the actual data I expect that the detection of radon gas at some location can be helpful to telling when and where an earthquake will occur and what its magnitude might be. But we don’t have radon gas detectors stationed around the planet. And so you could not be using them to tell what is being released at some remote location.

I could be wrong on this. There might be one way of detecting radon gas at some location and using those data to gain information regarding what is taking place elsewhere. And if you folks have developed that type of technology then great. I wish you success with it. But even if you have, at the moment I would have to say it does not appear to me to be improving your forecasts.

These are personal opinions.