The deeper issues behind Italy's conviction of earthquake scientists

Posted by Max Fisher on October 24, 2012

A photo taken two days after L'Aquila's 2009 quake shows a partially destroyed church. (Andreas Solaro/AFP/Getty Images)

An Italian court this week sentenced six scientists and former government official to six years in prison and $10.2 million in court costs and damages, convicting them of manslaughter for giving what the court described as a falsely reassuring statement in advance of an earthquake that killed 309 people.

The quake, which hit the town of L'Aquila in 2009, came after the geophysicists told city officials on a risk-assessment commission that they were unable to make a detailed prediction about whether ongoing tremors might indicate a coming disaster. The court seems to consider this akin to criminal negligence, which as many observers have pointed out fundamentally misunderstands how seismology works. One of the convicted scientists, 74-year-old physicist Claudio Evo, called the decision "medieval."

The prestigious scientific journal Nature has been following the story closely. Today, it took a step beyond just commenting on the story. The journal, which has been publishing original scientific research since 1869, called for protest, and in the process made a remarkable statement about Italian society:

There will be time enough to ponder the wider implications of the verdict, but for now all efforts should be channeled into protest, both at the severity of the sentence and at scientists being criminalized for the way their opinions were communicated. Science has little political clout in Italy and the trial proceeded in an absence of informed public debate that would have been unthinkable in most European countries or in the United States. Billi should promptly explain his decision, and the scientific community should promptly challenge it.

I'm not sure whether or not Italy as a nation is really as anti-science and uninformed as Nature seems to suggest. But this is one of several theories put forth in an effort to explain this truly bizarre case and any deeper issues that may inform it. In this vein, it's worth noting that L'Aquila residents have long sought an outlet for their anger over the 2009 quake's damage.

"In L'Aquila the trauma is still present and visible," Italian GlobalVoices blogger Paola D'Orazio wrote in April. "But stronger yet is the resentment of those families who will never see their homes again, of those who feel abandoned and who believe that not enough has been done, that in three years nothing (or almost nothing) has changed: debris and rubble piled on the streets downtown, houses propped-up in makeshift fashion, windowless buildings make up the cityscape awaiting tourists in the medieval jewel of Abruzzo."

Italian media have reacted with sustained outrage to the quake, in part, D'Orazio says, because a number of the victims were college students from other parts of the country, at some points comparing it to the far deadlier Fukushima crisis in Japan. That media pressure for action, as well as residents' apparent sense of profound wounded resentment, led to what he calls "many judicial inquiries."

The L'Aquila tragedy, as it persisted after the earthquake, did not concern solely the loss of human life during the catastrophic event: there were many judicial inquiries (some still under way) regarding the handling of the emergency, the responsibility of those companies that chose building materials and designs that were unfit for an earthquake zone (in particular, the construction of public buildings, like student housing, has come under questioning), and regarding lobbyists and other groups interested in receiving a portion of the funds allocated to reconstruction of the city and the entire seismic crater.

It's easy to see how the public demands for blood might have built momentum for a case that, on its own, would appear absurd.

There are other theories. The Economist quotes a California-based scientist who thinks the Italian physicists got "trapped" into giving a "yes/no answer" because they were trying to downplay a local amateur's claims of being able to predict earthquakes. A long Nature essay discusses the common misunderstanding that scientific risk assessment is the same thing as a prediction. New Scientists hints that L'Aquila officials, overwhelmed with the burden of protecting against earthquakes in an ancient fault-line city that is poorly equipped to handle them, may have shrugged their decision-making responsibilities onto the scientific advisers.

Whatever the case, it seems plausible that there's more to the L'Aquila's story than just hare-brained prosecutors misunderstanding seismology. Although that, to be sure, might be part of it as well.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2012/10/24/the-deeper-issues-behind-italys-conviction-of-earthquake-scientists/

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Scientific Illiteracy: Why The Italian Earthquake Verdict is Even Worse Than it Seems

By Jeffrey Kluger
TIME Magazine

Oct. 24, 2012

Guardia Forestale Handout / AP

An aerial view of the destruction in the city of L'Aquila, central Italy, April 6, 2009.

Yesterday was a very good day for stupid — better than any it's had in a while. Stupid gets fewer good days in the 21st century than it used to get, but it enjoyed a great ride for a long time — back in the day when there were witches to burn and demons to exorcise and astronomers to put on trial for saying that the Earth orbits around the sun.

But yesterday was a reminder of stupid's golden era, when an Italian court sentenced six scientists and a government official to six years in prison on manslaughter charges, for failing to predict a 2009 earthquake that killed 300 people in the town of l'Aquila. The defendants are also required to pay €7.8 million ($10 million) in damages. "I'm dejected, despairing," said one of the scientists, Enzo Boschi, in a statement to Italian media. "I still don't understand what I'm accused of."

As well he shouldn't. The official charge brought against the researchers, who were members of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), was based on a meeting they had in the week leading up to the quake, at which they discussed the possible significance of recent seismic rumblings that had been detected in the vicinity of l'Aquila. They concluded that it was "unlikely," though not impossible, that a serious quake would occur there and thus did not order the evacuation of the town. This was both sound science and smart policy.

The earthquake division of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimates that the world is shaken by several million earthquakes each year, most of which escape notice either because they are too small or are in remote areas that are poorly monitored. An average of 50 earthquakes do manage to register on global seismographs every day, or about 18,000 annually. The overwhelming majority do not lead to major quakes and the technology does not exist to determine which ones will. The best earthquake forecasters can do is apply their knowledge and experience to each case, knowing that you can't evacuate 50 towns or cities every day — and knowing too that sometimes you will unavoidably, even tragically, be wrong.

"If scientists can be held personally and legally responsible for situations where predictions don't pan out, then it will be very hard to find scientists to stick their necks out in the future," said David Oglesby, an associate professor on the earth sciences faculty of the University of California, Riverside, according to CNN.com.

The Italian seismologists are appealing their sentences and the global outcry over the wrong-headedness of the ruling will likely weigh in their favor. But whatever the outcome of their case, they're really just the most recent victims of the larger, ongoing problem of scientific illiteracy.

Just the day after the ruling came down, University of Michigan researchers released the latest results from the Generation X Report, a longitudinal study funded by the National Science Foundation that has been tracking the Gen X cohort since 1986. One of the smaller but more troubling data points in the new release was the finding that only 43% of Gen Xers (53% of males and 32% of females) can correctly identify a picture of a spiral galaxy — or know that we live in one.

Certainly, it's possible to move successfully through life without that kind of knowledge. "Knowing your cosmic address is not a necessary job skill," concedes study author Jon D. Miller of the University of Michigan, in a release accompanying the report. But not knowing it does suggest a certain lack of familiarity with the larger themes of the physical universe — and that has implications. It's of a piece with the people who believe humans and dinosaurs co-existed, or the 50% of Americans who do not believe that human beings evolved from apes, or the 1 on 5 who, like Galileo's inquisitors, don't believe the Earth revolves around the sun.

More troubling than these types of individual illiteracy are the larger, population-wide ones that have a direct impact on public policy. As my colleague Bryan Walsh observed, the issue of climate change received not a single mention in all three of this year's presidential debates, and has barely been flicked at on the campaign trail. Part of that might simply be combat fatigue; we've been having the climate argument for 25 years. But the fact is there shouldn't be any argument at all. Serious scientists who doubt that climate change is a real threat are down to just a handful of wild breeding pairs. But sowing doubt about the matter has been a thriving industry of conservatives for decades — most recently in the form of a faux scientific study published by the Cato Institute, that purports to debunk climate science as fatally flawed at best or a hoax at worst. Speaking of a federally funded and Congressionally mandated report by the U.S. Global Change Research Program that responsibly reviewed the state of climate science, the Cato publication argues:

It is immediately obvious that the intent of the report is not to provide a accurate [sic] scientific assessment of the current and future impacts of climate change in the United States, but to confuse the reader with a loose handling of normal climate [italics theirs]…presented as climate change events.

Well, no, but never mind. Our willingness to believe in junk science like this exacts a very real price — in an electorate that won't demand action from its leaders on a matter of global significance; in parents who leave their babies unvaccinated because someone sent them a blog post fraudulently linking vaccines to autism; in young gays and lesbians forced to submit to "conversion therapy" to change the unchangeable; in a team of good Italian scientists who may spend six years in jail for failing to predict the unpredictable. No one can make us get smart about things we don't want to get smart about. But every day we fail to do so is another good day for stupid — and another very bad one for all of us.