People send me stuff.
This morning my inbox had a forwarded Twitter item about a Tammy post where supposedly none of what McIntyre discovered about the dating problems in Marcott et al hockey stick “matter”, because “Tamino” has proven otherwise, even though Marcott’s PhD thesis with the same proxy data (but not arbitrarily re-dated) does not show the 20th century uptick. But, all Tamino did is throw some artificially generated spikes into the mix, run a process where he doesn’t show the code/work, and say “trust me”. It is amusing. We’ll save that for a future examination, as I’d like to see what Mr. McIntyre has to say.
In the meantime, Josh has a cartoon about a previous episode from Tammyworld:
Josh writes:
Tamino’s recent posts on Marcott et al bear an uncanny similarity to Steve McIntyre’s work at Climate Audit. Dave Burton noticed and commented:
Grant, I find it just plain bizarre that you wrote all this and never even mentioned Steve McIntyre, who first figured out what Marcott had done wrong, and whose excellent work is the whole reason you wrote this.
H/t WUWT
This cartoon imagines Tamino, aka statistician and folk singer Grant Foster, putting things right. Do suggest some more songs that Tamino might like to try. I am sure he will be very grateful.
After getting the email this morning, I decided to look around Tammyworld a bit. What was even more amusing was his post about hydraulic fracturing aka “fracking” and earthquakes, where he tries to show a correlation between recent hockey stick style upticks in low magnitude earthquakes in Oklahoma. Of course as anyone who follows the energy debate knows, “fracking” is the recently “discovered” evil incarnate process, even though it has been in use since 1949, and prior to that they used nitroglycerine to do the same job of enhancing well production by fracturing rock nearby the well casing.
There’s another Josh cartoon in this one, read on.
Tamino leads with:
Mother Jones reports on recent earthquakes in regions not accustomed to much seismic activity, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Ohio. Much of their story consists of anecdotal evidence, particularly the strongest earthquake in Oklahoma history at magnitude 5.6 in November 2011, which happened along a fault which a Univ. of Oklahoma geophysics professor referred to as “a dead fault that nobody ever worried about.” Since this quake “injured two people, destroyed 14 homes, toppled headstones, closed schools, and was felt in 17 states,” people are starting to worry.
I’ve highlighted the stick Tamino focused on.
http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/normnum1.jpg
He plots the Oklahoma data and gosh it sure looks like another recent man-made event doesn’t it?
![ok1[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/ok11.jpg?quality=83)
Source: http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/ok1.jpg
His conclusion:
So far, the fossil-fuel industry has denied any connection between recent earthquake activity and oil/gas production. The U.S. Geological Survey disagrees. Who you gonna believe?
At first I thought maybe he had a valid point, because the data presented sure looks convincing, and I started looking for data about the number of new wells drilled in Oklahoma to see if it supported his claim, but midway through the search process I started laughing, when I realized Tamino’s vision is just another case of this:
Thanks to Josh for allowing the borrowing and amending of his original cartoon for our entertainment today.
You see, I thought I’d have to do some data wrangling and plotting to see if Tamino’s point was really valid or not. But then, I realized that much like Mann’s hockey stick, and the Yamal incident, where some data that might not support the premise was excluded, so it was with the case with Tamino’s fracktastic analysis.
Some background. Some claim that this paper…
Examination of Possibly Induced Seismicity from Hydraulic Fracturing in the Eola Field, Garvin County, Oklahoma Oklahoma Geological Survey / by Austin Holland
http://www.ogs.ou.edu/pubsscanned/openfile/OF1_2011.pdf
[From the Report]
Our analysis showed that shortly after hydraulic fracturing began small earthquakes started occurring, and more than 50 were identified, of which 43 were large enough to be located. Most of these earthquakes occurred within a 24 hour period after hydraulic fracturing operations had ceased. There have been previous cases where seismologists have suggested a link between hydraulic fracturing and earthquakes, but data was limited, so drawing a definitive conclusion was not possible for these cases.
…”proves” that there is a link between fracturing and Earthquakes. Maybe there is, but I thought to myself, “the past, like the blade of the infamous hockey stick is flat, if fracking has been around since 1949, why isn’t there more spikes in earlier data in Tamino’s plot”? Surely, there must have been some fracking going on in oil-rich Oklahoma before 2009 when the uptick started.
The USGS report on the Nov 6th 2011 quake in Oklahoma states:
The magnitude 4.7 and 5.6 earthquakes that occurred on November 5, 2011, were situated in a region located about 50 km east of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Earthquakes are not unusual in Oklahoma, but they often are too small to be felt. From 1972-2008 about 2-6 earthquakes a year were recorded by the USGS National Earthquake Information Center; these earthquakes were scattered broadly across the east-central part of the state. In 2008 the rate of earthquakes began to rise, with over a dozen earthquakes occurring in the region east- northeast of Oklahoma City and southwest of Tulsa, Oklahoma. In 2009 the rate of seismicity continued to climb, with nearly 50 earthquakes recorded–many big enough to be felt. In 2010 this activity continued. The magnitude 4.7 and 5.6 earthquakes of November 5, 2011, are the largest events recorded during this period of increased seismicity. Additionally, the M5.6 quake is the largest quake to hit Oklahoma in modern times.
There have been dozens of aftershocks recorded following the shallow November 5, 2011 magnitude 5.6 earthquake and its magnitude 4.7 foreshock that occurred on the same day. These aftershocks will continue for weeks and potentially months but will likely decrease in frequency. This is not an unusual amount of aftershock activity for a magnitude 4.7 to 5.6 earthquake sequence. There is always a small possibility of an earthquake of larger magnitude following any earthquake, but the occurrence of the magnitude 5.6 earthquake, and the increase in activity in recent years does not necessarily indicate that a larger more damaging earthquake will occur.
The word “fracking” or any reference to injection wells or drilling as a possible cause or enhancer is completely absent from the USGS report. Even Scientific American doesn’t buy the hype saying:
Did Fracking Cause Oklahoma’s Largest Recorded Earthquake?
Probably not, as the gas drilling practice tends to be associated with minor quakes, not big ones, seismologists say
It seems simply like just another few and far between earthquake event in the Midwest, like the New Madrid Earthquake, which had it occurred today, some activist would most certainly try to find a fracking connection.
Back to Oklahoma. I mused that Oklahoma really wasn’t in “boom” mode recently (compared to its past drilling history), so why the recent uptick in seismic activity? Was it natural, or enhanced by fracking? And then it hit me; I was looking at the wrong state.
Where is the biggest “boom” in fracking enhanced oil production occurring? North Dakota and Montana’s Bakken formation seen in the map at right.
From this article in Bloomberg news:
To reach the Bakken formation, a 360-million-year-old shale bed two miles underground that geologists say holds a 15,000 square-mile region of oil, companies must use a drilling method known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. With fracking, water is pumped down a well with sand and chemicals to crack rock and release oil. Officials estimate the field could be productive for as long as 25 years.
Wikipedia says:
New rock fracturing technology available starting in 2008 has caused a recent boom in Bakken production. By the end of 2010 oil production rates had reached 458,000 barrels (72,800 m3) per day outstripping the capacity to ship oil out of the Bakken.[8][9] The production technology gain has led a veteran industry insider to declare that the USGS estimates are too low.[10]
It stands to reason that with this much fracking going on in the biggest oil boom region in the USA in a short and recent time span, surely there must be some seismic effects as a result of it. Surely there must be a cluster of small quakes around the Bakken region?
Nope.
Locations of earthquakes with magnitude 3 or greater
Source: http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/quakes.jpg
I have to wonder why Tamino didn’t plot the USA with magnitude 1 or greater quakes, since that dataset is what he focused his main analysis on? Just looking at magnitude 3 and greater, there isn’t much of a signal in Oklahoma anyway, and the nearby New Madrid fault seems to have more.
So, what does the USGS earthquake data that Tammy plotted say about eastern Montana and North Dakota where the big fracking boom is happening (highlighted in yellow)?
Source: http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/normnum1.jpg
The earthquake data for the Bakken region is as flat as the plains of North Dakota itself.
So on the question of “does fracking causes earthquakes”, “Who you gonna believe?”.
I think I’ll pass on Tamino’s visions.
UPDATE: Tamino has responded,
He shows that a Scientific American article suggested that fracking was probably not the cause of Oklahoma’s biggest quake on record. And by God, if fracking isn’t wreaking seismic hell in Nebraska then Anthony Watts won’t accept that there’s any evidence of its having an impact anywhere.
LOL!
He predictably ignores the issue I point out with Bakken and lack of earthquakes there. but doubles down on Oklahoma, and then despite the act that his previous post title says:
Does Fracking Cause Earthquakes?
…he goes to plan B “look a squirrel!” and goes to the wastewater injection well argument.
Anthony Watts pushes the idea that there’s no relationship between fracking and increased earthquake activity, he won’t even consider an indirect relationship due to the wastewater injection which fracking requires. Both the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Research Council disagree. Who you gonna believe?
I’ll believe the data, and the data says there are NOT swarms of Earthquakes in the Bakken formation, but there are some in Oklahoma. This difference is an issue, and he’s offered no explanation for this conundrum.
Does fracking and its byproduct wastewater cause some earthquakes? Maybe – but correlation is not causation, much like the correlation lie activist Josh Fox made in Gasland about flammable gas in well water, which turned out to be there long before fracking. It may simply be that some areas are more sensitive than others, or some processes are better than others, but it certainly doesn’t suggest that all fracking and its byproduct wastewater injection causes earthquakes as activists would like you to believe. It has only been recently an issue since global warming “concerns” have turned it into a potential tool to shut down energy production.
So if there some small magnitude 1-3 earthquakes in Oklahoma, are they big enough to worry about, much like the small earthquakes around mining operations known for decades? Probably not. I sure don’t, only the activists seem to get upset about this.
Since Tamino cited an event in the UK, (although Wales was claimed) it is instructive to have a look at what they say on page 40 of The Royal Society report (h/t Miguelito): Shale gas extraction in the UK: a review of hydraulic fracturing June 2012 (PDF)
5.3 Seismicity induced by hydraulic fracturing
There are two types of seismicity associated with hydraulic fracturing. Microseismic events are a routine feature of hydraulic fracturing and are due to the propagation of engineered fractures (see Chapter 4). Larger seismic events are generally rare but can be induced by hydraulic fracturing in the presence of a pre-stressed fault. The energy released during hydraulic fracturing is less than the energy released by the collapse of open voids in rock formations, as occurs during coal mining. The intensity of seismicity induced by hydraulic fracturing is likely to be smaller due to the greater depth at which shale gas is extracted compared to the shallower depth of coal mining. Magnitude 3 ML may be a realistic upper limit for seismicity induced by hydraulic fracturing (Green et al 2012). If a seismic event of magnitude 3 ML occurs at depths of 2-3km, structural damage at the surface is unlikely.
…
On 1st April 2011, the Blackpool area experienced a seismic event of magnitude 2.3 ML shortly after Cuadrilla’s Preese Hall well in the Bowland Shale was hydraulically fractured. Another seismic event of magnitude 1.5 ML occurred on 27th May 2011
following renewed hydraulic fracturing of the same well.
…
Analysis of the seismic data suggests that the two events were due to the reactivation of a pre-stressed fault. In abscence of further data it is difficult to determine whether the fault was directly intersected by the well, or whether hydraulic fracturing led to pressure changes that induced a distant fault to slip.
Note this: “Magnitude 3 ML may be a realistic upper limit for seismicity induced by hydraulic fracturing (Green et al 2012).” That supports what has been said about the November 5th, 2011 magnitude 5.6 earthquake it Oklahoma – it doesn’t seem likely that it was connected to fracking, though many people (Tamino included) want it to be, because then it becomes a political tool if they can prove it.
So has this event in Blackpool stopped anything in the UK? No, the UK Shale Gas Boom is going ahead, because rational people realize that the risks are small and the benefits far outweigh those risks:
Earlier this month the UK gave the go-ahead to hydraulic fracturing, under tight regulatory conditions, a year after the practice was suspended when an exploration company triggered two small earth tremors in Lancashire.
Problem solved.
But Tamino hates fracking, hates “deniers”, and generally is just an unpleasant bloke about anything that has to do with talking point issues pushed by the left. I find him and his irrational hatred of anything associated with oil extraction wholly amusing, and it’s the best free Saturday entertainment you could ask for.
So who you gonna believe? Well I believe fracking, like any process, has some risks, and the benefits far outweigh the highly publicized events used as political tools. I also believe I’ll go fill up my gas tank and turn on my natural gas powered fireplace. – Anthony
UPDATE2 4/7/13: From a guest post last year by David Middleton:
Frohlich, 2012 found no correlation between fracking and earthquakes… NONE, NADA, ZIP, ZERO-POINT-ZERO…
Most earthquakes identified in the study ranged in magnitude from 1.5 to 2.5, meaning they posed no danger to the public.
“I didn’t find any higher risks from disposal of hydraulic fracturing fluids than was thought before,” says Frohlich.”My study found more small quakes, nearly all less than magnitude 3.0, but just more of the smaller ones than were previously known. The risk is all from big quakes, which don’t seem to occur here.”
All the wells nearest to the eight earthquake groups reported high injection rates (maximum monthly injection rates exceeding 150,000 barrels of water). Yet in many other areas where wells had similarly high injection rates, there were no earthquakes. Frohlich tried to address those differences.
Texas map showing the Barnett Shale (gray) and rectangle indicating region mapped in figure 2. Credit: Cliff Frohlich/U. of Texas at Austin.
“It might be that an injection can only trigger an earthquake if injected fluids reach and relieve friction on a nearby fault that is already ready to slip,” says Frohlich. “That just isn’t the situation in many places.”
Hydraulic fracturing is an industrial process in which water and various chemicals are pumped deep underground in order to fracture rock, allowing oil or gas to more easily flow to a well. As petroleum is produced at the surface, most hydraulic fracturing fluids return to the surface too. Frohlich is careful to point out that he did not evaluate the possible correlation of earthquakes with the actual hydraulic fracturing process, but rather the effects of disposing of fracturing fluids and other wastes in these injection wells.
And finally, as I have previously posted, the induced seismicity from fracking and most injection operations is almost entirely nonpalpable.
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Anthony, Re: Frolich (2012), you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the role that statistical tests play in testing hypotheses. To put Frolich’s conclusions concisely, their work fails to reject the null hypothesis of no correlation. This does not mean that there is no correlation (in fact there is almost certainly some relationship), but that for the particular data they used, their statistical test was not sufficiently powerful to capture the nature of the relationship (if any). Their results have no bearing on the other studies insofar as they use different methods and data, so it is really quite an extraordinary job of cherry picking you’ve done to highlight one study with a negative result out of many with positive results, as Tamino has pointed out.
In the particular case in question, you also fail to recognize the crucial role of long observations (such as the enormous USGS archive used by Tamino) in examining this relationship. Frolich examined two datasets: one from the usual National Earthquake Center, and a brief, high resolution set from the region of Texas which was monitored during intensive shale fracking. While the latter data show a large increase in earthquakes of all magnitudes compared with the NEC data, this is expected a priori when sampling a region so densely. Thus Frolich does not show that ‘despite a large increase in earthquakes, they are not caused by fracking in this part of Texas’. Instead, he simply shows that high sampling density will get you more data for more events, but that a short period of observation is insufficient to identify any trends. The virtue of using long, homogeneous timeseries is shown very clearly in Tamino’s analyses.
REPLY: Oh, good job of obfuscation there. OK if long time series has value, and fracking has been around and in use in Oklahoma since 1949, explain then why there are no other events that climb out of the noise as Tamino’s analysis suggests. If long time series has a value, he should plot back to 1949 to look at all of the data. Tamino’s premise was general, asking a broad question. “Does Fracking Cause Earthquakes” and no caveats/qualifiers were given. I maintain that not all fracking causes Earthquakes, some probably does cause some earthquakes as the Royal society paper points out, and of the events that can be reasonably correlated, they don’t rise to the level of concern. Cite statistical tests all you want, but the real issue is whether any of this is worth worrying about as activists would like us to. For them, trying to prove that all fracking causes Earthquakes is simply a path to gain a political tool to use to shut down energy production. Its a ruse for the the uninformed to swallow.
I no more worry about fracking sized earthquakes than I do the occasional rumbles I get from low planes flying overhead that shake the windows at my office (near the airport) or the rumbles I get from the semi-trucks that travel the major road a mere 50 feet from my office. I suggest others shouldn’t either. – Anthony
chrisd3 says:
April 7, 2013 at 9:26 am: “…That is not a valid assumption, because they are geologically quite different….” Says who? You? Or do you have a couple of USGS Professional Papers or somesuch describing the creation, lithology and structural geology of the two shale basins we’re discussing here (Oklahoma and ND)? Otherwise you’re just waving your arms and obfuscating.
@jimf: “Says who? You?”
No, says the United States Geological Service. You could look it up.
This is not a question of worrying or not worrying; it is purely academic. I view the recent increase in fracking as a nearly ideal experiment, wherein we have a big, controlled and documented change in a candidate predictor variable. Previously, fracking was so small-scale that one could never hope to find a signal. Activists may choose to take up the issue or not, but for those of us who are impartially evaluating the issue, it is best to steer clear of preconceived notions about cause and effect, or attitudes good and bad. Besides, I don’t think that anyone is really concerned about M3 earthquakes. In fact my gut feeling would be that gradual relaxation via smaller slip events would be advantageous from the perspective of preventing larger events. While Tamino’s post is headlined as “Does Fracking Cause Earthquakes,” this is a reference to the Mother Jones article. And the post concludes with an open — if pointed — question.
As for why earlier data were not used, I’m not sure where you get 1949 from. The USGS source notes that “This search currently contains data starting on January 1st, 1973 to the present.” So there may be older data, but it’s not accessible at the moment. Most likely, those data are not spatially complete over the pre-1973 period, so it would still make sense to use the most recent interval. If you’re particularly interested in a region which has older data, by all means replicate the analysis over the full period. I would be interested in the results.
REPLY: Sorry, but no. The question of whether fracking is purely academic or not became moot when fracking was turned into a political change tool by the left.
And you illustrate a good point about dates, spatially incomplete data prior to 1973. One of the issues I wondered about was how much of these small earthquakes went unrecorded in the past dues to greater distances to seismic recorders. With the advent of modern well distributed seismic networks, such as the one deployed in Oklahoma, the Oklahoma Seismic Network, operated by the University of Oklahoma, the idea that fracking is causing more earthquakes now may simply be an artifact of better sampling.
For example, the Quake Catcher Network http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=2969
…will do for earthquakes what storm hcasers have done for storms, and create a reporting bias for smaller quakes, just like the extra eyes did for small F0-F1 tornadoes.
Again, not worth worrying about unless you are an activist looking to make political tools.
– Anthony
chrisd3 says:
April 7, 2013 at 11:50 am: No, you give us the citations.
chrisd3 says:
April 7, 2013 at 9:47 am
@Mark Bofill:
Ah, the “Timmy did it too” excuse. Given that North Dakota and Oklahoma are geologically quite different, assuming that fracking is safe because there has been no increase in seismic activity in North Dakota is unwarranted. What Tamino did or did not do is wholly irrelevant to that.
——————-
Chrisd3, What Tamino did or did not do is wholly relevant. The title of the blog article is Saturday Silliness: Tamino aka Grant Foster fracks himself, this should clue you in. I couldn’t decide if I was joking or not in my original post (the /sarc? tag), but clearly I should have been serious.
Listen carefully. The burden of proof does not rest on the skeptic. When refuting claims which do not consider a factor such as geological differences in the first place, it is wholly improper to discount an argument against the original claim because it does not satisfy a criteria that the original claim failed to meet in the first place. In other words, take it to Grant Foster, not Anthony Watts.
How about “Your Cheatin’ Chart”
cn
Mike Smith says:
April 6, 2013 at 6:40 pm
Anthony, Anthony: Fracking doesn’t cause earthquakes. Global warming causes earthquakes! Didn’t you know that?!
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/07/guardian-global-warming-to-trigger-earthquakes-tsunamis-avalanches-and-volcanic-eruptions/
http://tucsoncitizen.com/wryheat/2012/02/29/is-global-warming-causing-more-earthquakes/
————————-
Yes Anthony, we know you’re busy but please keep up.
/sarc
cn
@Mark: I didn’t say a word about Tamino. What I’m saying has nothing at all to do with Tamino or his post. It has entirely to do with what Anthony did, which was to make an unwarranted assumption: He assumes, apparently, that if fracking/wastewater injection doesn’t cause seismicity in North Dakota, then it can’t do so anywhere. That’s a bad assumption because not everyplace is North Dakota. Geology differs from place to place.
This is unrelated to anything Tamino said. It wouldn’t make any difference if Tamino’s post had never existed. My comment was not a defense of Tamino’s post.
Is this really that hard to grasp?
@jimf: I spent a half hour this morning looking at a number of sources about the geology of North Dakota and Oklahoma. They are different. I’m not going to go back through all that stuff again. You can do it yourself if you want to. Otherwise, don’t.
The fact is, it doesn’t make any difference to my comment. The point is that you just can’t say “If this doesn’t cause seismicity at location X, then it can’t cause seismicity anywhere.” That doesn’t follow. Geology differs from one place to another.
Chris- I realize that apparently in your view, since you are not talking about Foster’s post you fail to understand what it’s got to do with anything. The rest of us poor benightened fools who do not realize that you are the center of the universe quite naturally see it differently. Specifically, we note that Anthony was posting on Tamino in response to an argument put forward by Tamino. Come down from Planet Chris and think about it from the perspective of us peons, and maybe you’ll understand the problem.
If I tell another smoker that smoking is bad for me and bad for them too, it’s not hypocrisy. If I support government intervention on smoking (I don’t), and I still smoke, that is not hypocritical either. Hypocrisy is a feigned moral position. If I say that I would never allow smoking in my house, but I myself smoke in my house, then I’m being hypocritical. The charge is often levelled against Christians – If you sin, then you can’t be a Christian, and obviously are pretending to believe in God.
The meaning of the word is often stretched beyond its limits by people who simply want to criticise. It has a specific meaning, born from the Greek word ‘to pretend’, and alludes to people who try to set themselves on a higher moral pedastal by espousing beliefs they do not actually hold.
http://www.wordnik.com/words/hypocrite
I’d be a hypocrite if I said I use no fossil fuels, but actually did.
barry says:
April 7, 2013 at 3:06 pm
… If I support government intervention on smoking (I don’t), and I still smoke, that is not hypocritical either. Hypocrisy is a feigned moral position. …The meaning of the word is often stretched beyond its limits by people who simply want to criticise….
———-
Actually, I said, ‘hypocrite or worse’, and I suspect you missed my thrust. If you presume to rule others in a matter where you will not even rule yourself, you are at best a hypocrite. Hypocrisy in this case does indeed presume that the hypocrite has enough grasp of reality, right and wrong, etc. to at least feel shame for his actions and endeavor to hide them and pretend, however, doubtless sociopaths exist who would unabashedly assert that no rule proper for anyone else should possibly be applied to them.
chrisd3 says:
April 7, 2013 at 1:59 pm: “…Geology differs from one place to another….” Really? Me being a geologist, I know that. Now you came here and said that Anthony is wrong because the USGS says the geology is different. If you have a paper with a title such as “Comparison of contrasting depositional environments in the X and Y sedimentary basins”, then fine. Post the link. If you have two papers, for example “Structural and sedimentological development of the X Basin” and another of similar title concerning the Y Basin, then post the links and tell us your geological reasons for making the statement. Otherwise, you’re just throwing BS. Based on your other posts, you are just flinging poo.
@jimf: You continue to miss the point. Here it is, one final time: The fact that tracking/injection did not increase seismic activity in location X does not mean that fracking/injection can’t increase seismic activity anywhere, regardless of its geology. That is just not a valid assumption.
I really do not understand how you, as a geologist, can dispute this honestly.
Good grief. This whole exchange is simply ridiculous given that both Tamino and Watts are probably in agreement about what is the case concerning the relationship between earthquakes and fracking. It’s a great exercise in nitpicking.
[snip – juvenile snark – mod]
[snip – posts written in “baby talk” can be better applied here
Further, we wonder if as an employee of the Ford Motor Company, your superiors are aware of how you are using their network resources, -mod]
Well, in some fabled land I can imagine myself with super powers that enable me to ‘rule’ people, and then exempt myself from those rules. I guess we might find a case for some kind of hypocrisy there.
You seem to imply that anyone is a hypocrite if they advocate change in a system while living under the system they wish to change. It’s ludicrous. A person who fervently believes a too-big government should receive less tax revenue from its constituents, but still pays the tax they think is too much, is a hypocrite?
You said:
If the government regulations apply equally to my cigarettes, and I accept that, then there is no hypocrisy in it. I may not be acting in the best interests of my addiction (well, good for me!), but this is not remotely hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy is about pretending to a moral virtue. I smoke, I use fossil fuels. Advocating against their use is not hypocrisy unless I pretend that I don’t touch the stuff. I’m not playing holier than thou – which is where hypocrisy comes into it.
You can have the last word. this is way off-topic.
If you’d limited yourself to political comments I would not have been interested in commenting here. But you attempted some analysis and people questioned it – which is what I think is the best thing about these blogs. If you want to sideline the politics (I’d back you 100% on this), then encourage those people who make sensible comments on data and analysis, whether or not they agree with you.
Serious question: is your main motivation with WUWT political or scientific in character?
REPLY: Fracking has elements that are scientific and political mixed nearly every day in news stories, yet you complain about this combination here? Read the header, that’s the stated scope. Surely you must understand this by now. – Anthony
barry says:
April 8, 2013 at 7:13 am
——–
🙂 It is way off topic. Look, I think you’re overcomplicating a simple idea. If you choose to smoke, and advocate for that choice to be taken away (and please, lets not equivocate on this point; this is really what government measures are intended to accomplish) for everyone, then there is something fundamentally wrong with your position. One of the possibilities is hypocrisy. One of the more benign possibilities.
I try to separate political spin from substance wherever I read. Science is always muddied by political commentary, and it seems you don’t approve of that, same as me. Your continuing this combination would seem counter-productive – unless your chief aim is political in nature. I thought it would be a good idea to ask you directly. I think I have your answer, indirectly.
I’m still chielfy interested in correlation of seismic events with fracking processes, taking into account the geology, proximity to fault lines, the seismic risk of those fault lines, proximity of drilling operations, timing of seismic activity relative to drilling operations and wastewater pumping, and time series analysis that takes these things into account. In two days I will have time to read the studies to see if these things have been assessed (working two jobs at the moment). Perhaps you or one of the regulars could write a post on it, focussing just on the science.
Um, as I live in “Quake Country” I’ve had a lot of them. I remember some 5.x and 6.x and the one 7.1 we had was a pretty good roller… but below 5? Sorry. Don’t even rattle the windows enough to notice. Down in 1 to 2 land, we’re talking about like a truck driving down the street a block away. A seismograph can detect it, but not a person. So, anyone have any idea how many of those 1 ish sized quakes ARE trucks?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scale
So we’re talking about things that most folks can’t feel at all, that are either “continual” or in the millions a year.
Somehow I’m not worried…
And is it just me, or the Tammimann reference to Nebraska not match the map? HIS map, looks to me, like Nebraska isn’t doing much at all. Is he having trouble keeping Oklahoma and Nebraska straight?