Thursday, March 24, 2011

ICE CAPS AND EARTHQUAKES - A SECULAR PROPHECY COME TRUE

Might this article from 2006 - in which University of Alberta geologist Patrick Wu says the loss of polar ice volume will lead to increased global earthquake activity - qualify as a secular prophecy of sorts? Did Wu foretell, in a roundabout way, the disastrous, deadly, monstrous quakes that have hit HaitiChileNew Zealand and Japan? These four major quakes have all hit in the last 2 years - an unprecedented "close clustering" for events of this magnitude.

In the article, Wu is quoted as saying:
"What happens is the weight of this thick ice puts a lot of stress on the earth. The weight sort of suppresses the earthquakes, but when you melt the ice the earthquakes get triggered."
Now, I am fully aware that there is a robust and thriving skeptic community working hard to deny the prevailing wisdom / scientific consensus about Global Warming - especially as concerns the issue of "Anthropogenic Global Warming", the idea that human behaviors are to blame. Some in the parapolitical and conspiracy communities suspect that "AGW" is nothing more than an elaborate hoax perpetrated by genocidal elites, that it is nothing more or less than the laying of groundwork for the future implementation of horrific depopulation schemes to weed out the riffraff, the great unwashed, we "useless eaters". 

As the name of our sister blog implies, yer old pal Jerky certainly isn't prepared to dismiss out of hand the idea that there are very powerful forces working behind the scenes that would dearly love to dump a bunch of herbicide all over the Great Human Garden. This does not mean, however, that I - or anyone else - should automatically subscribe to any theory that fits into the gestalt of that particular suspicion. That would simply be a variation on the age-old logical fallacy known as "confirmation bias", and any serious student of parapolitics needs to be ever-vigilant not to fall prey to its powerful lure.

In short, we should always, all of us, seek out the very best information possible. And currently, as far as my research has shown me, the Global Warming Skeptics community just isn't cutting the mustard. The majority of them are brain-whores (thought-stitutes?) whose work on the subject - mostly op-eds, hardly ever peer-reviewed - is bought and paid for by the very industry lobbies and corporations that either a) are major contributers to the problem, or b) depend on continued government inaction to maintain their profitability. 

And so, until someone comes along and convincingly debunks this excellent and thorough debunking of the Global Warming "debunkers", I'm going to stick with the eggheads on this one.

4 comments:

  1. PS - I know that I already ran Wu's comments as a Quote of the Day, but I figured this particular issue could use some fleshing out. As always, your comments and rebuttals are welcome, even desired!

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  2. Jerky I think you might find that 1902 was a worse year for earthquakes than the last two years. I will do more diligence on this. Gotta get in the shower for work right now. YOP Sundy.

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  3. "Thought-stitutes." Now that right there is just damn brilliant!

    People are cognitive misers -- we just don't have a lot of cognitive energy to waste on things like reason and research, synthesis of perspective, and evaluation of information when there are toe nails to be picked and TV to be watched. As a result, we look for shortcuts, quick scripts that get us through interpersonal interaction. Some of those shortcuts might include e-mail bullet lists that our conservative friends forward to us. Politicians talk in talking points; we therefore have been programmed to think in talking points (Postman, 1995 or so makes a compelling argument that TV is to blame for this and he may be right).

    I have yet to hear a global warming debunker offer up information, or even an idea or solution that wasn't refined by a speech writer into a talking point for political purposes, broadcast and rebroadcast ad infinitum until the bloggers picked it up and continued to echo it in the e-sphere.

    Television becomes scripted in our minds. We've all heard someone parrot back as "their own" some bit of information they saw on TV that they don't realize that we saw too. I was watching Home Improvement back in 1996 and heard one of the characters talking about how men can't have babies, so they have projects and those projects become as important to them as children are to mothers. Thinking I was smart, I applied the concept to one of my own projects and parroted it off to my girlfriend at the time (who had a stinky pussy). She said "OK, so you've been watching Home Improvement." I was busted.

    I was trying to make a point with this but all my cognitive resources drained away in the first 12 hours of the day. Oh yeah -- global warming debate is, for the most part, the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave. The powers that be handed some scripts off to some reporters, Americans picked up those scripts, and are running wild repeating over and over a bunch of factoids that someone else came up with, and about 99.999% of the population has absolutely no clue what it's talking about -- zero interaction with global warming beyond those scripts floating around.

    So what was I trying to say? Oh yeah eggheads rule.

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  4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXFUUGeV1DI

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