The Great Earthquake Hoax and Global Warming

As April noted the other day, the media are now blaming earthquakes on global warming. It turns out that the media were taken in by a hoax.

It's amazing, is it not, how the media are so easily fooled by an alarmist hoax if it advances a leftist agenda. On the other hand, if a conservative says something like, "Iran is dangerous regime seeking nuclear weapons," that news is largely ignored.

James Taranto puts the whole episode into a neat perspective. Scroll down.

Remember Alan Sokal? He's the physicist who, in 1996, submitted an article to the postmodernist journal Social Text in which he claimed that "physical 'reality,' " including gravity, "is at bottom a social and linguistic construct." The whole thing was a hoax aimed at exposing postmodernism as fundamentally nonsensical.

It appears global warmism has found its Alan Sokal, a man named Tom Chalko. Our friends at NewsBusters.org note a story that appeared on both the CBS News Web site and MSNBC claiming that global warming causes the earth to move:

The research proves that destructive ability of earthquakes on Earth increases alarmingly fast and that this trend is set to continue, unless the problem of "global warming" is comprehensively and urgently addressed.
The analysis of more than 386,000 earthquakes between 1973 and 2007 recorded on the US Geological Survey database proved that the global annual energy of earthquakes on Earth began increasing very fast since 1990.
Dr. Chalko said that global seismic activity was increasing faster than any other global warming indicator on Earth and that this increase is extremely alarming.
CBS identified this as an Associated Press story before pulling it from its Web site (it's cached here). The story still appears at MSNBC.com, identified correctly as coming from Marketwire, a press-release wire.