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
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.