Don’t worry, this guy is just trying to sell a book conveniently located on the left sidebar of the Guardian. I hear there’s a two for one special with Chariots of the Gods on Amazon.
Get a load of some of this rubbish:
The world we inhabit has an outer rind that is extraordinarily sensitive to change. While the Earth’s crust may seem safe and secure, the geological calamities that happen with alarming regularity confirm that this is not the case. Here in the UK, we only have to go back a couple years to April 2010, when the word on everyone’s lips was Eyjafjallajökull – the ice-covered Icelandic volcano that brought UK and European air traffic to a grinding halt. Less than a year ago, our planet’s ability to shock and awe headed the news once again as the east coast of Japan was bludgeoned by a cataclysmic combination of megaquake and tsunami, resulting – at a quarter of a trillion dollars or so – in the biggest natural-catastrophe bill ever.
…
Could it be then, that if we continue to allow greenhouse gas emissions to rise unchecked and fuel serious warming, our planet’s crust will begin to toss and turn once again?
The signs are that this is already happening. In the detached US state of Alaska, where climate change has propelled temperatures upwards by more than 3C in the last half century, the glaciers are melting at a staggering rate, some losing up to 1km in thickness in the last 100 years. The reduction in weight on the crust beneath is allowing faults contained therein to slide more easily, promoting increased earthquake activity in recent decades. The permafrost that helps hold the state’s mountain peaks together is also thawing rapidly, leading to a rise in the number of giant rock and ice avalanches. In fact, in mountainous areas around the world, landslide activity is on the up; a reaction both to a general ramping-up of global temperatures and to the increasingly frequent summer heatwaves.
Whether or not Alaska proves to be the “canary in the cage” – the geological shenanigans there heralding far worse to come – depends largely upon the degree to which we are successful in reducing the ballooning greenhouse gas burden arising from our civilisation’s increasingly polluting activities, thereby keeping rising global temperatures to a couple of degrees centigrade at most.
Alaska has detached OMG!
Yeah right, that ~0.8°C of atmospheric warming in the past century reached all the way down to the bottom of the ocean and disturbed the fault off Japan. Of course if Mr. McGuire doesn’t do anything but let himself get scared by computer model predictions instead of examining measured reality, I can see how he’d be driven to write a book like this.
This Guardian article is even less credible when you pitch a sensational book in the “news” article at the Guardian right alongside it. I may nominate this guy for idiot of the year, he may beat Peter Gleick for this honor.
Here’s the book:
Waking the Giant: How a changing climate triggers earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes by Bill McGuire
Buy it from the Guardian bookshop
UPDATE: 9:00AM 2/27 Anonymous whiner “The Power of X” complains in comments that I “didn’t use enough science” in this post. I didn’t realize that when mocking such absurd claims I had to worry about it that much, especially when I tag the story with “GLOC” and “ridiculae”. I figured hey, I just won Best Science Blog for the second year in a row and Lifetime Achievement Award in the 2012 Bloggies, plus the post went up at 3:30AM PST, so I though maybe I’d get a little slack. Oh well, that’s what updates are for. Steve Goddard helpfully points out what the USGS has to say about this nonsense. They write on their website:
Are Earthquakes Really on the Increase?
We continue to be asked by many people throughout the world if earthquakes are on the increase. Although it may seem that we are having more earthquakes, earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or greater have remained fairly constant.
A partial explanation may lie in the fact that in the last twenty years, we have definitely had an increase in the number of earthquakes we have been able to locate each year. This is because of the tremendous increase in the number of seismograph stations in the world and the many improvements in global communications. In 1931, there were about 350 stations operating in the world; today, there are more than 8,000 stations and the data now comes in rapidly from these stations by electronic mail, internet and satellite. This increase in the number of stations and the more timely receipt of data has allowed us and other seismological centers to locate earthquakes more rapidly and to locate many small earthquakes which were undetected in earlier years. The NEIC now locates about 20,000 earthquakes each year or approximately 50 per day. Also, because of the improvements in communications and the increased interest in the environment and natural disasters, the public now learns about more earthquakes.
According to long-term records (since about 1900), we expect about 17 major earthquakes (7.0 – 7.9) and one great earthquake (8.0 or above) in any given year.
They make the exact same argument that I do about severe weather, another favorite worry-wail of the CAGW camp:
Oh, the GRACE data isn’t the definitive answer on ice loss=earthquakes
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/22/greenland-ice-not-responding-as-predicted/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/10/why-im-not-worried-about-greenlands-icecap/
correlation ≠ cause
I wonder how long it will be before the BBC picks this up and spins it.
You could’t make this stuff up.
Oh, wait a minute………………. .
H.G.Wells would be so envious of the imaginations of these folk.
I think Piers Corbyn sees links, but would link both climate and geological events with external forces such as solar forces. As we say so many times, just because 2 things are correlated doesn’t mean there’s a causal link one way or the other — in this case there may be a cause driving both of them.
Dear me Chariots of the Gods.
You are going back a bit aren’t you?
Not that gullible persons of that time didn’t rush about talking about it. Oh and the BBC made a show or two.Don’t blame me I was strictly fiction dept. Where we had real monsters you know.
Still there we are.
And congratulations on your success in the Bloggies.
Kindest Regards
That should read “couldn’t”.
My computer can’t spell.
I don’t think we’ll ever see Peak Stupid.
Included in the drivers of climate change are volcanic activity and plate tectonics amongst a host of others. These drivers work over millions of years for plate tectonics to a few weeks for a volcanic eruption of sufficient intensity. But the reverse is impossible. Earthquakes are feature of plate tectonics with the most severe occurring near subduction zones but no connection with climate.
This book sounds like typical Guardian alarmism based on fairy tales.
Do you think he believes the cr*p he writes or is he just in it for the money? I surpose you could ask the same of many-a rent-a-eco.
‘Buy it from the Guardian bookshop’ – no thanks I prefer more action in my Fiction, oh and Elves and Dwarfs.
Piers Corbyn has been saying that a quiet sun could cause more earthquakes/volcanoes for some time. This guy is betting he’s right to sell his book.
Can’t blame him , lots of other have jumped on the AGE gravy train with equally mad claims .
Oh come on! Possibly the other way round perhaps, but this is stoopid.
Oi!
Chariots of the Gods is a good book!
This is a common cause correlation here but these people are blinded by their absolute faith in the power of carbon dioxide.
There are many studies that have found statistical correlation of solar activity and earthquakes/volcanic activity. In the same way as many studies have found statistical correlations of variations in climate and solar activity (see Piers Corbyn). So there will be some common correlation between volcanic/earthquake activity and climate changes; they possibly have the same causation. This is complicated by the impact of large volcanic effects on climate of course. But then there can be no simple relationships between aspects of a chaotic system of chaotic systems.
However, as the Guardian article shows, there will always be someone who tries to draw simple causal links between correlated effects or trend lines through time series of data from stochastic processes.
It is insane… unless you are trying to sell a book to a bunch of deluded cultists and make one last smash and grab for cash before the game ends and the whole scam comes tumbling down in a heap.
This book has basically made the final claim. The one that has been too whacky for anyone else to make. But now that there are books about all other possible effects of climate change this was the last seam that could be mined and he has done it.
The only extension now would be to claim that our CO2 is messing up the Sun. It will be made soon but I don’t think that it will have quite the following needed to make a book worthwhile.
I was about to fisk this tripe myself but you’ve beaten me to the chase Anthony….
May I offer something else instead – the reaction of the True Believers to the Heartland forgery has frankly – been beyond belief, with the likes of DeSmog, the Guardian etc continuing to treat it as if it is genuine. And this McGuire bloke doesn’t seem to be cut from a different cloth himself.
So I cut a small vid (don’t worry, not a Downfall vid this time) from an amusing Star Wars parody that sums up the situation for me. There’s one mild cuss word in the vid. The first reaction I get in the comments from an alarmist on Youtube is much ruder though I’m sure it will amuse everyone….
Carbon Dioxide Supermolecule! Wears his knickers on the outside, not only can he defy gravity and stay in the sky for thousands of years, he can lift whole continents!
Well, if THIS be science, let them make the most of it.
Who the heck is Bill McGuire?
No, this is not a slur. According to Wikipedia: “Bill McGuire may refer to: Bill McGuire (volcanologist) Bill McGuire (baseball) Bill McGuire (footballer) Billy McGuire, one of the World’s Heaviest Twins.”
Assuming that the first adjective is the correct one, a vulcanologist should know that whether or not you move glaciers around, the tectonic plates are always undergoing stresses that would result in a constant rate of drift, if they were allowed to move freely. Melting glaciers, although in theory may make the plates slide more easily, cannot increase the average rate of this drift. This is because the forces driving the plates has not altered. Thus, if the plates slide more easily, as McGuire suggests, then there will be more frequent, but smaller tremors. This is actually a good thing.
McGuire is simply another one in a long list of alarmists, who make outrageous and ridiculous claims about so called climate catastrophe. Although what he is claiming, on closer inspection, appears to relate to areas currently under ice, that does not stop him from throwing in examples that have absolutely nothing to do with his theory. The Japan tsunami did not result from an area that was covered by ice, and the icelandic volcano, was in fact a volcano, and not an earthquake.
Having conflated the totally unrelated issues in the readers mind, he then makes his final leap of logic by claiming that:
“the geological shenanigans there heralding far worse to come – depends largely upon the degree to which we are successful in reducing the ballooning greenhouse gas burden arising from our civilisation’s increasingly polluting activities, thereby keeping rising global temperatures to a couple of degrees centigrade at most.”
No lack of adjectives there. Greenhouse gases are said to be “ballooning”, which implies geometric growth – also a nonsensical claim, and civilisation’s activities are “increasingly polluting” which is a non-sequitor in any case. If there is more pollution, there is likely to be more aerosols and therefore global dimming – remember that theory? Well, perhaps by pollution he is referring to CO2 emissions only, rather than actual pollution. Yet he is now out on a limb, because whether global temperatures will rise by more than a couple of degrees depends totally on the amount of positive feedback in the climate system. This is a contraversial issue, but most evidence to date suggests feedback will actually be negative, not positive.
But I guess a vulcanologist wouldn’t be expected to know much about the climate system. Maybe Peter Gleick wrote that bit for him.
Oh noes! The dreaded isostatic rebound is torquing Gaia to bits! Buy the book, soon to be a major motion picture!
Seriously, this guy may be crazy but he’s certainly cunning. His doomsday article is so carefully laced with “mights” and “coulds” and “maybes” and “possibly, somedays” that nobody can ever legally complain. He’s just writing a thriller and cashing out on popular confusion and fear.
The fact that his work is so sloppy and over-the-top suggests that the opportunists see the end of the scam as imminent, and either want to double-down on the potential consequences even as the probabilities dwindle; or they want to rush the last hysterical warnings to market and collect a check before the public wakes up.
Either way, this is most interesting.
Next week in the Grauniad: “How climate change makes the Earth more vulnerable to asteroid impacts.”
Makes me wonder if the 1964 Alaska quake (9.2 magnitude) was pre- or post-Global Warming.
And about that 2010 quake in Haiti (7.0). Melting of the Papa Doc Glacier?
If this type of nonsense isn’t confronted we’ll end up with climate trials like Oliver Reed’s in ‘The Devils’.
Not to mention all those old copies of National Geographic in everyone’s garages causing subsidence. /sarc
sarc. abandon ship ! mann the boats !
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
Oldseadog says:
February 27, 2012 at 3:37 am
You could’t make this stuff up.
——————————————
A rational person couldnt make this up, but warmists can.
They couldnt give a monkeys about the truth, all theyre interested in is going for the big “scare me” story.
The bigger the scare the better they like it and will promote it, no matter how ludicrous, no matter how bizarre, no matter that its completely made up, the product of a sick imagination.
The wilder, the dumber, the more stupefyingly erm stupid the idea, there will be a warmist behind it, screeching hysterically, hair flying in the carbon dioxide “saturated” atmos, foaming at the mouth and pointing their pointy fingers at everyone hollering the “repent” the end is nigh” codswallop thats so their hallmark.
They accuse sceptics of being “anti” science- whats scientific about the british taxpayer funding a “rainman” out in africa somewhere?
Yup, theyre actually chucking cold hard cash at some voodoo loving screwball to produce rain.
Thats the level of agw “science”, complete garbage at every possible level.
Right, now onto the rapture….ha ha!
Oh dear. Oh dearie dear. Utter plonking lunacy. There was a time I read the Grauniad, but for The Arts and sport, never for Science. Now I won’t touch it because I can’t bear to add the slightest advertising revenue to their insane drivel.
Good grief evacuate all hills immediately, the ice holding the hills together is melting!
Vince Causey says:
——
Bio: he’s a professor of end-of-world studies – sorry, ‘climate hazards’. He keeps writing books about imminent apocalyse.
“Seven Years to Save the Planet”
“The End of the World Reports” on TV.
Who’s who entry says hobby is ‘worrying about the future of our planet’.
‘Nuff said.
[Multiple screen names violate site Policy. ~dbs, mod.]
The North Atlantic rift has spread for 150 million years. 35 volcanoes have erupted in the past 10,000 years. I don’t see how people caused that. But, people with deeply held beliefs will conquer the facts needed to support their belief, common sense needn’t apply. Pretty good proof that AGW is a religion instead of a science. The book is not bordering on insane; it is insane.
This is “climate porn.” I think one of the motivations for warmism was a secret desire to revel in doomsday / end-days porn. These buttoned-up scientists had so suppressed their juvenile, fantasizing side that it erupted in CAGW and porn-type self-indulgence in imagining the 1001 catastrophes that an inexorably warming climate would bring.
“Next week in the Grauniad: “How climate change makes the Earth more vulnerable to asteroid impacts.”
Yes! “Ballooning” greenhouse gases creates a “heat trapping blanket” that raises the temperature of the atmosphere “to unprecedented levels of heat”. Basic physics tells us that the heated atmosphere expands and becomes thinner. The dangerously attenuated atmosphere offers less resistance to asteroids. This won’t affect the impacts of giant asteroids, which are very rare anyway, but of much smaller ones, which are extremely common.
Small asteroids, of the size of a brick, or smaller, are either burnt up, or reduced to terminal velocity – about 120mph. However, with “dangerously attenuated atmospheric syndrome”, these small asteroids, will hardly be slowed down at all, and will strike the ground at speeds of thousands of mph. They will explode with the force of atomic bombs. This is basic physics – E = 1/2MV**2.
I wonder how much the Guardian will pay me to publish it?
Saw this thing on my morning scan of the ‘news’ media, but somebody had already Tipped and Noted it, good to see you took it up so quickly. Maybe one day the Guardian will come to its senses, but until then … keep shining the light on their idiocies, and we can hope that yesterday’s shower of awards on the realist blogs drives a few more bemused people to call by and form – no, make that correct – their own opinions.
The Guardian – It’s Worse Than We Thought!
Quickly, adopt Socialism, [snip], eat raw food, live on rations, end freedom, establish trillion dollar carbon credits market, save planet!
Certifiably insane!
I find that bookcover highly insulting. I think mr Mr. McGuire should travel to places like Rikuzentakata or any other place that was hit in the greater Tohoku area and tell those who are left there that this was al caused by the CO2 super molecule.
Wow. A book that’s entirely based on material from newspaper headlines of trash tabloids! He probably lays awake at night worrying about the Easter Bunny and that Santa may lose his kingdom up North, for real!
The Crazy World of Bill McGuire…
“If we think about climate change at all, most of us do so in a very simplistic way…”
You think he’s about to acknowledge any hitherto ignored complexities of climate mechanics?
Maybe a denouement on the dynamics of ocean-atmospheric interface?
Perhaps he’ll posit the possibility of a negative feedback or two?
Nope, no Gaian gestalt evident in this factual wowsers methodism, It’s straight to the fire and brimstone when reading from the geological gospel according to Bill McGuire!
No room for any benign, gauzy, Earth Mother goddess in mad Bill’s world view, he worships at the feet of a vengeful god. The god of catastrophic climate change! Bill’s book of revelations brings forth his fervid vision of hell unleashed, mountains unhinged torrents of magma and tsunamis summoned forth to purge all trace of the unbelievers. AND IT’S HAPPENING NOW PEOPLE!
…or p’raps not?
“Critics have said that McGuire has sometimes made exaggerated claims, in the media and in popular science publications, about geohazard risks that are outside his field of expertise.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_McGuire_(volcanologist)
How many folks have had (or heard of someone having) this experience (I’m guessing a lot)?
A friend of mine was trying to get a UK grant for studying a specific aspect of owl behavoir, and was getting nowhere. So he changed his grant application to ‘the effects of climate change on [the specific aspect of owl behavoir]’ and the grant came through quicker than you could say ‘what-a-con’. In the end, he added one meaningless paragraph to the resultant paper mentioning climate change.
So, what’s going to sell better in this insane period – a book subtitled ‘Earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes’ or a book subtitled ‘How a changing climate triggers earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes’.
Follow the dosh, as well as the insanity.
It’s an attempt to re-energize the movement………..sorry, couldn’t resist.
Roger Knights says:
——————
A lot of scientists are reliving 1950s B-movies where only the sage scientist and his beautiful daughter could save the world from imminent catastrophe.
Then it was giant ants; now it’s tiny horses.
‘Klaatu barada nikto’…
Ha ha ha. Chariots of the Gods? Ha ha ha. I actually have that book. It’s a fun book to read for the fun of it.
Chris Dunn’s books are much closer to the truth than fiction compared to Chariots of the Gods… http://www.gizapower.com/ He’s an engineer with tons of experiences with machining tools. Much closer to reality, like Watt and others are…
Did he see the big white rabbit as well?
CO2 molecules have a cape, and a little mask. It was a freak gust of CO2 which blew the crew of the Marie Celeste overboard, shortly before dinner time.
Honest.
Best laugh I have had for a while. Is Bill McGuire going on tour with this comic masterpiece?
http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/15-06-2011/118207-volcanoes-0/
I think the author just read that and decided to take that theory and flip it to CO2 since he knew the last 20 years (until recently) have been dominated by a strong solar cycle 23, volcanism and rising CO2.
It’s like the old joke graph connecting CO2 to piracy.. only not a joke and a lot more shameless.
Just more from the self-loathing crowd. Truly nothing to see here, folks. Move along to sanity; you won’t find it here.
the claim of a 50 year study time, the the wild one about a MILE?? depth of ice melting in 100years..so what i wonder is his proof of that?
“Alaska has detached OMG!” I think detached is Brit for noncontiguous.
“…In the detached US state of Alaska, where climate change has propelled temperatures upwards by more than 3C in the last half century, the glaciers are melting at a staggering rate, some losing up to 1km in thickness in the last 100 years…”
Yet, in the detached continent of Antarctica, scientists drilled through two miles of ice (3.22km) to reach Lake Vostok.
At the rate of 1km/100yrs, they’ll open a beachside resort there somewhere around 2312.
Book your slots now…
Natural Hazards Funding 101:
Fiction seductress attracts more victims if appearing straight-laced.
He’s gleicking the theory of plate tectonics. Reverse causality at its finest. A fohn wind of Hydroponiclimatogeology. The folks at Grist must be doing a rain dance. I wonder how this book is selling (I’m afraid to search to find out). A puny valley glacier causing ‘ablation earthquakes’? Serious stuff.
Watching a bad movement enable crazy people to write books of magic and doom is sad.
Remember: This is the same movement that produced “Time’s Up!”, endorsed by Jim Hansen, and calling for xenocidal levels of destruction of technology to save the Earth. Now those violent terrorist wannabes have a rationale to do anything they feel inclined to act on.
The Guardener has lost all credibility. Any geologist or lay person worth their salt will be aware of the devasting major earthquakes which have occurred throughout the globe and well before the CO2 scam started?
From Agadir to Zangezur.
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/historical.php
The Guardener has lost all credibility any geologist or lay person with an interest knows that devasting earthquakes resulting thousands of deaths have occurred over many centuries.
From Agadir to Zangezur
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/historical.php
Sounds like we need to induce another ice age so we can put about a mile of ice on top of Alaska to hold that place down.
“Here in the UK, we only have to go back a couple years to April 2010, when the word on everyone’s lips was Eyjafjallajökull – the ice-covered Icelandic volcano that brought UK and European air traffic to a grinding halt.”
Rubbish. Eyjafjallajökull wasn’t on anybody’s lips, because I’m the only non-Icelander who can pronounce it.
Bill McGuire’s publisher must be a real pushover. Hmmm, I’ve got a couple of sci-fi manuscripts they could look at. Wouldn’t take too much rewrite to destroy the planet Aptera with runaway global warming instead of a runaway asteroid.
Thanks for mention, Peter Ward.
I have the honor of having met Bill McGuire and asking him a question in an insurers meeting years ago. Delusional then – and he wouldn’t even have a conversation later after not answering my question in public; and yes wait for it even more delusional now – judging by this book.
HOWEVER guys there IS a solar-lunar- weather-earthquake-volcano connection. Of course it only works McGuire’s way if man-made CO2 drives events on the sun!!!!! Enough said.
Major earthquakes and extreme weather events have a common solar-lunar based cause. They are in the same PARALLEL family.
Solar events + lunar etc modulation => jet stream shifts + weather especially extremes
Solar events + lunar etc modulation => tectonic stresses & quakes-volcano especially major ones
As far as what IS going on we have made some headway with TRIAL QUAKE FORECASTS, with so far (limited trials) some success in predicting major quakes and which hemisphere of earth they are most likely to occur in. There is an independent person working on the stats btw.
Have a look at:
http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews12No6.pdf
http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews12No8.pdf
http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews12No10.pdf
(This WA12No 10 link might not work yet but it will soon)
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=9179&linkbox=true&position=12
THIS includes some reportage of discussions at WeatherAction monthly meeting and Poly Of North London Astronomical Forum (PONLAF) on Frid Feb 24th.
Note these trails are like how our weather forecasts began namely NOT forecasts of all quakes (or weather) but specific forecasts of certain extreme events at certain periods leaving the rest of the future as unknown and unforecasted.
Cheers Piers Corbyn
I have just tagged it as a fantasy novel and science fiction on Amazon UK 🙂
ROTFLMAO! You may be right!
I once read that Albert Einstein had a copy of Velikovsky’s “Worlds in Collision” on his desk when he died. So I went and bought a copy and made it 1/3 through the book when I just had to put it down. Claims without evidence gets a little tiring after awhile. For a volcanologist to use Iceland as an example of global warming is extremely perverted given the long history of volcanic eruption on that island.
Bill McGuire may be a nut job, but he’s a tough nut job. Not everyone could withstand the torrents of laughter sure to follow.
Does McGuire qualify for some kind of Gleickenspiel award? Oscar for best Mann- erism?
Oh the volcano thing, yea, I read in New Scientist that global warming would bring the collapse of volcano cones, which would destroy cities built next to volcanoes. Millions of people will die!
So I wrote to the author of the article. She was one of those “science journalist” type people (press release editor). I said, “Dear Madam, I have just had the displeasure of reading an article authored by you, which appears to me to be the most idiotic article I think I’ve ever read, etc, etc.”.
She did not reply.
The name of the offender is: Kate Ravilious and her rump-smackingly dumb article was published at New Scientist in 2010.
Vince Causey says:
February 27, 2012 at 4:29 am
“Next week in the Grauniad: “How climate change makes the Earth more vulnerable to asteroid impacts.”
Yes! “Ballooning” greenhouse gases creates a “heat trapping blanket” that raises the temperature of the atmosphere “to unprecedented levels of heat”. Basic physics tells us that the heated atmosphere expands and becomes thinner.
It is worse than we thought. The next step is for the atmosphere to expand out to the orbit of the moon at which time the friction of the gas will slow the moom causing it to spiral into the the Earth, killing us all.
There’s comments open on this thread and it’s a doozy.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/27/peter-gleick-heartland-institute-lie?commentpage=last#end-of-comments
I gave a reference to Gavin Schmidt of RealClimate
‘No I asked for scientific institution. That’s a dude on a blog.’
My response:
Are you real? Earlier you asked me about the hockey stick and I answered your question quite easily and I see no rebuttal to my simple analysis of the fraud involved.
Gavin Schmidt not good enough for you, you’ll have eyeryone crying with laughter over that one:
“Gavin A. Schmidt is a climatologist and climate modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. He works on the variability of the ocean circulation and climate, using general circulation models (GCMs). He has also worked on ways to reconcile paleo-data with models. He helped develop the GISS ocean and coupled GCMs to improve the representation of the present day climate, while investigating their response to climate forcing. The latest GISS GCM is called ModelE.”
PS All that stuff on his blog, guess where it comes from.
Dogs and cats living together.
Or: “Angels Don’t Play this H**RP” ?
Yes; fiction. Generates friction w/me and some others too …
.
@tregonsee says:
February 27, 2012 at 5:21 am
“Alaska has detached OMG!” I think detached is Brit for noncontiguous.
I think ‘detached’ in this case means, ‘uninterested’ or ‘uninvolved’ or ‘no emotional connection.’ The only worry about AGW I’ve noticed in Alaskans is that they won’t get enough of it soon enough.
[REPLY: Please add a little commentary next time (like maybe “Watching a lava lamp set to Finlandia“). -REP]
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYbTNFN3NBo?rel=0&w=420&h=315%5D
Gee, and you wonder why the Guardian doesn’t take comments on the bullsh^t. Probably put their sensitive readers right off their feed.
@H.R. says:
After the winter they’ve had they must be praying for it.
If you have 1km of ice stogging up a volcano and it melts, you have to wonder… Is this due to a trace gas above or the magma chamber chamber below? Quick, someone do a computer model.
Whether or not Alaska proves to be the “canary in the cage” – the geological shenanigans there heralding far worse to come – depends largely upon the degree to which we are successful in reducing the ballooning greenhouse gas burden arising from our civilisation’s increasingly polluting activities, thereby keeping rising global temperatures to a couple of degrees centigrade at most.
No problem skippy! Even without reducing our ballooning greenhouse gas burden, we are not going to come close to a couple of degrees centigrade, let alone the four or six or eight that you guys tell your bogey man stories about.
BTW, which is funnier:
1) That every negative phenomoenon known to man is caused by global warming, but just happens to be OK up to 2 degrees, or
2) That people who can be so good at holding everyone on the Team to the same story haven’t noticed that the company line is obsolete?
It is so obviously caused by Global Climate Change
Just like the 2004 earthquake/tsunami in Sumatra
or the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa
or the 1902 Montagne Pele in the West Indies
or even Vesuvius in 79 (man was right there too)
or June 18, 1783 the Laki Eruption in Iceland which killed 1/5 the population and tens of thousands across Europe
then there is the fact that Kilauea has been erupting continuously since 1983
CO2 rise cause or effect???
Bill McGuire is director of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre at University College London. He’s the guy who brought us tales of catastrophe from the Canary Islands. The theory is that half the island of La Palma will slide off and create a mega tsunami. Like most catastrophist theories, the headline article is always far bigger than the story that debunks it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/3963563.stm
The guy’s whole job is promoting catastrophe.
Robinson says:
“The name of the offender is: Kate Ravilious and her rump-smackingly dumb article was published at New Scientist in 2010.”
Amazingly enough, in the New Scientist article, Ms. Ravilious cites Bill McGuire.
Prof Betts of the Met Office has just told James Garvey of the Guardian to shut up 🙂
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/27/peter-gleick-heartland-institute-lie?commentpage=last#end-of-comments
Anthropogenic Global Warming-Why its supporters are traitors to the human race.
Science.
The word itself conjures up images of men and women in white coats, blackboards filled with equations and the odd bunsen burner heating a conical flask or two of colored liquids in turn giving off pungent odors.
Certainly thats how I always imagined scientists worked and to a degree those activities are how scientists have traditionally been portrayed.
However, since I was a child, something has happened to the world of science as we all understood it to be.
Hard sciences, such as physics, astronomy, chemistry and biology have never had any issue with being discussed by anyone.
Theres, no great hoo haa evident because scientist “A” disagrees with a theory postulated by scientist “B”.
Indeed, Einsteins theory of relativity is routinely discussed, questioned, tested and discussed yet again, all without any issues at all.
The recent CERN experiments with neutrinos apparently flying faster than light briefly raised a few eyebrows, yet the issues that created the observations were discussed and resolved without any finger pointing or threatening behaviors.
And thats as it should be.
Other scientists couldnt re create the observations at CERN and so their assertions were tested and found to be the result of an error.
Fine, precisely as we should expect these things to be resolved, with good, diligent science.
In stark contrast we have the so called “science” of Global Warming/Climate Change and all its spin offs such as Climate Chaos and Climate Justice.
The language being used is emotive immediately from the outset.
Instead of the “science” conducted being rigorous, diligent and thorough, we find a sloppy application of procedures and knowledge based on unproven and often untested “facts” such as including comments from a visitor to a glacier who “thinks” this or that in actual scientific papers.
As the Climategate emails have proven, climate “scientists” who propose anthopogenic global warming are politically driven by a “cause” rather than a desire to seek the truth however supportive or otherwise the data may prove.
As has been proven, the data can often be rewritten by the followers of their cause to fit the theory they propose which goes directly against the scientific method.
They install their own “people” onto internet forums and the media with people barely smart enough to function but dumb enough to take orders without questioning whether the facts are straight, stacking the numbers against anyone with a counter view, wikipedia being a prime example where thousands of submissions were systematically altered or blocked by just a few individuals.
I suggest that theories and actions so founded, not only cheat the followers of the proposed theory, they also cheat the rest of humanity and they cheat the earth itself that they so vehemently but disingenuously defend.
Some of the cheating we have seen defies logic, honesty and morality, being mirrored in the kinds of despicable behaviors displayed by our politicians and at times to those of the genocidal tyrants we often see throughout history.
The kinds of actions displayed by followers of “the cause” as its been known at such establishments as UEA, the shouting down of anyone who wont follow the unproven theory, the labeling of whole sectors of society as evil deniers- a disgusting perversion of a term meant to lower in the eyes of anyone not familiar with the subject matter those its aimed at to the level of the nazis and holocaust deniers, the continual threatening of other scientists who dont agree, who arent a part of the not so grand consensus, itself a sad joke due to the cheating applied to swell the numbers is simply not science.
The latin maxim Nullas in Verba means- On no ones word.
Thats the essence of science, you dont take anyone elses word for it.
But the followers of the cause dont view it like that, they have belief, faith if you will of the certainty of their theory, just like a god and the simple fact is theyll do anything as has been seen to protect it and nurture it.
The science of studying climate has been reduced to a religious ideal where anyone questioning the orthodoxy is a heretic, a denier and a threat to the implementation of it, to be despised, and spat upon, the be “strangled in our beds by our children” or to be sent to camps for “re education”.
Thats the reality of the “The Cause”, its no longer about science its about “what I say because I say so”.
But enough of that, the fact is simply this, science dosn’t require such actions on its behalf, it will stand or fall on the truth it is based upon, nature needs no activists to tweak its models, or have its trend lines altered or smoothed or fudged with.
Finally an accusation often levelled at “the deniers” is that theyre “anti science”, a hypocritical statement but it mimics the pattern followers of the cause often utilize.
Its because they say so, but once again nature, the earth and its inestimable mechanisms dont concur.
Being sceptical is what science is all about not believing because some other guys tells you its so.
And thats the crux- the followers have dispensed with the basis of science: To be skeptical!
Thats why the followers of AGW are traitors to science, theyre traitors to humankind and above all, theyre traitors to the planet but science, like the truth will always triumph whilst good men continue to seek it.
BTW, if any of you have not yet made it to Wikipedia’s page for: Eyjafjallajökull yet and clicked on the *.wav file of how that word is pronounced, please do so.
That language seems like it came from an Elven/Klingon collaboration
I like his reasoning:
1+1=”a metaphor”
That should have been:
2+2=”a metaphor”
[Hmmmn. 2+2, then Ah metafour? 8<) Robt]
I don’t normally read the Guardian, don’t know anything about the author, but there is a remote possibility here of a ‘Gleick’ type, but this time more subtle disinformation.
Gullible and naïve absorb scary stories. Guardian’s journalists and some of their limited readership are self-opinionated bunch and do consider the rest of populace as gullible, naïve and …..
Planting stories of this type I would consider as an attempt of fake propaganda which can be easily confused with the sceptics’ view that it is the volcanoes and other natural events that are causing climate change. Gambling on the effect of the ‘two sides of the same coin’.
He may be onto something. Up until a hundred years ago, volcanic eruptions were never severe enough to interfere with commercial aviation. And it has only been since the 1950s that volcanic ash has affected jet engines. (sarc)
“or even Vesuvius in 79 (man was right there too)”
No doubt Vesuvius was set off by Roman deforestation of southern Italy and the CO2 output of their brick kilns.
Response to AC1 (and others):
Einstein is reputed to have said:
“The only difference between genius and stupidity is that there is a limit to genius.”
Wish I had said it … … …
Mark H.
Good grief. The next thing they’ll tell us is they can use tree rings as a paleo-thermometer.
“In the detached US state of Alaska, where climate change has propelled temperatures upwards by more than 3C in the last half century, the glaciers are melting at a staggering rate, some losing up to 1km in thickness in the last 100 years. ”
Is there any truth in the claim that some glaviers have lost 1 km in THICKNESS over the past 100 years?
MetOffice vs Guardian
Quote:
Mr Garvey
I am a climate scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre and also a lead author with the IPCC (NB. the opinions I express here are my own though – I am just telling you that for context).
I would ask you to refrain from bringing my profession into disrepute by advocating that we act unethically. We already have enough people accusing us, completely incorrectly, of being frauds, green / left-wing activists or government puppets. A rabble-rousing journalist such as yourself telling us that we should “fight dirty” does not help our reputation at all. “Fighting dirty” will never be justified no matter what tactics have been used to discredit us in the past.
Inflammatory remarks such as yours will only serve to further aggravate the so-called “climate wars”. People’s reputations are already being damaged, and we know that some climate scientists get highly distasteful and upsetting mail through no fault of their own. If people like you continue to stir things up further, it is only a matter of time before somebody actually gets hurt, or worse.
Please keep your advice to yourself, we can do without it thank you very much.
Richard Betts (Prof)
Listen, he might be on to something. . . .
Fortunately, damage by volcanoes can be prevented and controlled rather easily. . . . .
All you have to do is toss a few nubile virgins into the erupting crater and all will be fine.
Hey — it worked for the Hawaiians, didn’t it??? And there’s just as much scientific evidence for what the Hawaiians did as what the esteemed volcano expert is postulating!
/sarcasm. . . . . . .
Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments when he was merely stupid. Heinrich Heine German critic & poet (1797 – 1856)
Of course the scientists know nothing.
“When every radio station [and blog] is blaring that a man without knowledge or education is better than one who has studied, it takes courage to ask: better for whom?” – Bertolt Brecht
Mike,
You do understand that your quote applies directly to the alarmist crowd, don’t you?
Guardian comments turned off. I wonder why?
Annabelle says:
“Is there any truth in the claim that some glaviers have lost 1 km in THICKNESS over the past 100 years?”
Some glaciers have lost 1 km in thickness in the last 15,000 years. That is probably close enough for some people.
Alaska has been detached for some time. Furthermore, the Hawaiian Islands are south of Florida, see here:
http://www.insidesocal.com/bargain/United-States-Map.jpg
Some years ago on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno they had two young folks on. A question about (I think) how long it would take to drive to Alaska brought the response (from the male) that you couldn’t drive there because Alaska is an island. Having some experience with HS students and maps, I knew what the fellow’s problem was. It surprised Jay and so I sent a letter with a couple of maps – one taken from the official site of the USPS. Government approved. It’s detached.
I will probably get a science article today about this…God help us all.
It’s a fine line for me to tell them to pick a weekly article about science but not tell them they may NOT choose something that touts AGW. No matter what I teach them, they come out of it all thinking that AGW is right because it’s all they read about.
Oy.
That bloke ‘guardian’ may have a point, here is what man made turbulence on the sun looks like:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/img2.htm
(sarc off)
“Here there be monsters”.
There always were. But not the ones you expected.
“Alaska has been detached for some time. Furthermore, the Hawaiian Islands are south of Florida, see here:”
Wow, the USA is made of many (mostly rectangular) islands with channels between them!
John F. Hultquist says:
February 27, 2012 at 8:14 am
And it shows deep canyons between the states! No wonder some of ’em don’t get along!
Bill McGuire is professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. I wonder how much the government grant to the Uni is to run the dept.
Also the Guardian are ripping off it’s readers, they charge £15.19 for a copy, Amazon £11.04
Solar activity/inactivity causing it? Possibly. Lets see some predictions and falsifiable hypothesis.
CO2? Ya gotta be having me on! Seriously? CO2 and a warming Earth (even if there was a huge link which there isn’t) wouldn’t warm enough to even have the difference measured compared to the inner molten parts. They fret over 1 degree per century and that is what percent of the temp of the material below the lithosphere?
dccowboy says:
February 27, 2012 at 5:37 am
“Sounds like we need to induce another ice age so we can put about a mile of ice on top of Alaska to hold that place down.”
🙂
Ah, but you see, infinitesimally small variations cause catastrophes, so anything man does, even flushing the toilet, can cause earthquakes and volcanoes. As McGuire says (page 269, penultimate page before bibliography):
“earthquakes can be induced by infinitesimally small variations…the pressure of a handshake could be sufficient to trigger its rupture and set the ground shaking…many potentially hazardous geological systems may be teetering on the edge of stability…a tiny nudge…may initiate a reaction out of all proportion to the size of the trigger – the pressure of the handshake analogy comes once again to mind. Substitute anthropogenic climate change…Through our climate-changing activities we are loading the dice in favour of increased geological mayhem…”
So, there is his thesis: an infinitesimally small variation such as the contribution of man to climate change can bring geological mayhem. That is the sum of his wisdom after 270 pages recounting all the natural causes of geological disasters.
Well, if infinitesimal variations can cause disasters, then natural variations, which are non-zero in magnitude, must be the cause of much bigger ones. And so we find that natural variations are the cause of natural variations, and geological events are natural after all.
This is an extremely cynically-contrived book with a fatuous conclusion. He must be short of money because the science is bankrupt.
Wow – the warmists have finally made the complete leap into shamanism.
This is now nothing but an old-time Hellfire and Brimstone religion for people who tell themselves they’re too smart to believe in Hellfire and Brimstone religions.
“earthquakes can be induced by infinitesimally small variations…the pressure of a handshake could be sufficient to trigger its rupture and set the ground shaking…many potentially hazardous geological systems may be teetering on the edge of stability…a tiny nudge…may initiate a reaction out of all proportion to the size of the trigger – the pressure of the handshake analogy comes once again to mind. Substitute anthropogenic climate change…Through our climate-changing activities we are loading the dice in favour of increased geological mayhem…” Patently false. How many handshakes happen every day with no corresponding earthquake?
This author is a dumb as the rocks he wishes he understood.
Experts on earthquakes tell us “strain can build up for hundreds of years”–yet such great stores of energy are not released just by the shake of someone’s hand. (This guy’s a wanker but it isn’t the earth he’s jerking.)
I’m pretty sure the volcano picture is a closeup of the one at the Mirage in Las Vegas.
Goes off on the hour (unless its raining too heavily….or there is CO2 alert…or tsunami warning that day) to celebrate all the people in the world who have bet on the wrong horse….or am I just making this stuff up as I write? Yeah…that’s the ticket…. 😉
Didn’t I see this plot on the scifi channel?
I know I will see this mentioned when I read the comments but two things require my comment now so my head does not explode:
“The permafrost that helps hold the state’s mountain peaks together is also thawing rapidly, leading to a rise in the number of giant rock and ice avalanches.”
If this is true I have been grossly misinformed about what permafrost is. Aren’t mountain peaks composed largely of non soil-like material?
And “canary in the cage”? Is he unable to say the term “coal mine” without eco-psycho trauma? I mean *further* eco-psycho trauma.
Mr Watts, really, for the first time ever I question your judgement! “may nominate this man for idiot of the year”.? Please, just give the award to him anyway it will save an awful lot of hand wringing & head scratching! I am sure you’ll manage to find some more idiots throughout the year with which he can share that most coveted of prizes 😉
What a wonderful man this McGuire must be. All we have to do is burn less coal, cycle to work and avoid too much farting to reduce our carbon output and all the volcanoes, tsunamis and tornadoes across the world will come to an end. Who’d have thought it. If only Mr McGuire had been born a few thousand years ago and everyone had been made aware of his mind blowing discovery, then all earthly catastrophies would have been avoided years ago. And what a shame the Japanese people weren’t told this before their devastating catastrophe last year, they would have been eternaly grateful. I think you Bill should be given a Nobel prize pretty quickly for such work, I’d like to see your working papers soon just to see how you did it. Just one thing bugs me though Bill. Can you tell me whether that Km of ice which you say has melted in the last 100 years started off as ice a km high, or was it below the surface and that the place at where it melted is now a kilometer deep? Perhaps it’s half a Km up and down. A bit puzzling to a simple brain like mine, but I’m sure you will have a very good and lucid explanation. I can’t wait for your reply Bill, so do blog soon.
Lessee here….. Earth’s core is maybe between 4,000-10,000deg C.
A change in the earth’s outer atmosphere of 0.6deg C will destabilize the entire system.
Ok.
One thing certain, the size of some scientist’s brains is decreasing due to thinking about global warming. Maybe an invasion of aliens would be a good thing.
I will look into how much units McGuire sells. I’m interested in becoming a science writer as well. Germans love doomsday scenarios.
Anybody come across any recent scientific papers that have anything to do with climate?
Oldseadog says:
February 27, 2012 at 3:37 am
You could’t make this stuff up.
Oh, wait a minute………………. .
H.G.Wells would be so envious of the imaginations of these folk.
###
No way! H.G. Well grounded his stories in the science of his days.
I thought the volcano looks a lot like the cover of “Dianetics”. Could global warming have something to to with engrams and Thetans?
From a physics standpoint……
As the temperature difference between the atmosphere and the core become closer, would not the system become MORE stable, not less???
..just wonderin’.
I read “Chariots” when I was still in elementary school. It had a huge impact on my understanding of what science is all about. I am very glad I read it. I can now recognize the signs of pseudo science at 20 meters without my glasses!
Vince Causey says:
“Next week in the Grauniad: “How climate change makes the Earth more vulnerable to asteroid impacts.”
In addition to the tiny asteroid threat, there’s the threat of alien civilizations determining we’re too dangerous to allow to exist as evidenced by our increasing atmospheric CO2 and start hurling really, really, really, huge asteroids towards Earth.
I propose we evacuate Earth ASAP, starting with the alarmists. Of course after they’re gone we’ll realize the evacuation wasn’t quite as urgent as we thought and just enjoy the lack of prolific pathetic precautionary principle proclamations for a change.
AC1 says:
“I don’t think we’ll ever see Peak Stupid.”
Hilarious, QOTW material.
Immensely shoddy. Here is what he writes on page 202:
“Together, the weight of all the Earth’s surface water adds up to an unimaginable number of tonnes – something like 1.35 followed by 16 zeros in fact”.
No, it’s not anything like that, in fact. Is he a mathematical illiterate? 1.35 followed by 16 zeros is 1.350000000000000000, i.e. 1.35 tonnes for the weight of the whole of earth’s surface water! 1.35 tonnes is quite imaginable, and horribly wrong.
The true figure is somewhat greater than 1.35 x 10^18, or 135 x 10^16, or 1,350,000,000,000,000,000. But what is the non-technical reader to make of 1.35 followed by 16 zeros. None of the above.
He could possibly have got away with ‘135 followed by 16 zeros’, but ‘1.35 followed by 16 zeros’ is ridiculous. Who could write such a daft thing, and who checked this rubbish?
“DirkH says:
February 27, 2012 at 9:23 am
I will look into how much units McGuire sells. I’m interested in becoming a science writer as well. Germans love doomsday scenarios.”
DirkH: Keep us posted. This could be a very lucrative opportunity. And fun. All the aspiring writer has to do is open a bottle of chilled chardonnay from Gleick Vineyards and turn on the laptop. Whatever comes out can be posted as a Kindle-ready text at say $0.10 a page. The rantier the better!
Snake Oil, “Canary in a coal mine” is an unsustainable metaphor.
Past few days, I had been catching up with older posts by Watts since 2006. I came across this – http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/05/lieberman-warner-debate-senator-rohrabacher-do-you-really-think-the-world-is-filled-with-morons/. I guess this fits in with that ridiculous article by Guardian…
The detached state of Alaska has seen a rise of 3 degrees Farenheit over 60 years. This was due to the phase shift of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation in 1976. Does Mr. McGuire comment on the PDO or the Pacific Climate Shift of 1976?
The Arctic Climate Research Center at the University of Alaska provides a nice summary:
http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/TempChange.html
Backwards again. Volcanic activity is correlated with temperature, but with cooling. And with solar cycles.
Perhaps magma is affected like the atmosphere over the oceans. Or magnetic activity can act as a trigger, or a combination as CRF may ionize molecules and magnetic field can affect circulation patterns.
Looks and reads like the classic case of either not enough, or too many drugs.
Time for a structural geologist – those of us rock jocks who study rock deformation and mechanisms.
I am preparing a thread on this at my blog In suspect terrane http://suspectterrane.blogspot.com/
and will have it ready in a couple hours
DesertYote says:
February 27, 2012 at 9:35 am
I read “Chariots” when I was still in elementary school. It had a huge impact on my understanding of what science is all about. I am very glad I read it. I can now recognize the signs of pseudo science at 20 meters without my glasses!
=======
Want to read something really crazy yet maybe real? Read Chris Dunn’s Giza Power and Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt. Here’s a link to get a taste of his writing – http://www.gizapower.com/LoTeAnArticle.htm and the pyramids may be at least 10,000 years old! That’s not to say that Chariots is real but makes you wonder if parts of it are real?
So another person who ignores the fact that the Alaskan glaciers that have had significant melting are relatively new. Their bulk was formed during the Little Ice Age, go back 1000 years and no glaciers.
“…go back a couple years to April 2010, when the word on everyone’s lips was Eyjafjallajökull…”
Oh, sure – but did anyone know how to pronounce it? Talk about overblown rhetoric! 😉
The guy is in the alarmist big league, burning up our UK taxes. This was the title of an article he wrote in the Guardian in 2008:
“Do believe the hype on climate change: when it comes to the science of climate change – if it reads like a disaster novel, then it really is that bad”.
Please do keep believing the hype: it keeps one in a very lucrative job, and it helps one sell loads of books. Among his published books (redolent of disaster novels, no doubt) are
‘A Guide to the End of the World: Everything You Never Wanted to Know’
‘Surviving Armageddon’
‘Apocalypse’
I can see why ‘Chariots of the Gods?’ came to mind!
And this guy teaches in UK universities!
Is it April 1 already?
I note that “Waking the Giant” doesn’t seem to have made the discussion at: Eruptions [http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/09/welcome-to-eruptions-4-0/] Volcano-Blog.com [http://www.volcano-blog.com/index.html] or The Vulcanism Blog [http://volcanism.wordpress.com/]. I guess that means that serious volcano freaks have decided that its not worth talking about.
W^3
Hey, it’s all possible.
NASA can do.
Some 3 years ago our Dr. Svalgaard was questioning why I have in ‘my now infamous’ solar formula factor pi/3.
I had no idea.
Then I had a quick ‘Gleick’ email from my NASA (Not Astrology Science Accepted) contact with just an enigmatic link:
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov//data/REPROCESSING/Completed/2009/mdimag/20090330/20090330_0628_mdimag_512.jpg
here is magnified part of image located at 10 o’clock.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Pi.gif
my answer was clear :’because the NASA said so’.
I’m sure Dr. S should remember, he even quoted his colleague (I think it was Dr. Kenneth Schatten) that Chinese have ‘developed’ similar technology for “writing on the sun’s surface”.
(strange but partially true).
On behalf of the once Great Britain I would like to apolagise for the Guardian and their readers. Never in the history of human endeavour has so much stupidity been written by so many for so few…..
I’ve barely started in on the comments and already doubt I’ll see one better than AC1’s – ” doubt we will ever see Peak Stupid.”
I can imagine the next siren alarm headline:
“CO2 Effects Seen Sending Earth Spiraling Out of Solar System”
The scientist kooks will come up with a convoluted argument pointing to man causing it all based on a new unfalsifiable science theory linking CO2 to:
Quantum Flux Disturbance, Ether Turbulence, Black Hole Spontaneous Event,
Gaia Getaway Manifestation, Gravity Leak Effect, etc.,etc. Loosening Earth from its Orbit.
A Big Tax will fix it (cash preferred), and postpone doomsday.
Thank god we invented money…
The stuff that’s coming out of the AGW religion is schizophrenic lunacy.
Watch for a movie based upon this book. Another “Day After Tomorrow” from the leftists in Hollywood. Earthquakes and volcanos, great stuff! Just watched “Grapes of Wrath” the 1940 film where the rich farmers are abusing the po folk and with the government operated campground where they are treated just swell by the federal government. The book written by the left wing Steinbeck and starring Hanoi Jane’s old man. Joe McCarthy was right. And the beat goes on.
I’m convinced now that most of mass media are just real life brick-and-mortar trolls. There’s really no reason to publish clearly unsubstantiated articles like this other than to provoke and earn page views.
I almost forgot. “The Day The Earth Stood Still”. The old version was anti-military/ anti-war and the new version is a propaganda piece for the warmists. Good old Hollywood.
Myrrh said @ February 27, 2012 at 4:02 am
Unfortunately for Supermolecule, his evil nemesis, The Green Slime, is eating him for breakfast. And lunch. And dinner.
I think the relevance to climate might be thus:
1. Extreme winter snowfall like December/January 2011/12 in Eurasia and Alaska.
2. Extreme volcanic eruption triggered in, say, late February/early March prior to snowpack melting.
3. A ‘year without a summer’ a la 1816 triggering lack of snowpack melt, heightened albedo and significant cooling.
4. A Maunder-style minimum occurring for 50 years leading to increasing mass balance on glaciers etc etc.
No doubt those far more qualified than I could comment on whether that is possible, has happened in the past or whether ice ages are triggered differently.
Steve from Rockwood says:
February 27, 2012 at 6:02 am
I once read that Albert Einstein had a copy of Velikovsky’s “Worlds in Collision” on his desk when he died.
Not surprising. Albert and Immanuel were friends and corresponded often. They did not necessarily agree. Velikovsly’s main purpose was to use catastrophic events to link the Bible with Egyptian history. He was a catastrophist (based on natural events) in a time of uniformity thinking.
I first heard of the frozen mammoths, with undigested plants, which now only grow 400 miles south of the finds, in their stomach. Indicates to me that “climate change happened pretty suddenly then.
Venus as a comet is a little hard to accept, but it shows we know a lot less than we think.
There was a programme on BBC about 18 months ago (I think) discussing a big earthquake in Turkey (not totally sure – it’s a good while ago) with a panel of scientists mostly. One of their number who is well-known here in the UK, Adam Hart-Davis, an historian (sort of) said “I feel sure that the increase in earthquakes is due to Global Warming. I can’t yet see exactly how, but I am sure it is.” The other panelist said nothing but looked thoughtful. Did this start this particular ball rolling, I wonder?
Danny Glover (has he even played a scientist or stayed at a HI Express?) was the first to make the connection between global warming and earthquates (TMK), even more specifically the lack of action on global warming and a particular earthquake:
correlation ≠ cause
Indeed. How come that CAGW soothsayers of doom think it is then? The Mannian Hockey Stick is all about correlation = cause (man did it). How does he get away with that as a scientist?
We really should stop giving succour to these half wits at the grauniad. The paper is going bust we should just leave it in peace to die quietly
Mr. McGuire has made quite a reputation of promoting, as TinyCo2 indicated, large scale disasters associated with an earthslide from a small volcano on a tiny little island in the Atlantic near the coast of Africa. He has made many appearances on The Discover Channel and other pushing this doomsday prediction of the destruction of the whole East Coast of the US from this earthslide.
I always thought that is was pure sensationalism.
And the hits to real science continue. Each time one of these “sky is falling’ stories comes out and then fizzles out the public think less of science and scientists. It is way past time for real scientists to speak out against this BS.
With these two Guardian articles…..I’m not so sure the Guardian is pro-global warming after all
henrythethird says:
February 27, 2012 at 5:23 am
At the rate of 1km/100yrs, they’ll open a beachside resort there somewhere around 2312.
Book your slots now…”
________________________________________________________________________
Too late – the Germans already have their towels in place (:-
CAGW causes Schmallengerg!!! oh dear. unattributed Telegraph piece:
27 Feb: UK Telegraph: Climate change blamed for drought and Schmallengerg virus as cases reach 83
Jonathan Scurlock, Chief Adviser on Climate Change for the National Farmers Union, blamed climate change for the difficult conditions in farming.
He said Schmallenberg, like Bluetongue, was able to cross over the Britain from the Continent because the midges survived a warm winter.
He also said drought will become more common in future because of global warming…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/agriculture/farming/9109091/Climate-change-blamed-for-drought-and-Schmallengerg-virus-as-cases-reach-83.html
no other MSM appears to be making the CAGW claims.
BBC has this:
27 Feb: BBC: Nine more cases of Schmallenberg livestock virus reported
He (Ian Johnson, a spokesman for the south-west England branch of the National Farmers’ Union)said the risk should be kept in context – last year in south-west England 25,000 cattle had to be slaughtered because of Bovine TB, he said, while so far fewer than 100 cases of Schmallenberg have been reported.
He added “the problem is, it’s an unknown”, and went on: “Potentially, it could be extremely serious depending on how widespread it is.”…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17179214
Bordering?
I think you passed the border a ways back, pal.
Speaking of correlation, has anyone correlated McGuire’s Grauniad pieces with the publication dates of his books? I’d bet there’s a connection, there.
Maybe someone should explain the significant gravitational effects of the moon on the earths crust to this utter moron mcguire?
And as for the guardian branded toilet tissue, theyre as mad as a box of frogs the lot of em.
Its plain to see, theyre clutching at straws, the cause is screwed, the public is weary of it but they cant help but revert to type and shout about calamity and doom, yawnsville…..just keep on a crying Wolf! you fools.
Cmon Mr FOIA, lets have the passphrase, its time to to the humane thing and euthanase the global warming movement.
Global Warming also causes bridges to collapse – the relentless thermal stress of that violent ~ 0.8°C raging heat increase is more than mere steel and concrete can withstand
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/08/07/ex-clinton-official-did-global-warming-contribute-mn-bridge-collapse
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
“Mommy, where do earthquakes come from?”
Just noticed this, hope it is not a repost. Sounds shambolic to me…..how do they think this stuf up?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17143269
BBC News says:
February 27, 2012 at 10.20 pm
“less ice in the Arctic, more snow in north-east USA, UK and China.”
Gee (this is my Gee series).. it must be much more dangerous in July than in January if warming is to blame. Why didn’t they trot out the graphs to illustrate that volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and the like occur mainly in the winter.
I especially like the conflation of the costs of the tsunami damage with the costs of the nuclear plant catastrophe. Yes, the tsunami caused the nuclear plant catastrophe, but how many other nuclear tsunamis have their been? I’d say there is an extenuating circumstance explaining the “biggest natural-catastrophe bill ever.”
Score? Fail.
You know what? The fact that the nuclear meltdown costs are lumped in like this just shows how eager he is to prove his own case, to the point of skewing the facts to fit the explanation. I rescind my previous score and thank my teenage daughter for the phrase, “Epic fail.”
Thank you Mr. McGuire for being point-man on this. I will be satisfied when the queen lizard’s wizards hush up and sit down and queenie has to trade her crown for a place in the breadline in front of those horrible Rothschild people. The world has seen enough of them and heard more than they should have. Yay, Farley, it may come to that.
Please consider the USGS and Japanese earthquake reports for the Fukushima tsunami and ‘9.2’ report. 1) The graph profile readout matches nuclear blasts instead of earthquakes. 2) The closest actual monitoring station, less than 7 miles from the ‘9.2’ record a 5.6 with the actual epicenter being a 6.2 a mile or more inland. 3) Reactor 4 ‘exploded’. Well, that is not quite possible. You see, reactor 4 was out of the entire building being refueled and overhauled. So……why do those weird Israeli made and placed cameras installed in the four exploding reactors just before the tsunami look just like mininukes and why did they have to be six feet tall or more and where is the lens? The Rothschild growth and queen lizard got some ‘splanin’ to do.
There is no visible earthquake damage beyond a short stretch of street and sidewalk for the ‘Fukushima earthquake. Nobody was alarmed until the water started to show up. Check out every earthquake above an 8, which is magnitudes lower than a 9.2. In all cases you see extensive structural damage and such. Not here. Take a look to the depths of depravity to which U.S.and British rule has sunk.
Gary Hladik says:
Is it April 1 already?
Not yet, but that’s when the book is due to be publicly released on Amazon:
Available for Pre-order. This item will be released on April 1, 2012.
http://www.amazon.com/Waking-Giant-Changing-Earthquakes-Volcanoes/dp/0199592268
These Global Warming Scientists, go figure, if this were a Christian group predicting the end of days they would be scoffing, but let one of their own…
They’ve certainly come a long way.
He’s not “bordering on the insane”. He’s exploiting a market! Lots of susceptible fear addicts out there to sell to. 100% leftists, other than the occasional End of Times loon.
“Larz” said on February 27, 2012 at 11:15 am:
Who else has gotten such auto-generated almost-grammatical spam in their email? Did this comment come with an embedded image that wordpress didn’t accept, linked to a barely-legal porn site formerly owned by the recently-deceased Nigerian Minister of Climate Change, provide your bank account info and receive your share of the $20 million of laundered EU carbon guilt credit indulgence money?
You’d be better off viewing the Free Tour first. The pics of the former railway engineer showing off his hockey stick generated from positive feedbacks is hilarious, so I hear.
[REPLY: Stuff happens. Dealt with. Thanks. -REP]
RogerT (February 27, 2012 at 5:52 am) wrote: “I have just tagged it as a fantasy novel and science fiction on Amazon UK :)”
Fits like a climate model.
AC1 says:
February 27, 2012 at 3:44 am
I don’t think we’ll ever see Peak Stupid.
==============
I agree with you that we’ll never see Peak Stupid, but there are a lot of Stupid Peaks.
There are some references above (Tiny CO2 and Aaron) to the Canary Islands falling apart causing a massive tsunami which would devastate the eastern seaboard of the USA. Sorry to disappoint and perhaps worry you both, but this could really happen – and in fact has happened in the past. I am not making this up.
At the outset let’s be clear about the cause: the future collapse of (part of) the Canaries has nothing to do with global warming, CO2 levels or mankind, it is a result of ordinary geological activity. The Canaries overlie a mantle hot-spot and are still volcanically active.
The Canary Islands may seem small and distant from the USA but if/when one of the Canary volcanoes collapses it could result in several 10’s of cubic km of rock sliding into the surrounding abyssal plain (>4 km water depth), which in turn would create a mega-tsunami. Europe would receive some impact but modelling indicates the US would be far worse hit. The likelihood of this happening in the next say week-year-century-millenium is really really small but, like the next big meteorite impact, it will happen.
So, Aaron and Tiny CO2, in this instance MacGuire is correct. But I would be more worried about falling under a bus or getting shot by my wife when in bed with my mistress.
(And yes, I’m a geologist who has done a lot of work with submarine depositional systems).
Just to clarify my comment above in case my wife reads this, I don’t have a mistress.
Snake Oil Baron says:
February 27, 2012 at 8:55 am
I know I will see this mentioned when I read the comments but two things require my comment now so my head does not explode:
“The permafrost that helps hold the state’s mountain peaks together is also thawing rapidly, leading to a rise in the number of giant rock and ice avalanches.”
If this is true I have been grossly misinformed about what permafrost is. Aren’t mountain peaks composed largely of non soil-like material?
————————————————–
Snakey, Snakey, it’s post normal permafrost. You really need to get with the program.
Too late. You could have avoided the coming 9.9 earthquake by using “your” instead of “my”. You have my condolences.
If certain other climate sites were serious about keeping it real they’d be pointing out how silly this is, as well as their usual pro-alarmist topics.
On WUWT, ClimateEtc, and Bishop we have these discussions where the more controversial skeptic claims are brought to answer (e.g. law of thermodynamics), but at alarmist sites it’s all one way.
Monopole says:
February 27, 2012 at 9:37 pm
“There are some references above (Tiny CO2 and Aaron) to the Canary Islands falling apart causing a massive tsunami which would devastate the eastern seaboard of the USA. Sorry to disappoint and perhaps worry you both, but this could really happen – and in fact has happened in the past. I am not making this up…..”
Absolutely. It may happen hundreds of years in the future. But it will happen, and the effects will be devestating, particularly on the US eastern seaboard.
It just so happens that I wrote a novel about this, and completed it a few months before the Boxing Day tsunami. However, in my novel the collapse was triggered by a nuclear weapon.
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/tsunami/249734?productTrackingContext=search_results/search_shelf/center/1
I haven’t visited the lulu website for some time, and I note that one of my earlier novels (The Children of Gaiya) is now a free download.
In the Author’s Note I did mention a warning about the Cumbre Vieja volcano made by none other than Bill McGuire. At that time I had a certain amount of respect for him. But that changed when I came across a video showing him implying that sceptics are the same as holocaust deniers.
And now this nonsense. Can science descend any lower? I wouldn’t make any bets.
But one thing is certain: this man is beneath contempt.
Chris
To ThePowerofX:
What does the peer reviewed literature say about trends in the past 120,000 years of earthquakes and vulcanism?
As we’ve gone from one interglacial into an ice age, then back into today’s interglacial (the Holocene), the sea level has gone down 350 feet, and back again. The stresses on the earth’s crust have changed considerably as two miles of ice piled onto Canada and Scandanavia, and then melted again, putting all that water in the oceans again.
Wouldn’t stresses work both ways, if they are in fact the cause of increasing vulcanism and earthquakes? As far as I can tell, the biggest volcano in the last 120,000 years occurred about 70,000 years ago, in the middle of the last ice age. That was the supervolcano Toba, attributed by some to have caused a bottleneck in human evolution by creating a volcanic winter lasting 6 to 10 years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
If I were to take the approach of the writer of this newspaper article, I would say that it must be the stresses of ice ages on the earth’s crust, removing all that water from the ocean and piling it on land in the form of ice, that causes huge volcanos and earthquakes. But I prefer science to the scary headline approach of this writer. He may make lots of cash selling his book, and he may further confuse the gullible, but I don’t see solid scientific study behind what he wrote.
Evidently, plate tectonics as the prime input of potential stress energy released suddenly as earthquake mechanical energy has gone out of fashion. No: it’s the snow.
Methinks there is far too much arm-waving going on, here. If McGuire were to don some armwear suitably aerodynamic in shape, he may achieve human flight.
Hi AC1,
While we might never see PeakStupid, we might project the possibility of HockeystickStupid.
Robin
How does air traffic grind to a halt?
The turbine blades in the jet’s engines become fouled and grind to a halt. If the crew and passengers are lucky and the flight captain hasn’t lost it, the engines MIGHT be able to be restarted once out of the volcanic dust and ash. Maybe. This is after losing thousands of feet in altitude.