Or maybe he is 'kind-of" right. Changes in sea level and ice loading will alter the stress on crustal plates. Changes in rainfall will alter the aquifer level, which may also alter the stress on crustal plates. This could conceivably trigger quakes earlier (or later) than they would otherwise be triggered. Calculating these interactions is left as an exercise for an overconfident doctoral student, because i have no idea how to figure it out.
Well yes, but
(1) These are relatively slow effects, compared to (say) the effects of CO2 or insolation changes upon climate, and therefore
(2) Even if the Copenhagen Conference had resulted in the whole world magically shifting to nuclear energy the next day, there wouldn't have been time for it to make a difference.
Granted, I don't think he was speaking from a position of knowledge, but don't dismiss him just because it seems "obvious" that he must be wrong.
I'm "dismissing" him because he's displaying a very poorly-thought out and mystical concept of how human action affects the Earth, and one which gets in the way of understanding how Gaian interactions happen. In particular, he clearly doesn't get that these processes are long-term on human timescales -- nothing we have done within the last year is affecting the climate much now, for good or ill. It's what we've done over the past decades and centuries, and likewise what we do now will affect the climate in an equivalently distant future.
Not emotionally as satisfying as a smiley-Gaia and light coming down from the sky and angelic music playing when we do something good, but reality doesn't have to be as emotionally-satisfying as a cartoon.
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Date: 2010-01-19 07:18 am (UTC)Well yes, but
(1) These are relatively slow effects, compared to (say) the effects of CO2 or insolation changes upon climate, and therefore
(2) Even if the Copenhagen Conference had resulted in the whole world magically shifting to nuclear energy the next day, there wouldn't have been time for it to make a difference.
Granted, I don't think he was speaking from a position of knowledge, but don't dismiss him just because it seems "obvious" that he must be wrong.
I'm "dismissing" him because he's displaying a very poorly-thought out and mystical concept of how human action affects the Earth, and one which gets in the way of understanding how Gaian interactions happen. In particular, he clearly doesn't get that these processes are long-term on human timescales -- nothing we have done within the last year is affecting the climate much now, for good or ill. It's what we've done over the past decades and centuries, and likewise what we do now will affect the climate in an equivalently distant future.
Not emotionally as satisfying as a smiley-Gaia and light coming down from the sky and angelic music playing when we do something good, but reality doesn't have to be as emotionally-satisfying as a cartoon.