Update: Today, six of the seven scientists convicted of manslaughter in 2012 for failing to predict a disastrous earthquake . In this story originally published on Oct. 23, 2012, PM contributor Glenn Reynolds explains why we shouldn't scapegoat scientists.
Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein once wrote: "Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as 'bad luck.'"
These words were the first thing I thought of when I heard of the Italian decision convicting scientists of manslaughter. Their crime? Giving "incomplete, imprecise, and contradictory" information a few days before the town of L'Aquila was struck by an earthquake that killed 300-plus people.
According to prosecutors, the scientists failed to warn the little town of the danger of a large quake following small tremors that preceded it. But given that nobody knows how to predict earthquakes precisely, completely, and clearly, what other kind of information could the scientists have provided? Small tremors are no guarantee of a large quake to come. (CNN reports that at a meeting the week before the big quake, the Italian scientists called the risk "'unlikely,' but not impossible.").
The most that a scientist can say is that a particular area faces a higher or lower risk of large earthquakes over the coming century, but no one can say when an earthquake will occur. And many earthquake-causing faults still remain undiscovered, meaning that no prediction can be complete.
But there's a bigger lesson here. The Italian justice system, already in bad odor after the Amanda Knox fiasco, has now made sure that no scientist in his or her right mind will ever give earthquake advice to Italians again if these convictions stand. If I were an Italian earthquake researcher, I'd be giving serious contemplation to the prospect of relocating. (Four top disaster experts in Italy already have quit their posts in protest.) And if I were a researcher in some neighboring country, I might be reluctant to offer an opinion, lest some overreaching Italian prosecutor call Interpol for my arrest.
That's too bad for Italy, which is one of the world's major earthquake hotspots. Italian disaster officials, building-code writers, and insurance companies need the best earthquake advice they can get. But they won't be getting it now. Instead, they'll face a run of "bad luck."
I wish that I could write off this bizarre incident as the result of some risible quirk in the Italian national character. But, alas, I'm not sure that the problem is limited to Italy. The Italian prosecution, it seems to me, comes from a combination of scientific ignorance, a desire for security, and for revenge when things go wrong. None of those are limited to one country. (As far as the legality of putting scientists on trial, it's doubtful a U.S. prosecutor could do it. Of course, I'd have said the same thing about Italy.)
If people understood the science—even at a high school Earth Science level—they'd understand that scientific predictions about earthquakes are at best educated guesses. If people understood that life is inherently risky, they'd realize that their desire for complete security can never be fully realized. And if people understood that the trauma of losing friends and family can give rise to an irrational urge to find someone to blame, they might resist the temptation to engage in the scapegoating that took place in Italy.
In more primitive times, of course, people responded to tragedies like earthquakes, plagues, and famines by assuming that someone had angered the gods or was practicing witchcraft. The offender was identified often by the sort of procedures parodied by Monty Python, and then hanged, burned, or thrown into a volcano. This didn't do much to address the problem, but it let the survivors feel better, and let the authorities look like they'd done something about a problem that was in fact beyond their reach.
You would like to think that we've have moved beyond such primitive responses. But these responses stem from human nature and are only avoidable through education. The Italian convictions suggest that we're not doing enough.