Wednesday, 29 February 2012

Bill and the volcano

Personally, I prefer a more traditional approach
Tim Blair reports on the latest affront to Blessed Gaia with this clip from one Bill McGuire:
Across the world, as sea levels climb remorselessly, the load-related bending of the crust around the margins of the ocean basins might – in time – act to sufficiently “unclamp” coastal faults such as California’s San Andreas, allowing them to move more easily; at the same time acting to squeeze magma out of susceptible volcanoes that are primed and ready to blow.
Global warming causes volcanoes.  Even by climate alarmist standards this is so silly on the most basic of grounds that it makes about as much sense as claiming that petting cats causes lightning storms.  This lot are so superstitious that they'll be amending the Kyoto treaty to include something about tossing the occasional virgin into Mauna Loa just to be on the safe side.

No wonder James Delingpole has stopped being polite to them.

4 comments:

eon said...

I read McGuire's spiel linked from RCP. I also studied geology once in my misspent youth. Specifically, vulcanology.

I ran across this claim after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and thought it was total Bravo Sierra then. Nothing I've learned since that time has changed my opinion.

If he'd said that volcanic activity can affect the weather, that I'd believe. Tambora in 1816 and Krakatau in 1883 proved that conclusively, to say nothing of the Tunguska event in 1908. But going the other way just doesn't work in terms of physics.

Unlike Mr. Delingpole, I still try to be polite to the warmists. But I also realize that, as he puts it, they are to a man "watermelons"- green on the outside, red on the inside.

They are after power, and dream of remaking the world in their own image. And if that means 90% of humanity must be "deleted", so be it.

They just want enough peasants left to do the scut-work, anyway.


cheers

eon

Sergej said...

Well, second of all, and most importantly, we're talking fractions of an inch per year rise in water levels, max. Small fractions, with lots of time for the crust to adjust. But first of all, I seem to remember reading about the area around the Baltic Sea having a bit of a wild ride when the last ice age ended. Melting glaciers raised the sea level (by a lot, and rapidly!), flooding the coast, then the crust rebounded, bringing the coast back out of the water. There might have been something with the basin being closed off from the sea as well, so it might have been a lake at one point. Or maybe it's only the Black Sea I'm thinking of.

Of course, this was over a long time, by human standards. And the broad, flat Baltic basin basin was kind of susceptible to small changes in elevation and sea level leaving it alternately wet and dry. Nothing about volcanoes, though. I guess that's pretty much the greenies' imagination.

(However, you do notice that whenever a Giant Radioactive Beastie threatens Tokyo, or Ming T. Merciless brings Planet Mongo in for an attack, hurricanes, tsunami and volcanoes are pretty much the standard things that happen. So maybe the greenies aren't all wrong after all...)

eon said...

Sergej;

It was mostly the Black Sea; pre ice age villages have been found in the foreshore area. Among other things, it points up the fact that organized civil cultures and what we would call "technological societies" may have been around on this planet longer than we previously thought. Without any help from "space gods", please note. (Von Daniken must be having fits.)

As for the AGW true believers, Richard Lindzen just got done addressing their delusions in front of Commons, using their own data and charts to show how they have falsified pretty much everything in pursuit of their political agenda. Not that it will change anything; the Cameron crowd is still committed to spending billions of pounds sterling on their anti-AGW program. Less from an actual belief than from the political power they see accruing from the "rationalization" of industry, transportation, etc.

MacDonald, Baldwin, and Chamberlain had the same pipe-dream in the Twenties and Thirties. It ended rather badly for them, and I suspect would have even if WW 2 had not intervened.

As for Ming and various Kaiju Eiga, those just prove that whatever the weather does or doesn't do on its own, we are always at the mercy of the most dangerous force on Earth; the studio stock-footage library.;-)

cheers

eon

Sergej said...

Those stock footages can get pretty fearsome.