Predictors of earthquakes: Vanguardists or imposters?

Some days ago I read a piece of news involving six Italian scientists who were in prosecution for alarming the public of an oncoming earthquake in 2009. During that day, just some small and minor tremors hit the town of L’Aquila.

The idea of predicting earthquakes has always enchanting me and I know I’m not the only guy in the world fascinated with this idea, 2012 seems like “the year of geo predictors” and our country fits perfectly as their convention center. The most recognized so-called predictors of earthquakes are the Brazilians young scientists of Quake Red Alert (QRA), they claimed to have predicted almost one thousand telluric movements and they have appeared many times on TV, most of the times defending their theory and methods; because it seems that a crusade have come  against these young scientists.

The old paradigm denotes that Earthquake can’t be predicted, even though these past year in many occasions QRA had announced an oncoming tremor days before it hit; and in the same number of occasions, appears a geologist on a TV channel arguing that it just a matter of luck, that science wasn’t used in the prediction and that the paradigm cannot be changed.

Sometimes, people “try” to predict an earthquake only basing on religion, beliefs or fortune; and those are the kind of predictors I would consider as truly imposters, but if a group of scientists with a expertise in physics and with the help and support of their university had claimed to have the solution for one the deadliest dangers in life, the old school geographers and the local TV station should have consider the idea of an huge advance in their area.