yeah, someone at work just reminded me that the context was that someone was going round warning about a major earthquake (based on argon release? which i think hasn't been found a reliable predictor) and this was all in response to that.

while the scientists were probably correct that the earthquake warnings were not justified, it turns out that the prediction was vaguely correct (iirc the time was off by long enough that evacuations would have been impractical).

[edit: radon, not argon - http://articles.latimes.com/2009/apr/07/local/me-quake-predi... - and he didn't have the correct location or time, but was close]