Climate alarmists rush to blame every natural disaster on global warming.
Recently they blamed a massive rock slide in Switzerland on a warming planet. Yet, geologists say there’s no link.
Last year, August 2017, a massive rockslide occurred on the north flank of the Piz Cengalo (3369 m) in the Swiss Alps, above the village of Bondo, located near the border to Italy.
No data suggesting warming is behind rock slides
In total, some four million tonnes of rock and mud came tumbling down. The dramatic incident highlighted the hazards posed by rock slides for villages located near the picturesque mountains of the European Alps.
Though rockslides are not unusual, there has been growing scrutiny behind their causes lately. Unsurprisingly climate alarmists are opportunistically pointing the finger at climate warming.
According to the alarmists, rising temperatures are causing the permafrost in the mountains to thaw and so lead to portions of the mountains coming unglued and cascading dangerously down into the valleys and villages below.
The Swiss SRF public broadcasting reported here how Swiss Minister of Environment Doris Leuthard came up with the explanation just hours after the incident: “Climate change”.
According to Leuthard: “Such incidents will continue to occur.”
No link to warming – tend to occur in cold, rainy weather
However, one expert geologist disagrees, the SRF reports: University of Bern geologist Ueli Gruner told the SRF:
No relationship between heat and rock slides can be made – in colder and wet weather there can tend to be even more rockslides.
According to Gruner, large rock slides (more than one million cubic meters) tend to occur every five to ten years. The SRF reports that so far no data supporting a higher frequency of rock slides are available.
The SRF adds:
However, heat fundamentally even has a positive effect, says the geologist [Gruner): From experience, stone behaves in a more stable manner than when it’s cold, snow melts and rain enters into the cracks.
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Providing that Al Bore and his fellow Eco-Wackos blame everything on Global Warming/Climate Change just like that liberal news rag THE WASHINGTON COMPOST blaming trump for this latest Hurricane just as stupid as brain-dead liberals blaming the NRA for mass shootings
We have rock slides pretty much every year in the canyons on Colorado. They are caused by the cyclic freezing/thawing of water that gets into the cracks of the mountains causing boulders to come tumbling. Sometimes it’s only a small amount of rocks that fall but other times enough to destroy highways and anything in the way. Luckily we’ve not had one as large as this one in the Alps in some time.
I can attest to the rock slides in Colorado personally. During the Memorial Day weekend about 20 years ago, possibly 1995 or 1996, I was driving highway 36 near Lyons on a cold drizzly day and encountered a rock sliding down the mountain side 200 yards (metres) ahead of me. It was about half the size of my car and I had only a few seconds to decide if I could somehow stay on the highway by driving into the mountain to avoid the rock. Luckily the rock got caught into the gap between the guardrail and mountain so I was able to pass by without making that choice. To this day, I look up mountain sides when driving through canyons anywhere in the world.