The following are personal opinions.

As I have proposed in the past, the science of forecasting earthquakes is not being limited so much by the available technology as much as by a complex and dangerous mixture of international government and scientific community politics. This situation has some similarities to the present Global Warming controversy. But the earthquake forecasting politics problem has been around for much longer and is probably far more complex. And as I said, it has been discussed in detail in some of my past postings to this bulletin board.

Scientists frequently try to solve technical problems such as earthquake forecasting by moving straight at them. But in this case that direct approach is in general not working because the technical efforts constantly get sidetracked by the politics side of the problem. Researchers get extremely frustrated. And they frequently just stop trying to solve the problem. Also unfortunately, relatively few researchers appear to be interested in trying to recognize or adjust to those political problems. Little technical progress is made. And relatively little research funding for their efforts is made available by governments etc.

The researchers’ efforts were unsuccessful in part because they inadvertently or deliberately ignored the proverbial “Elephant in the room.”

Although I have several degrees in the physical sciences and am a professional analyst, I am not a geologist. And it probably took me a good five years of talking with different individuals and groups before I began to develop a fairly good understanding of the politics picture hampering this science. I have adjusted for it myself and am attempting to move forward. The first step in the effort is to get my own forecasting program sufficiently well organized that I can point to various data and state that they that indicate this or that is occurring in fault zones etc.