Yes, The Atlantic says, and it’s your fault. According to their “Weekly Planet”, and we are not making it up, “On geological timescales, the Earth is a dynamic place. Tectonic plates shift. Continents move. Mountains rise and fall. But during humanity’s tenure on Earth, the ground beneath our feet has largely stayed put. That stable period may now be at an end.” Gosh. Better warn people in San Francisco that it could cause a nasty earthquake as early as 1906. No, wait. That was before climate. You see, “When the Earth’s waters shift, so does solid ground. Now warming is destabilizing land across the planet, and geology is becoming a real-time science. In more and more places, the floor is giving way.” Beneath the author’s brain, perhaps.
Now in such situations, having lived through years of the “you’re not a climate scientist” sneer aimed at skeptics by alarmists who, overwhelmingly, were not themselves climate scientists or even scientifically literate, we often get curious about the credentials of people who write such guff. And in this case the author, a “Science Journalist & NASA Audio Producer” has built quite a career including with NASA’s alarmist Goddard Space Flight Center, on a “BA, Cultural Anthropology, Environmental Studies” which you may not have known was a thing, and also an “MS, Science and Environmental Journalism” which sounds at first blush like training in science but actually involves a lot of people making a good living in a comfy institution politicizing science without embarrassment. Indeed they seem to boast of it.
As for the Space Flight Center, you might well suppose it was the Goddard Climate Obsession Center especially if you’ve been subjected to much of the output of its Goddard Institute for Space Studies subdivision run first by James Hansen and then by Gavin Schmidt. As Wikipedia observes, “Research at the GISS emphasizes a broad study of global change, the natural and anthropogenic changes in our environment that affect the habitability of our planet.” What the devil any of that stuff has to do with Space, let alone Space Flight, we can’t imagine, except the apparent notion that we’ll have to fly away from the Earth once carbon pollution is done with it. But we gress.
If we may quote Wikipedia a bit more on the GISS, and just try to stop us, “GISS was established in May 1961 by Robert Jastrow to do basic research in space sciences in support of Goddard programs.” Goddard in this case being, of courser, the Space Flight Center. And again, what can an obsession with climate change have to do with Space Flight unless, perhaps, the idea is that it will become impossible to launch rockets because of all the hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, intolerable heat, atmospheric rivers and other stuff no one ever heard of before 1988?
Plus that thing where the planet is actually crumbling, so maybe you head to Cape Canaveral and it’s not there and you’re going is it under water? Did it move to Texas? Is it out in the Caribbean somewhere?
If so nobody told Elon Musk. Or the mapmakers. It’s still right there, separated from Merritt Island by, from the learn-something-new-every-day file, the “Banana River.” But wait. You also get:
“In the 1960s, GISS was a frequent center for high-level scientific workshops, including the ‘History of the Earth’s Crust Symposium’ in November 1966 which has been described as the meeting that gave birth to the idea of plate tectonics.”
Now forgive us for name-dropping because one of us once took refuge from navigational ineptitude at the cottage of J. Tuzo Wilson, a Canadian pioneer in the study of plate tectonics, which makes us question that claim above about its birth in 1966 since he was writing about it before that date. But in any case continental drift has been around for at least 60 years (knowledge of it, we mean; the phenomenon dates back to the invention of the continent) so this idea that humanity’s tenure on Earth has been characterised by an eerie statis with respect to landslides, volcanic eruptions and other evidences of a restless Earth is as weird as alarmists’ apparent belief in such a statis with regard to temperature, rainfall patterns and anything else of that sort. And both are insolent ignorance. There is no excuse for not knowing it for bunk the moment you hear it.
How did his editors green-light such claims? Do they not have Google on their computers? We do, lucky us, and so we googled “geological upheavals in recorded history” and got quite the blast, so to speak, from volcanoes to earthquakes to “severe climatic disruptions that reshaped civilizations” without being in any way, shape or form attributable to human influence unless you count us offending God or the gods.
Of course it is obvious that continental drift has never happened at a pace visible to observers, human, sauropod or what have you. But it is equally obvious that the kinds of changes we do observe have always happened. How can it get into print that now there are earthquakes? There are, duh. But there always have been, duh.
Indeed, leaving aside nonsense from people who’ve been smoking tarot cards, it is at least plausible that the legend of Atlantis had its origin in a massive eruption and tsunami, perhaps the Thera eruption. Or in the “submerged island of Spartel near the Strait of Gibraltar” or maybe “Doggerland in the North Sea”, which “is thought to have been flooded by a megatsunami following the Storegga Slide of c. 6100 BC”. Or “the Celtic shelf”.
BTW can we just mention here that a piece in Phys.org on the eternally fascinating question of how the Stonehenge stones got to the henge suggests that they might have been carried by glaciers from the Orcadian Basin “to a region off England’s east coast called Dogger Bank” and that Dogger Bank was once an above-water stony marvel of large rocks and a glacial moraine but “Doggerland was gradually flooded as large ice sheets around the world melted at the end of the last ice age.” What’s more, Doggerland didn’t go under until between 9 and 7 thousand years ago but “throughout that time, the landscape saw dramatic change.” Dramatic change? And here they were telling us it just sat there until humans messed things up.
It is not our purpose here to rush in where mermaids, and maybe even Nostradamus, would fear to tread. It is to point out that, despite records being extremely sketchy especially before the invention of writing, there have clearly been all manner of sudden swallowings of people, places and things by the Earth, or upheavals. Despite which this author seriously believes, and his editors did not rise up in revolt that:
“As glaciers retreat, some at unprecedented rates, they leave behind unstable cliffs that were once supported by ice.”
For starters, there is no glacier anywhere on Earth that is retreating at an “unprecedented” rate. Has he no idea how fast it happened at the end of the last glaciation, as ice sheets that covered Manhattan to a depth of 2,000 feet vanished? Again, you just need Google on your computer to learn that:
“The ice in the area disappeared around 10,000 BC. The ground in the New York area has since risen by more than 150 ft because of the removal of the enormous weight of the melted ice.”
Would he consider the ground rising by more than 150 feet over a relatively short period of time to be stability, whereas what’s happening there now is upheaval? Does he consider knowing any of this a badge of sophistication, or just a way of doing “Science and Environmental Journalism” so as to bring all three into disrepute?
