A lot of people are tweeting about a MAJOR EARTHQUAKE WARNING for Southern California over the next few days. Except it's a hoax. You can't predict earthquakes, idiots.

Today's warning shooting around Twitter goes something like:

80 HOUR MAJOR EARTHQUAKE WARNING; 6.0 to 7.0 earthquake likely in S California in the next 80 hrs

Oh, but wait! We just got a new warning from www.YouCan'tPredictEarthquakes.com. It says:

WARNING: You are stupid.

If you don't believe us, listen to California Emergency Management Agency Secretary Matt Bettenhausen, who has been forced to take time out of preparing for real emergencies to tell KGET this is a hoax:

"Although the broad scientific community has been working relentlessly to give us better information about earthquakes and their behavior, being able to predict when earthquakes will strike is not something they can do at this point," Bettenhausen said.


This is fake. Not real.

The rumor was started by a California idiot named Luke Thomas. Thomas runs a scam website called Quake Prediction, where he posts earthquake predictions "based on thermal temperature changes caused by kinetic frictional heating of the tectonic plates." (i.e. randomly guessing.) The janky website looks like some lady built it on GeoCities in 1996 to display pictures of her cat, but people still believe the bullshit posted there. In fact Thomas has sparked so many fake earthquake freakouts it's earned him a nickname on the Bay Area blog SFist: "Quake Quack."

First Pedobear Panic, now this. Southern California is where reason goes to die in a coked-out, fake-tanned haze.

Update: Sorry, we should have made it clear that the KGET story in which Bettenhausen is quoted is from a previous fake earthquake freakout in April, sparked by the same idiot. But even now, six months later, YOU STILL CANNOT PREDICT EARTHQUAKES.