Institute For The Future

"Mining, earthquakes, and uncertainty"

A recent National Geographic article reported on research suggesting that some earthquakes are caused by human activity.

The removal of millions of tons of coal from the area caused much of the stress that triggered the Newcastle quake, [Columbia University scientist Christian D.] Klose said.

But even more significant was groundwater pumping needed to keep the mines from flooding....

[M]ining operations... sometimes require as much as 150 tons of water to be removed for each ton of coal produced....

Coal mining isn't the only human activity that can trigger earthquakes.

Klose has identified more than 200 human-caused temblors, mostly in the past 60 years. "They were rare before World War II," he said.

Most were caused by mining, he said, but nearly one-third came from reservoir construction.

Oil and gas production can also trigger earthquakes, he added.

Three of the biggest human-caused earthquakes of all time, he pointed out, were a trio that occurred in Uzbekistan's Gazli natural gas field between 1976 and 1984 (map of Uzbekistan).

Each of the three had a magnitude greater than 6.8, and the largest had a magnitude of 7.3.

Human-triggered earthquakes are particularly dangerous, Klose said, if they occur in seismically inactive areas.

That's partly because people aren't prepared for them. But also, he said, "regions that are naturally inactive are very trigger-sensitive, because stress has built up over long periods of time."

This was a striking piece, in part because I've been doing some work recently with a mining company, but also because I've been looking at the way scientific controversies play out today. If there's one thing that sets intelligent design advocates, global warming skeptics, and other anti-science types apart from their predecessors, it's a greater sophistication of how science works, and how uncertainties in the scientific process can be translated into action (or just as often, inaction) that works in their favor.

 

For example, Jonathan Chait piece in The New Republic on the work of economist Alan Reynolds, and his efforts to challenge claims that income disparity between rich and poor has increased. Chait argues that there's a clear strategic pattern between his work, the rhetorical battles of the intelligence design movement, and global warming skeptics. Reynolds' role is to get "newspapers treat the question as a matter of dispute rather than a settled fact."

If this sounds like the conservative stance on global warming or evolution, it shouldn't come as a surprise. Like those two issues, the existence of rising inequality is beyond dispute among academics who study it.... [T]he ambition of the conservative counterestablishment in these areas is not to overturn the scholarly consensus but simply to make the topic appear so complicated that laypeople and the press don't know what to believe.

But whether the missing data would make inequality look worse or better is really beside the point. Reynolds's role is merely to point out that the data is imperfect. The skeptic challenging the expert consensus must be fluent enough in the language of the experts to nibble away at their data. (The evolution skeptic can find holes in the fossil record; the global-warming skeptic can find periods of global cooling.) But he need not--indeed, he must not--be fluent enough to assimilate all the data himself into a coherent alternative explanation. His point is that the truth is unknowable.

Introducing ideology into a debate is one of the think-tank hack's strongest weapons. It demystifies a complicated issue, moving it from the realm of science into the realm of politics. The think-tank hack confesses he has his biases but then claims that his opponents in academia or government do, too. Evolution is the secularist science establishment's campaign to discredit religion; global warming is being pushed by regulators who would gain enormous power from new pollution controls; et cetera.

Since the goal is not winning these debates but merely achieving symmetry, the hack's most effective technique can be taking the accusation that would seem to apply to him and hurling it at his opponents. "The politically correct yet factually incorrect claim that the top 1 [percent] earns 16 [percent] of personal income appears to fill a psychological rather than logical need," Reynolds writes in the [Wall Street] Journal. "Some economists seem ready and willing to supply whatever is demanded." So, while you might think Reynolds is a hack mining the data for results that would conform to his political preferences, he has already made the same charge against the other side. Who can tell who's right?

 

Essentially, this comes down to a few basic moves:

1. Cast whatever doubt you can about the level of certainty your opponents' views deserve. If you have to take what insiders regard as normal technical disagreements and turn them into proof that "the science is still unclear," so be it.
2. Encourage the press to generate the appearance of a controversy.
3. Argue that since there's a controversy, prudence demands 1) waiting for more solid science before making a final decisions, or 2) letting people make up their own minds.

This is the intellectual equivalent of guerilla warfare. You don't have to win. If you can not lose decisively, you can claim a moral victory. If you can keep the battle going, you increase the odds that the other wide will give up.

 

So if one were to be hired as an anthropogenic earthquake skeptic, what would you do?

 

Start with technical objects. How can we know that the instruments measure what they're supposed to? Was there a control group?

 

Arguing over terms is always good. Sure, it looks like these areas were geologically stable, but what do we really know about geological "stability"? Given that geologists are interested in change, can we really say that anyone know what a "stable" area would look like?

 

Finally, make a case that the notion of "stability" is a myth, or at least a misnomer. The earth is changing all the time, thanks to a wide variety of factors. The idea that the world is stable strikes me (say this more in sorrow than anger) as pretty unscientific.

 

While you're doing this, make sure the press is balanced and even-handed, and treats the other side's claims of objectivity and disinteredness with the skepticism it deserves. As attorney Lionel Hutz said in The Simpsons, "What is truth? If you get my drift." You needn't point out that any particular person is cheating; just talk about a general hostility to new ideas, to opposing points of view, or professional forces that encourage lockstep thinking on certain issues (like this one). Point to string theory as a great example.

 

Finally, call for more research, as a way of pointing out that it's way too early to make any policy decisions. That way you can seem pro-science, while actually being the opposite. If your position is very definitely one that is in the minority, argue for "teaching the controversy"-- expose people to both sides, and let them make up their own minds.

 

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