Global Warming & Volcanic Eruptions

In August of 2007, over 2.5 years ago, a geologist had studied the historical record for global warming events which were not anthropogenic (not caused by human activity).

His conclusions were that global warming has caused volcanic eruptions and earthquakes in the ancient past.

He went on to say that the anthropogenic global warming occurring now will do so too.

Over two and a half years ago he mentioned by name the very volcano that just erupted in Iceland shutting down air traffic over Europe.

He also indicated that earthquakes could result from anthropogenic global warming:

"In places like Iceland, for example, where you have the Eyjafjallajökull ice sheet, which wouldn't survive [global warming], and you've got lots of volcanoes under that, the unloading effect can trigger eruptions," McGuire said.

With the changing dynamics in the crust, faults could also be destabilized, which could bring a whole host of other problems.

"It's not just the volcanoes. Obviously if you load and unload active faults, then you're liable to trigger earthquakes," McGuire told LiveScience, noting that there is ample evidence for this association in past climate change events.

(Live Science, 2007, emphasis added). A paper recently published in the journal Arctic indicates that in fact the ice sheets have been melting and vanishing:

Close to 50 years of data show the Devon Island ice cap, one of the largest ice masses in the Canadian High Arctic, is thinning and shrinking.

A paper published in the March edition of Arctic, the journal of the University of Calgary's Arctic Institute of North America, reports that between 1961 and 1985, the ice cap grew in some years and shrank in others, resulting in an overall loss of mass. But that changed 1985 when scientists began to see a steady decline in ice volume and area each year.

"We've been seeing more mass loss since 1985," says Sarah Boon, lead author on the paper and a Geography Professor at the University of Lethbridge. The reason for the change? Warmer summers.

(Science Daily). We all know that there is volcanic activity exactly where he said some would be, and there have been many earthquakes over the past several months.

It behooves scientists to rethink these possibilities, because it can cause severe economic impact, and perhaps tempt one nation to attack another because they know the other side's military aircraft are grounded.

Ice Sheet melt is not the end of the story:

McGuire conducted a study that was published in the journal Nature in 1997 that looked at the connection between the change in the rate of sea level rise and volcanic activity in the Mediterranean for the past 80,000 years and found that when sea level rose quickly, more volcanic eruptions occurred, increasing by a whopping 300 percent.

(ibid, Live Science, link above). In other words as the melting ice around the world is released into the atmosphere or river system, eventually causing more climate change, it will eventually find its way to the oceans where weight on the crust will be redistributed causing different stresses than usual on the tectonic plates.

Which means more "surprises".

Some major networks are carrying the story that global warming causes or can cause volcanic activity in some circumstances: Warming Could Wake Up Volcanos (MSNBC), Global Warming May Trigger More Volcanoes (Telegraph, UK).

If you know of any more, feel free to post a comment.

The Rebel Orbits of the Rebel Planets

When are the stars and planets going to conform to the law passed by human governments?

Or conform to the doctrine of human science?

Funny questions, but governments seem to think that their laws are more important than the actual laws of the cosmos it sometimes seems.

The universe does not change when we pass environmental laws or when we make doctrinal declarations about this or that cosmic reality.

That applies to our sense of cosmology, our hypothetical sense of the cosmos, and our theoretical sense of the cosmos, taught in the state universities.

Yes, the state has an approved dogma for you and I to learn, which they call "education", but some scholars have a different name for it:

And, of course, there are power systems in place to facilitate this. Throughout history it's been mostly the property holders or the educated classes who've tended to support power systems. And that's a large part of what I think education is — it's a form of indoctrination. You have to reconstruct a picture of the world in order to be conducive to the interests and concerns of the educated classes, and this involves a lot of self-deceit.

(Noam Chomsky, emphasis added). Another scholar, a noted physicist, uses similar language to point out his belief that much of "advanced" scientific theory is nothing more than fantasy:

Quantum mechanics is an incredible theory that explains all sorts of things that couldn’t be explained before, starting with the stability of atoms. But when you accept the weirdness of quantum mechanics [in the macro world], you have to give up the idea of space-time as we know it from Einstein. The greatest weirdness here is that it [quantum mechanics] doesn’t make sense. If you follow the rules, you come up with something that just isn’t right.

...

The [new Penrose] book is called Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe. Each of those words stands for a major theoretical physics idea. The fashion is string theory; the fantasy has to do with various cosmological schemes, mainly inflationary cosmology [which suggests that the universe inflated exponentially within a small fraction of a second after the Big Bang]. Big fish, those things are. It’s almost sacrilegious to attack them. And the other one, even more sacrilegious, is quantum mechanics at all levels—so that’s the faith. People somehow got the view that you really can’t question it.

(The Memes of Penrose, see Discover). In general these scholars point out that you are judged by how well you learn their scientific dogma, not on how well you learn how to think or apply rigorous scientific processes.

Thus, after all your hard work to memorize doctrine and dogma, every once in awhile you get blind sided with some new information, new data, or new experimental results that give you reason to throw out the window some of the textbooks you memorized from:

Planets are thought to form in the disc of gas and dust encircling a young star. This proto-planetary disc rotates in the same direction as the star itself, and up to now it was expected that planets that form from the disc would all orbit in more or less the same plane, and that they would move along their orbits in the same direction as the star's rotation.

...

They even found that six exoplanets in this extended study (of which two are new discoveries) have retrograde motion: they orbit their star in the "wrong" direction.

"The new results really challenge the conventional wisdom that planets should always orbit in the same direction as their stars spin," says Andrew Cameron of the University of St Andrews, who presented the new results at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting (NAM2010) in Glasgow this week.

(Turning Planetary Theory Upside Down). That is the way it has been for decade upon decade, however, that is not what scientists tend to feel, because they actually have made a faith out of portions of what they call science.