Danny Glover... what a tool !

Originally Posted by Catfish

Hello,
maybe we can kill ourselves by nuclear bombs, chemical warfare or just exterminate other species which then leads to our own extinction due to the food chain, but i tell you - even with the biggest bombs we will not be able to influence plate tectonics, let alone making any influence by agricultural activities or praying to the wrong god lol.

The earth itself without this thin surface we call atmosphere (if we really srew it up and kill ourselves as a result) is perfectly able to develop its own activities without help of us ridiculous ants crawling over its surface.

We are living on a thin crust that has been moving since 3.5 billion years, swimming on a semi-liquid and very hot mantle of molten "rock" - and this crust is made of many single plates, that constantly push others around, sink others/are being sunk or pile up against each other. The movement is usually some 2 centimeters a year e.g. in the atlantic ocean floor, but at the collision areas the tension rises until the friction of the crusts cannot hold back the tensions any more - and it makes a hefty and sudden jerk - an "earthquake".

You do not really need a god for this, unless you call him Pluton like our ancestors. But believe a geologist (me), no prayer or political/ religiously/ whatever human behaviour will prevent this crust from moving.

Greetings,
Catfish

P.s: Maybe it would have been wise to build earthquake-resisting buildings, powerplants and whatnot, like they do in Japan, but you need MONEY for this, and Haiti is a poor state, thanks to its government.
To tell such phrases like the climate and our behaviour being the reason for what recently happened in Haiti or- in this Pat Robertson's bull$hit - guilt or religiously "wrong" behaviour in connection to and after this event is asking for someone using a shotgun against those self-righteous a$$holes.
Sorry, venting done.

Thank you for this obviously knowlegable answer. It makes a nice change to the 'smiley-posters' who frequent this board.

To clarify, I didn't mean that things such as soil erosion and poverty actually cause the earthquake but that they create and magnify the damage to the human population of a stricken area.

Although with even my limited knowledge of earthquakes, I think there is still quite a bit of uncertainty when it comes to the prediction of earthquakes. The danger areas are roughly known but people are still allowed to live in these areas. And even when an earthquake is somewhat predicted with seismic measurements, then what? Some bespectacled absent-minded professor type will run over to the white house and somehow convince the world leaders that something needs to be done to save people in some third world country that doesn't even have any oil? Hasn't happened as of yet to my knowledge.