You can’t make this stuff up. It’s worse than we thought. Related: Why the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets are Not Collapsing
Climate change: melting ice will trigger wave of natural disasters
Scientists at a London conference next week will warn of earthquakes, avalanches and volcanic eruptions as the atmosphere heats up and geology is altered. Even Britain could face being struck by tsunamis
Robin McKie The Observer, Sunday 6 September 2009
Scientists are to outline dramatic evidence that global warming threatens the planet in a new and unexpected way – by triggering earthquakes, tsunamis, avalanches and volcanic eruptions.
Reports by international groups of researchers – to be presented at a London conference next week – will show that climate change, caused by rising outputs of carbon dioxide from vehicles, factories and power stations, will not only affect the atmosphere and the sea but will alter the geology of the Earth.
Melting glaciers will set off avalanches, floods and mud flows in the Alps and other mountain ranges; torrential rainfall in the UK is likely to cause widespread erosion; while disappearing Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets threaten to let loose underwater landslides, triggering tsunamis that could even strike the seas around Britain.
At the same time the disappearance of ice caps will change the pressures acting on the Earth’s crust and set off volcanic eruptions across the globe. Life on Earth faces a warm future – and a fiery one.
“Not only are the oceans and atmosphere conspiring against us, bringing baking temperatures, more powerful storms and floods, but the crust beneath our feet seems likely to join in too,” said Professor Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre, at University College London (UCL).
“Maybe the Earth is trying to tell us something,” added McGuire, who is one of the organisers of UCL’s Climate Forcing of Geological Hazards conference, which will open on 15 September. Some of the key evidence to be presented at the conference will come from studies of past volcanic activity. These indicate that when ice sheets disappear the number of eruptions increases, said Professor David Pyle, of Oxford University’s earth sciences department.
“The last ice age came to an end between 12,000 to 15,000 years ago and the ice sheets that once covered central Europe shrank dramatically,” added Pyle. “The impact on the continent’s geology can by measured by the jump in volcanic activity that occurred at this time.”
Read the rest here at the Guardian
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I dunno. That Guardian article has got me really worried. I’m at risk of laughing myself to death…
It’s hard to believe that the Dangerous man made global warming hypothesis could be extended into crustal dynamics but they have managed to do it. This really is laughable, if it wasn’t so serious.
All that with just one or two degrees of warming that will take the Arctic’s mean temperature to minus 27C and the Antarctic to minus 35C! OMG LOL
Henny Penny, the sky is falling! Run!
I don’t care to think what my geology professor would have said if I had put something like that on paper for him to read.
This conference seems like a parody of science.
*sound of me picking up my jaw from the floor*
And if it is warmer the earth will expand and make it a bigger target for asteroids. And there will be more solar flux hitting the larger earth so it will get even warmer, expand more and get even warmer……..leading to more drag from space dust which means the orbit around the sun will decay more quickly and it’ll get even warmer nay hotter and……
Some how I think there are more likely causes of earthquakes then AGW. The most interesting is from an Andies indian observation that quakes and eruptions followed solar eclips.
“This new learning amazes me! Explain again how sheep’s bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes.” ~Monty Python and the Holg Grail.
None of this would have happened if we’d kept the earth flat and at the centre of the universe. I blame science and technology for all this… ahhh ignorance is such bliss.
Thermageddon and the Ecopolypse will cause earthquakes, tsunamis, and then the seas will boil!!! The very crust beneath our feet will crack and swallow us up!!! Scientists are all in consensus on that!!! Why won’t you listen, you deniers, you heretics and apostates???? Doom, I tells ya, doom is fast approaching!!!!
Oh the weeping and gnashing of teeth!!! You stupid greedy SUV drivers and energy hogs!!! You have condemned us all and Life Itself to the fiery pits!!!!
Two questions: what’s for lunch at the conference, and will there be a no-host bar?
I’m beginning to wonder why I keep subjecting myself to reading these sorts of stories. All they do is aggravate me and yet I keep going back for more, hoping that at some point they go over the deep end and people finally start looking at the numbers themselves.
Concerning the content of the article, I can’t help but wonder how Earth has even survived this long. They certainly seem to pile on the doomsday possibilities, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis oh my! Are they just hoping that if they propose enough disaster scenarios that if one were to happen they can instantly point to it and say look we told you so? If the methane hydrate deposits are so sensitive to sea surface temperatures isn’t it a good thing that they have been dropping since 2004? If less ice at the caps reduces the pressure on the Earth’s crust wouldn’t that reduce the likelihood of eruptions? Is it possible that correlation is not causation and that the volcanic activity at the end of the last ice age might be attributable to the milankovitch cycle, or another gravitational mechanism and have absolutely nothing to do with warming temperatures or retreating glaciers? Even if you assume they are right wouldn’t the increased volcanic activity lead to dimming? Pinatubo and El Chichon show up immediately in the temperature data and overwhelm many warming effects.
I think I have an idea for how we can accelerate the awakening to the realization the emperor has no clothes. We found the Watt’s Institute for Climatalogical Armageddon Nexus or WICAN. We then put out daily press releases showing that the increase in temperatures have led to increases across the globe in the number of cases of swine flu, aids, automotive accidents, pirates, terrorists, etc… We can scientifically show that all of those things have increased as a result of higher temperatures. “These are key issues that we will have to investigate over the next few years” All we need is the funding to do so.
It wouldn’t take long for the average joe who doesn’t pay very close attention to the drivel from the Hazard Research Centre to suddenly realize that the alarmist hand wringing du jour is just that.
JM
Maybe volcanoes offer an escape from ice ages through deposition of molecules on ice affecting the planet’s albedo.
The correlation could be backwards. Wouldn’t surprise me they try to find the most alarmist assessment possible though – it is the Guardian.
This is just the beginning.
Wait until they start getting creative.
The media will love them.
Fiction sells better than truth.
“Even Britain could face being struck by tsunamis…
The cynical selection of panic lines displayed by the quote above from this story is highlighted by reference to the following from a 2007 article. Like… why mention it has happened before a few hundred years back? That would only blunt the panic… and the guilt so necessary to keep this baby movin’.
I lost my keys this morning. Isn’t climate change insidious?
I´m sceptic of manmade climate change, but actually when ice sheets disappear, scientists in Iceland have said for years that less pressure on earth´s crust do trigger volcanic activity under the glaciers.
Greetings from Icelands 🙂
I bet they can’t proofe this. Al the snow and ice in the alps melt every summer and snow’s back every winter. I bet they didn’t measured the volume of the glaciers or any thing else. This is worse than the pope is saying that aids is caused by condoms.
and next time, the guardian’s science team will reveal the biggest threat to mankind
http://bioresonant.com/news.htm
Reply: I wear extra large, please ship to Anthony. http://bioresonant.com/dress.html ~ charles the moderator
After twenty plus years of this nonsense we are into a new generation of scientists who are qualified not in Climate science, or meteorology and the like. They are qualified and have PhD’s in Global Warming and Mitigation Strategies, Climate impacts on indigenous peoples, socio-economic impacts etc etc, having been taught and supervised by the initiators of the whole scam in the first place and fostered by the Behemoth that is the UN.
Makes you wonder how they will handle it when another c. 535 volcanic eruption occurs what wipes out the US and Canadian grain crops. Last time it happened we lost 1/2 of the world’s population. We would probably loose a greater portion if that happened today. And it WILL happen again.
XBox-360 – “Anything is possible”
(I should have gone into advertising)
So AGW leads to ACD (Anthropogenic Continental Drift). Looks like the climatologists are finally catching up to the Peoples Cube.
http://thepeoplescube.com/red/viewtopic.php?t=1668
Bill McGuire : rent-a-disaster expert.
Put him in a plane, send him to a disaster destination, get some footage of him walking around the area with his little travel bag, cue audio.
I recall a nutty PhD in Australia who mooted this a few years ago. It was howled down by both AGW proponents and sceptics alike, but obviously he must have the ear of some folk. I just cant remember his name at the present.
Reply: Dr Thomas J. Chalko MSc, PhD ~ ctm
Obviously people are not scared enough over Global Warming.
……………………but there is a day of reckoning coming for scientists who indulge in crying wolf.
Got it. Tom Chalko is the fellow, who did his fid in vibration analysis. His website;
http://sci-e-research.com/quake-energy.html