Life on a fault line should concentrate the mind, and make it serious. If you want to build an office tower in California, for example, laws require that you make sure it will stand up to a major earthquake. Over the years the specifics change, as both building technology and seismic research advance,rnbut the general principle endures: politics, technology, and science should work together to protect people's lives.rnImagine, though, what earthquake preparedness would be like if it were handled the way American society deals with climate change. There would be little debate on the real choices ahead, but plenty of "debate" over the "alleged scientific proof that earthquakes are actually real or that humans can do anything about them. Deniers would trot out one or two dissident seismologists to claim (falsely) that there is no scientific consensus. The reality-based community would take the bait and claim (falsely) that all scientists agree about everything. In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore states that there are 930 papers that agree on human-made climate change and zero that dispute it. But as the climatologist James Hansen recently noted, "That's just not normal for science."
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