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
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.