Man-Made Global Warming Causes … Earthquakes?

In a recent post, Tim Blair offers the following challenge:

UPDATE II. A warmy suggests:

There should be a prize for the denialist who “proves” global warming doesn’t exist by pointing to the lamest, most short-term, most localised cooler than normal weather event.

Let’s flip that around and offer a prize for someone pointing to a localised, short-term – and historically predictable – weather event as evidence of warming. Hurricane Katrina, for example.

This is not quite the “Today is hot in Humpty Doo – it’s  Global Warming and we’re all! gonna! die!!” observation he might have been looking for, but if nothing else it’s worthy of a Long Bow prize.  I offer the following AP article in today’s  The Australian in full  (emphasis mine):

NATURAL disasters killed more than 220,000 people in 2008, making it one of the most devastating years on record.

The world’s number two reinsurer says the figure confirms a global climate deal is badly needed.

Although the number of natural disasters was lower than in 2007, the catastrophes in 2008 were more destructive in terms of the number of victims and the financial cost of the damage caused, Germany-based Munich Re said in its annual assessment.

Most devastating was Cyclone Nargis, which battered Burma in May to kill more than 135,000 people, and the earthquake that shook China’s Sichuan province the same month which left 70,000 dead, 18,000 missing and almost five million homeless, Munich Re said.

“This continues the long-term trend we have been observing,” Munich Re board member Torsten Jeworrek said.

“Climate change has already started and is very probably contributing to increasingly frequent weather extremes and ensuing natural catastrophes.

The world needed “effective and binding rules on CO2 emissions, so that climate change is curbed and future generations do not have to live with weather scenarios that are difficult to control.”

Until recently, events like these were called “Natural Disasters” or “Acts of God” —   “An event that directly and exclusively results from the occurrence of natural causes that could not have been prevented by the exercise of foresight or caution…  Courts have recognized various events as acts of God — tornadoes, earthquakes, death, extraordinarily high tides, violent winds, and floods. Many insurance policies for property damage exclude from their protection damage caused by acts of God.”

What a strange and self-centered idea it is that events like these are no longer “Acts of God” or even “Natural Disasters,”  but are caused by Man’s failure to have  “effective and binding rules on CO2 emissions.” I suppose now we’re meant to feel guilty enough about our 4WDs and central heating causing hundreds of thousands to suffer and die from earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis and the like that we’ll rush out and invest in Carbon Indulgences Offsets?

As GK Chesterston is alleged to have said (but didn’t):   “When a Man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything.” Welcome to the religion of the 21st century.

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UPDATE:  Speaking of Warmenist loons screeeching that we have to cut our CO2 emissions in order to save little Chinese schoolchildren from earthquakes, Jennifer Marohasy pings  GetUp!’s latest global warming television ads (set to air today) for dishonesty and inaccuracy:

“For all sorts of reasons a number of groups, of which Internet campaigners GetUp.org.au are one, are pretending that the Rudd Government’s proposed Emissions Trading Scheme is a minor 5 to15 percent adjustment to our way of life”.

“In fact, the government’s ETS will reduce the amount of energy available to every man; woman and child currently living in the country by an extraordinary 35 percent, absent the discovery and implementation of an unknown source of carbon free energy in the next ten years”.

Dr Marohasy said that this would be the equivalent of closing down all of Australia’s manufacturing and half its rural industries.

“Or thought of another way, it is the equivalent of closing 72% of our current power generation capacity (stationary power)”.

[Dr Marohasy’s entire Media Release here]

Watching that latest GetUp! ad was enough to spur me into finally getting around to going over and helping out the Australian Environment Foundation’s internet campaign to fight the ETS.   Killing the Australian economy is *not* going to lower global temperatures one bit, and is certainly not going to allow us to “control” acts of God such as earthquakes and hurricanes.

As always, do your own research and make up your own mind when it comes to making any donations – but I urge you to at least look into it.