The is no connection whatsoever between them, except for the fact that they occurred in the same year on the same planet. A planet inhabited by at least one person - respected science journalist and author Alan Weisman - who wants to shout "Doomsday is Upon Us!" From the nearest media mountaintop.

Last Friday, Weisman wrote an opinion piece for CNN.com entitled, "Is the Earth Striking Back?". In it, he writes about the dangers of human-induced climate change, and connects it to the recent spate of natural disasters:

Yet something else is lately worrying geologists: the likelihood that the Earth's crust, relieved of so much formidable weight of [glacier] ice borne for many thousands of years, has begun to stretch and rebound.

As it does, a volcano awakens in Iceland (with another, larger and adjacent to still-erupting Eyjafjallajokull, threatening to detonate next). The Earth shudders in Haiti. Then Chile. Then western China. Mexicali-Calexico. The Solomon Islands. Spain. New Guinea. And those are just the big ones, 6+ on the Richter scale, and just in 2010. And it's only April.

Melting glaciers caused the earthquake in Haiti? Chile? Mexico??? No, no and no. And "no" to all the other quakes, and the eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull, too. There is no evidence that any of them were affected in any way by global warming (for a more in-depth discussion of the climate-volcano connection, see here and here).

Now, the fact that CNN ran this item without a shred of doubt in Weisman's ability as a truth-telling commentator makes sense -- he wrote the excellent best-selling book "The World Without Us," in 2007. People trust him to give us insight into what's going on with the planet.

That makes Weisman's misstep -- written with such confidence -- doubly disappointing. How can a seasoned science journalist like him get it so horribly wrong?

Weisman's claim stems from an issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A released to the media on April 19. The issue examines the interaction between natural disasters and changes in climate -- human-induced or otherwise.

To CNN's credit, they are running a rebuttal article today from Ian Saginor, a geologist at Keystone College (full disclosure: I went to graduate school with Saginor). In it, he writes:

...as Earth’s glaciers continue to melt, the crust rebounds as it is relieved of the burden.  In fact, this has been happening for thousands of years since the peak of the last ice age.

Several of these [Royal Society] papers did propose that climate change could affect certain types of earthquakes on the ocean floor or underneath melting glaciers, however Haiti is neither on the bottom of the ocean nor under a glacier.  As for the Chilean quake, it was caused by the incredible amount of pressure generated as two tectonic plates are forced together.

The point is that not all earthquakes are caused by the same forces and earthquakes on the ocean floor or under glaciers could not be more different than earthquakes in Haiti or Chile.  It's like saying that cigarettes cause lung cancer, therefore they cause skin cancer as well.

To Weisman's discredit, he thinks he got the science right on this. His willingness to blame a recent spate of tropical and subtropical earthquakes on human-induced global warming is appalling.

There is absolutely no question that man's activity on this planet is causing global warming, and that the consequences of that warming represent the most significant threat to modern civilization we know of. We must do everything in our power to halt the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, as soon as possible.

But Weisman's arm-flailing assertion is a disservice to science and anyone who cares about our future. As Saginor writes: "The effect of his article is to take several well-meaning, preliminary, cautious, and limited scientific studies and create unnecessary fear and confusion in the general public."

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