Guest post by Steven Goddard
Wikipedia Image of Disaster Movie poster
While volcanic ash falls on Britain, in yet another assault on reason, the Royal Society has warned :
In papers published by the Royal Society, researchers warned that melting ice, sea level rises and even increasingly heavy storms and rainfall – predicted consequences of rising temperatures – could affect the Earth’s crust.
I also watched the movies 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow, but apparently I didn’t take them as seriously as some – Zombieland was probably more realistic.
As the land ”rebounds” back up once the weight of the ice has been removed – which could be by as much as a kilometre in places such as Greenland and Antarctica – then if, in the worst case scenario, all the ice were to melt – it could trigger earthquakes. The increase in seismic activity could, in turn, cause underwater landslides that spark tsunamis. A potential additional risk is from ”ice-quakes” generated when the ice sheets break up, causing tsunamis which could threaten places such as New Zealand, Newfoundland in Canada and Chile.
Pleeezzz …. Even if these claims worth worth considering, it would take tens or hundreds of thousands of years for Greenland and Antarctica to melt.
Back in the real world we hear from the Icelandic Meteorological Service that the glacier is what is causing the ash :
Einar Kjartansson, a geophysicist at the Meteorological Office.believes the volcano has melted about 10 percent of the glacier
It still could take months for the volcano to burn through the rest of the glacier, to a point where the steam and ash would turn instead into lava, he said.
What he is saying is that the sooner the glacier melts, the sooner the volcanic hazards will subside. This must be tough to swallow for people who believe that world is better off when it is cold and icy.
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The following is written in crayon on brown paper:
Dear Care-Taker Prime Minister of Iceland,
Please stop throwing UK investor money into the Joes-Skull volcano to appease the angry fire dragon, the smoke is really horrid an’ the ash is spoilin’ my best white smalls as they dry on me clothesline.
Signed, Harold Smith – Slough, England, formerly Great Britain, but now,..not so much.
REPLY:On 150 gsm photocopy-paper in blue felt tip pen.
Dear Harold,
The smoke is actually members of the Rothschild banking Cartel, they smoulder rather than burn, we made the error of hurling George Soros on too, but since he’s already infernal, he does not manifest the combusting.
The Volcano is due to shut down, once the Icelander taxpayers get their money back, from crooked international banksters. So not soon.
Yours, Acting-Emergency-Most Urgent-We’re in the poop now-Comptroller,
Siguer Sigardsiguerson, last-stand-bunker, Iceland.
@Dave L (21:14:58) :
“Another AGW prophet ranting about doomsday scenarios. Any day now I expect to see some of these wackos standing on the street corners wearing white robes and carrying signs predicting that the end is at hand.”
Er, wasn’t that Copenhagen?
As a rider to my earlier comment on psychoanalysis and CAGW, Freudian therapists I’ve met have tended to be rule-bound, authoritarian and thoroughly unable to admit that other views than their own could have any validity. Scepticism is a psychological flaw for many of them. So the Tavi seminar hardly comes as a surprise – they will recognise fellow believers and condemn heresy with gusto.
Isostatic rebound doesn’t just start to happen only once all the ice is melted.
Geoff Sherrington (02:33:50) :
“From the Latin roughly, “iso” = “same”, “stasis” = “standstill”.”
Geoff, allow me to be pedantic once: both words are greek. Anyway, I’m almost sure the Earth won’t get warmer just because of a small mistake like that.
It is worth taking a step back and viewing all these cases of climate alarmism in the wider context of the way that society is becoming more and more risk averse. Frank Furedi wrote a good essay on sp!ked.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8607/
Although he was using the latest Volcano ash crisis, the same thinking lies behind all of our decision making processes. For our Royal Society, the idea that there may be earthquakes and tsunamis is itself a reason for shutting down our economies, because any risk of any unpleasant event is intolerable. Probabilities and balancing pros and cons and costs in risk assessment has all but disappeared, to be replaced by mere possibilities and extended downsides only.
It is not so much a reflection on the Royal Society, but on modern civilization, and the people we have become.
Hmmmm.
I’ve argued for years that the irrational levels of automatic respect people have for anyone with the title “scientist” needs to disappear. Let’s face it. There’s no licensing system to be a scientist. You don’t even need a college degree. Basically you’re a scientist when other acknowledged scientists in turn acknowledge you as a scientist.
It’s like a glee club but with neither the charm nor the organization.
And I’m personally very happy the RS has decided to implement a plan all on it’s own to completely and utter discredit scientists in general.
There is considerable concern and aviation disruption due to the eruption of the EYJAFJALLAAJOKULL volcano. Some scientific doomers and gloomers have again wrongly suggested that global warming is behind this eruption without doing their homework. An analysis of past Icelanding eruptions tells a quite different story. There were actually more eruptions when the climate was cold during the Little Ice age [1500-1800.] There is also another volcano in Iceland that is long overdue, namely Katla, that we should keep an eye on.
Icelandic major volcanic eruptions since 800AD
CENTURY –All Icelandic Eruptions [KATLA eruptions in brackets]
800 -1[0]
900 -2[2]
1000-0[0]
1100-2[0]
1200-5[3]
1300-3[1]
1400-3[2]
1500-5[3]
1600-4[3]
1700-6[2]
1800-5[2]
1900-3[1]]
2000-1[0]
TOTAL -40[19]
http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/largeeruptions.cfm
The analysis shows that there were fewer eruptions during the MWP and the current warm period and more eruptions during the LITTLE ICE AGE.[1500-1800 ]
KATLA is the dominant eruption [50% of all eruptions ] and historically overdue .Erupts typically 2-3 times a century but no eruption since 1918 or for 92 years. However it was also quiet for 276 years between 934-1210 AD or during the last warm period [MWP]
If Katla does erupt it is likely next year after current eruption of Eyjafjallajokul ends. The latter may continue in an active way and then in a more subdued way and then active again type of cycle for a year. This was the pattern 1821-1823.
Now I know what that hole at the pole was in the ice picture a while back. It was an ash hole. The Royal Society lives there.
Popular manias mean logical and ridiculous conclusions are alright as long as they are in support of the focus of the mania.
Let’s say you have some compressible material in a container topped by a piston and the piston is 1/3 down the length of the container. If the piston is raised to 1/6 down, the pressure will be less, not more. Wouldn’t magma tend to punch through the surface if it were under greater pressure? Wouldn’t it be under less pressure without the ice?
Why does the earht’s crust care about an extra mile of ice on top of it?
If the volcano with it’s 2000 degree lava can slice right through the rock and earth, melting it on the way, does anybody think the last mile of ice is even going to slow it down?
Wouldn’t it be better, to prevent steam explosions, if all the ice were gone? See, global warming can have big pluses.
Jimbo (02:35:05) :
Silly question. Would not rebounding land counteract rising sea levels caused by melting ice?
Careful with that crazy talk…the black helicopters are closing in as you speak. 😛
matt v. (04:53:25) :
Very useful information, thanks!
This link gives search results for McGuire’s papers in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions A:
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/search?fulltext=McGuire&submit=yes&x=33&y=9
A small point: SG’s lead sentence is a little bit misleading. The Royal Society has not issues a statement on climate change causing geological events. It’s journal has published articles claiming this.
Fitzy (19:12:13) :
We could go one better and shove a few mountain ranges into the sea, and voila, our Island will float, like a boat made of rocks.
We’ll enter it in the America’s cup, which we’ll win, cos its hard to out tack a two thousand kilometre long yacht. Odd though, when the boat is the port..
Guam may beat you… as long as they don’t capsize.
“What’s the worst that can happen?”
There’s a youtube video entitled the above. It supposedly puts forwards a convincing argument to actually ‘do’ something about global warming based on the worst outcome.
However, anyone with practical experience on decision making and risk analysis can see that the premise and argument is flawed and inappropriate for the scenario he presents. Unfortunately, it seems a lot of people have been taken in by this overly simplistic argument. Additionally, this person is a teacher! If this is the mental agility of a teacher, I certainly feel the students are being brainwashed by such thinking.
I’ve been building up a retort to such an abysmal presentation, but just get so frustrated that this is seen as enlightened reasoning.
People aren’t stupid, but they are ignorant and undereducated on the whole. This means that they can easily be swayed by flawed premises and doomsday scenarios. When it is the ‘educated elite’ presenting such arguments, you end up with the blind leading the blind. How often do we hear that ‘so-and-so is not a climatologist and so has no understanding of the subject’?
I do see we are going into a dark age of enlightenment: I don’t think there’s a word for it, yet – a downfall of education; keeping (consciously or otherwise) people ignorant; developing a susceptibility to snake-oil treatments through fear/scaremongering.
How to spot Green Talk:
http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/2010/04/how-to-spot-green-talk.html
Having lived in the UK for a few short years I have come to realise how much religion affects UK society. In the light of this, I suspect the Royal Society’s editors are acting from its core group’s religious beliefs; i.e. the physical world is still ruled by the agents of their God and their Devil and bad stuff happening is a manifestation of their deity’s displeasure with them. The Renaissance was supposed to have ushered in the beginnings of the age of enlightenment and reason. A societal shift from God-centred thinking to reason-centred thinking typifies the Renaissance, but the movement seems to have slowed to a crawl somewhere and has not yet reached the editorial members of the Royal Society’s publishing house.
Another manifestation of religious belief getting in the way of reason is, according to a Kiwi mate, adding a new shrillness to the vitrolic put-downs the Guardians faithful Warmists bring to bear on any poster daring to differ from their viewpoint.
Re: Fitzy (19:12:13) :
“New Zealand is doing fine thanks, we’ll blow torch our glaciers and get our own bounce, …following Royal Society reasoning, if we move all the really heavy rocks of our land mass we’ll beat the hypothetical sea rise, altogether.”
Better be careful, start moving those rocks around and it might tip over and capsize…
Lets look at the premise that these disaster scares are based on:-
“In papers published by the Royal Society, researchers warned that melting ice, sea level rises and even increasingly heavy storms and rainfall – predicted consequences of rising temperatures – could affect the Earth’s crust.”
Melting Ice – as total amount of ice is stable, not relevant.
Sea Level Rises – the long-term trend of a slight increase in sea level has not changed recently, so not a great worry. The solar.lunar created tides move the ocean much more than the slow change to mean, so this is not a relevant factor.
Increasingly Heavy Storms and rainfall – no sign of the increasing storms, and while global rainfall has increased over the last few years, this will have no effect on the crust as our river network will run it off to the sea as it always has, so again, not relevant.
Predicted Consequences of Rising Temperatures – only slow warming for the last few hundred years as climate recovers from the LIA and no statistically significant warming for the last 15 years. The predicted rise in temperatures has stalled and only the GCM and statistical models are forecasting warming. All failed to predict the last 15 years, so have no predictive power.
No need to read further – premise dismissed.
If ifs and ands were pots and pans, where would be the work for Tinkers’ hands?
If there is a link between glacier and icecap recession and volcanic and earthquake activity, then certainly the RS study can show that in past when glaciers receded that there was correlating vocanic and earthquake activity.
Rod M (00:37:40) :
Too late Rod. Volcanic eruptions has been on the warmlist for ages. Ditto earthquakes.
DaveE.
For greatest stresses upon earth’s crust, I’m voting for (perturbations in) Celestial Mechanics. Anything powerful enough to alter the motion of earth is more than enough to result in a few fireworks here and there….
“cause underwater landslides that spark tsunamis”
the ice sheets break up, causing tsunamis which could threaten places such as New Zealand, Newfoundland in Canada and Chile”
First of Newfoundland in not in “Canada and Chile”. It is part of Canada
Next, as things seem to move in slow motion under the water, would underwater landslides realy spark tsunamis?
Finaly, the arctic is not a ice sheet that can break up. It is ice pack that is already a mass of broken up chunks of ice. I am not worried about tsunamis from the arctic ice. What are these guys degrees in anyway. I think it is marketing, not science.