1906 SF earthquake "a hoax"

Touching on denialism in that earlier post, there's a piece on The Guardian website today about the deniers' conference held this week in New York, Global warming - Was it ever a crisis?

Touching on denialism in that earlier post, there's a piece on The Guardian website today about the deniers' conference held this week in New York, Global warming - Was it ever a crisis?

This in the week that the Copenhagen Climate Change summit reports on the sea's dangerously rising acidity, the attempt at calculating the volumes of CO2 that will be released as ice melts and tundra thaws in the event of a 2 degree temperature rise, the raised predictions for sea-level rises and the prediction by some scientists that climate change makes the attempts to save the existing rainforests a labour of Sisyphus.

At times like this, thank God for The Onion:

SAN FRANCISCO—In an event that sparked outrage across the historical community, deniers of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake convened last weekend to share their controversial theories about what actually occurred on that tragic day more than a century ago.

The 1906 Earthquake Deniers, a group reviled by Californians and scholars alike, held three days of lectures and roundtable discussions over what they call a "century-long hoax" of exaggerated seismic activity in the Bay area, and part of a conspiracy to bring the World's Fair to San Francisco in 1915. Historians protested the conference, saying the organization's statements denying any major seismic activity in 1906 are reprehensible and out of line with all available geologic data from the time.

"On Apr. 18, 1906, an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale killed 3,000 San Franciscans and devastated a growing metropolis," Professor Richard Kasper of the University of California, Berkeley, told reporters Tuesday. "It was a massive, massive earthquake. To say otherwise is to callously ignore not only the suffering of the disaster's victims, but also a mountain of photographs, video footage, and eyewitness reports."

Added Kasper: "And I find it personally offensive to suggest that a single malfunctioning trolley car could have wiped out 490 city blocks."

Hat tip to Denialism blog.