This article caught my eye:

• More fatal earthquakes to come, warn geologists

Why? Because it has to do with something I talked about a few months ago in “The Grand Slam of Climate.

This evolved out of the ”Triple Crown of Climate“ idea that I pushed several years ago on "The O'Reilly Factor.” To summarize, the three legs then were the sun, the oceans and stochastic events, which is what I will deal with here, and then recently an intuitive fourth leg was added: The design of the entire system.

In any case, the article continue the alarmists’ missive that everything and anything is because of “climate change” or whatever they are calling it today. Basically, no matter what happens, it’s used as a reason to fuel hysteria. This latest volley claims that a warming planet is going to cause an increase in seismic activity. (Strange since objective measurements show no warming for 18 years, and even a suggestion of cooling the last 10, and there is no apparent linkage between CO₂ and temperatures, as shown in the graph below.)

That comes under the third leg of the triple crown, stochastic events, because seismic and volcanic activity have known linkage.

Here is one of many articles on that matter.

I am sometimes amazed at the logic used by the alarmist crowd, but, given the lack of intellectual curiosity by those that buy it, they get away with it. They assume that no one will a) question them on what they are saying or b) examine the folly of their assumptions. So they use it. First of all, my approach to the whole climate problem can be likened to playing chess. I love to simplify the board, trade down and then be left with a battle over basic endgame positioning. In science, two ideas on this come to mind.

1.) Occam’s Razor.


The principle states that among competing hypotheses that predict equally well the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Other, more complicated solutions may ultimately prove to provide better predictions, but in the absence of differences in predictive ability the fewer assumptions that are made, the better.

Given the track record of the warming hysteria the past 20 years, the idea of the climate being cyclical not only is predicting equally well but is far superior to the modeling!

You can read more about Occam’s Razor here.

2.) Le Chatelier’s Principle.

When a system at equilibrium is subjected to change in concentration, temperature, volume or pressure, then the system readjusts itself to (partially) counteract the effect of the applied change and a new equilibrium is established.

Physicist Lubos Motl has an interesting article on it here.

I will use it in a devil’s advocate way.

Suppose I concede that the so-called warming is leading to more seismic activity. This would also imply that there is an increase in volcanic activity, a known linkage to earthquake activity. Increased volcanic activity is linked with cooling. Therefore it is logical to assume that, even if the premise put forward here is right, nature will simply correct to the opposite conclusion of what the hysteria-based article is concluding!

In other words, if the author is right in the shorter term, he is wrong in the long run because the increase he fears, and it’s part of something I have been pushing for years as one of the legs of climate, would lead to cooling in the end.

So, being the nice guy I am, I will give him his due. Let’s assume he’s right. Then you have to agree with me — that such an increase would lead to the response, and if we simplify to the logical conclusion nature adjusts!

Not only is this intuitive, but Le Chatelier’s Principle would argue for it. Unless of course he seeks to simply throw it out, which we see happen quite often to data that does not seem to fit the missive being pushed.

This is not to say I accept his premise. It is to say that if he wants to play that game he has to then play mine. It’s pay me now, or pay me later. Either way you come back to what I have proposed, leg three of the grand slam of climate. Stochastic events mean nature is highly likely to adjust to the imbalance.

Notes and asides:

This sea ice article caught my eye also!

• BOMBSHELL: Scripps says Arctic Sea Ice may return, forecasts of loss based on ‘oversimplified arguments’

In Feb 2010 I challenged Bill Nye, the so-called “science guy,” on “The O'Reilly Factor” to open up his engineering turned science guy actor mentality to the grand experiment made possible by the satellite data we have today — the idea that we can now measure more accurately things like temperatures and sea ice, which we could not do before the satellite era started at the end of the last warm cycle of the Pacific in 1978.

As I write this, global sea ice is the third highest on record for the date.

Antarctica is setting its 33rd daily record of the year.

An excellent summation of all this can be found here.

It was, as I put it, a grand experiment. The usual suspects in the media trashed me, as they did after the triple crown of cooling idea, but since then both ideas have shown merit. The article listed above, by an organization that certainly does not see eye to eye with me on the this issue, is now coming out with the idea that perhaps things I was noting before are coming to fruition, in this case with the Arctic ice hysteria.

In the end, as I have opined of late, the whole debate is much ado about nothing and likely will be proven to be a giant waste of our nation’s (and world’s) time and treasure. My only dog in the fight is to be right, as it is in any forecast. That loud proclamations are made and grab headlines from a seemingly complicit via ignorance media, and then are not exposed for their inaccuracies, is exemplified in these situations. But sound logic and science demands then that men of good will at least question, if not outwardly debunk, missives such as we have seen above on seismic activity and man-made global warming. And now we are seeing it in the sea ice argument too.

As always, look and think for yourself. This does not mean I am right, though I believe I am. It does mean that the challenge is to look for yourself! It’s the truth that will set you free, not blindly following without questioning!

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Joe Bastardi is chief forecaster at WeatherBELL Analytics, a meteorological consulting firm.