Something which I have stated in the past and will state again here is that it is my opinion that, exaggerating a little for emphasis, the science of forecasting earthquakes is 1% science and 99% politics. If you are attempting to forecast earthquakes in an effort to save lives and you do not take that 99% politics factor into account then your ability to be successful with your efforts may be severely limited.

The types of forecasts which I circulate do attempt to take them into account. And my recent series of earthquake warnings was one of the best that I have circulated to date. I feel that it let appropriate parties know that they needed to get ready to respond to a destructive earthquake, when it might occur, how bad it was likely to be, and to a certain extent, in what general area of the world it could occur. Not everyone saw all of the data that I circulated.

It is unfortunate that in spite of the fact that the last warning update in the series was widely circulated, no other forecasters around the world were able to take any actions which provided people in the affected area with an effective warning.

For an example of earthquake forecasting politics at work, Shan has developed what could be a forecasting procedure which with widespread use might enable people living in the most remote villages in developing nations to successfully detect the approach of powerful earthquakes in their areas. I cannot directly tell if his procedure works. But I have been comparing his forecasts with my own and have found that they are often in good agreement in spite of the fact that he and I live on opposite sides of the planet. I can evaluate my own forecasts. And since his and mine agree so often I have to assume that his procedure works.

Unfortunately, as far as I am aware, in spite of the fact that he has done all of that work including having at least one newspaper story published on his procedure, and the fact that I myself frequently try to get governments etc. around the world to test and perhaps use his procedure, he has never been contacted by a single government or research group interested in checking on it.

I believe that the reason for that is that he is not presently able to deal with the international earthquake forecasting politics of the situation. And he might also not realize how important it is to do that. The result is a lack of interest in a forecasting procedure which I suspect could have the potential to reduce yearly earthquake fatalities to a fairly low number.

Ultimately, his procedure might become widely used. But that could be because I am presently considering trying to get a particular international group to develop it. And I think that I have a moderately good understanding of both the politics of the situation and their importance.

On another topic, people failed to mention that in my February 20 earthquake warning update I included a section which stated that I am considering developing an earthquake forecasting Web page with a dramatically different format than the one at my present 131.html Web page. I believe that it would greatly increase the usefulness of my forecast data. However at this time I do not have the resources needed to develop such a Web page and am working on that.

Finally, I did compare Canie’s precursor data with my own. And I believe that the various data were good indicators that the recent strongly felt earthquake in California (34.31N 116.85) might be about to occur. My own data pointed to a possible one in the vicinity of where the following earthquake occurred:

2002/01/29 06:08:01 34.37 118.66W California
(NEIS data I believe)

However, I was focusing on trying to determine where around the world a fairly destructive earthquake might be about to occur and concluded that it was unlikely that there was a really bad one headed for that area.