Yet another scary story from the Warmist crowd that sounds more like a Madam Zelda prediction, via Mother Jones
Can climate change cause or intensify earthquakes? Christopher Mims wrote about some of the science on this subject back in March, after the Japanese quake. This set the collective panties of climate skeptics a-bunching, chafed at the very notion that global warming might have some impact on plate tectonics.
Can it? Sure. As glaciers retreat, you can get land rebound, causing earthquakes and even volcanic activity. I’m sure there was an uptick once the last ice age started ending around 20,000 years ago. Damn beavers driving SUVs, ya know. But, of course, science, history, and reality are not the point. Keeping the warmists scared and keeping the money flowing is the point.
This month, New Scientist takes a closer look at the subject. Their content is behind a pay wall, unfortunately, but the article concludes that there is strong evidence that melting ice and sea level rise will impact the earth’s crust, potentially causing earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes. There’s clear evidence that what happens at the surface of the earth can have a significant impact on even massive tectonic plates—the melting of ice after past ice ages; major erosion from monsoons over the course of millions of years; and (more recently) the construction of dams have all impacted plate movement.
So, it’s happened before? What, exactly, caused it to happen before? But, hey, if only it wasn’t hidden behind a pay wall (and, no, I’m not going to pay just to read the one article.)
The piece makes several things very clear: there has not been a significant increase in erupting volcanoes or earthquakes in the past century, and there are no scientists out there claiming that there’s a connection between global warming and things like the Japanese quake.
So, AGW hasn’t increased them, and the fools claiming that it has are not really scientists?
But that doesn’t mean it won’t have an impact in the future, as Bill McGuire, a volcanologist with the Benfield Hazard Centre of the University College London argues in the piece
See? It hasn’t happened, but, it might! Give me money to study something which I have no proof will happen.
