Roger,

With some humor intended I will propose that with your next reincarnation you should not request that the “powers that be” allow you to return as a disaster mitigation worker. You would certainly starve to death from an inability to find employment.

What you have stated is just another entry from the endless list of excuses that government officials and people in the international scientific community have generated over the years so that they can get out of taking any responsibility for developing forecasting program technologies.

But, even if the excuse you mentioned were true then the explanation for it would be the following:

The people who generate irresponsible forecasts are often doing that because there are no sympathetic government officials for them to talk with when they have determined that an earthquake might be about to occur. And without any forecasting guidelines they go off on their own and try to circulate forecasts through Newsgroups or news services.

If I remember correctly, that one forecaster in Italy who was measuring radon gas levels when he tried to forecast that deadly Italy earthquake a few years back stated, “I didn’t know who to talk with about the forecast.”

Governments don’t want to spend the time and energy and risk any possible political backlash from discussing the science of earthquake forecasting with the general public. So they have never tried to provide any assistance to the international earthquake forecasting community.

Consider this,

The only person in the entire U.S. government that I have ever heard about who was actually trying to determine if earthquakes could be predicted and who was also willing to talk with the general public about forecasting was Dr. Lionel Whiteside who used to post notes to this bulletin board. And I expect that he finally stopped posting notes here because of all of the negative comments and arguments.

If I remember correctly, his government job was eliminated in one of those periodic budget cuts.

Does that sound logical? With all of the earthquake dangers that face people living on the U.S. West Coast and perhaps in the St. Louis area, the U.S. government decided that it would be a good idea to get rid of perhaps the only government scientist who was willing to discuss earthquake forecasting with the general public?

I suspect that the real reason that his job was eliminated was because his superiors at NOAA didn’t want their agency to have anything to do with earthquake forecasting.

Roger, with that type of comment you are in my opinion just telling people far and wide that you are a card carrying member or wannabe of that Special Interest Group that has been fighting so hard for so many years to keep the science of earthquake forecasting at a standstill!

However, I also feel that with your posts here, though inaccurate, you are at least usually polite and considerate of the importance of the subject matter and the wishes of other people who are posting notes.

These are personal opinions.