It is easy to feel outrage at the jail terms handed down to six Italian seismologists and a civil servant this week. How could anyone hope to have predicted the earthquake that devastated L'Aquila in 2009? That is the rallying cry, but failure to predict the quake is not, in fact, what the seven men have been convicted of (see page 4). The prosecution made it crystal clear all along that their case was about poor risk communication; it was built on an accusation of giving out "inexact, incomplete and contradictory information".
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