Global warming will make large earthquakes are disappear by 2035. That’s grabbed your attention now hasn’t it? The graph above shows the number of earthquakes of magnitude 7 and above each year since 1940 [source USGS] together with moving averages over 5 year and 15 year spans and the linear regression line for the 15 year moving average. It clearly shows a decline in large earthquakes. If this trend was to continue there would be no large earthquakes above magnitude 7 by 2035.

I’m often asked at public talks if global warming is increasing the number of earthquakes – so let’s plot the NASA GISS Global Surface Air Temperature Anomaly and its linear regression on an inverted scale.

See, the regression lines are practically identical. Global warming is causing large earthquakes to disappear.

OK, for the absence of any doubt, all of the above is complete bollocks. There is no causality between earthquakes and global climate change.

I have just been having a bit of fun with excel. Although the data is real, I have been highly selective. It shows that by being selective with one’s data and playing very fast and loose with statistics one can ‘correlate’ pretty much anything.

If we look at the full earthquake dataset going back to 1900 we can see that the recent ‘decline’ in big ‘quakes is just part of a long term random variation.