Just reading the headline on the right makes me cringe. The words are from Clean Technica, and the article following the headline attempts to make a dubious link between global warming and earthquakes. It puts forward the idea that there has been a recent increase in earthquake activity and hints that scientists are well on their way to establishing a link between global warming and and this perceived earthquake increase:
"At last year’s American Geophysical Union meeting geologists were already questioning whether there was a climate change link underlying the increasing frequency of unusually large earthquakes, according to Mathew McDermott at Treehugger. The Haiti earthquake was then just the latest example."Where to start! In the first place, where is the statistical evidence that there is any increase in the frequency or severity of earthquakes? We live on a planet with shifting tectonic plates and earthquakes have been here since Earth was a planet. I have seen no statistical data showing any significant increase, and to take a couple anecdotal examples and call them scientific evidence is ludicrous.
Beyond this obvious flaw in the argument, we are dealing with two incredibly complex and unpredictable areas: Climate change and seismology.The vast number variables and lack of accurate forecast models alone, are reason enough not to try and invoke relationships between these incredibly intricate systems.
1906 San Francisco earthquake: pre-global warming paranoia |
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