Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Three years since Richard Hoagland showed his abject ignorance

  • Magnitude 9.0
  • Epicenter 142° 22' E 38° 19' N
  • Time 05:46 UTC 11 March 2011
  • 5,884 deaths
  • 6,148 injured
  • 2,633 people missing
  • 127,290 buildings totally collapsed
  • 272,788 buildings half collapsed
  • 747,989 buildings partially damaged
  • Level 7 meltdown, three reactors, Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant
        Those are the facts about the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. The pseudoscientist Richard Hoagland saw past the human tragedy and economic catastrophe, to an opportunity for promoting himself and his bankrupt, discredited, ideas. On the Book of Faces, and on Coast-to-Coast AM (24th March) he proclaimed that this was not a natural event but an attack, contrived by "somebody." His "evidence" was that the longitude of the epicenter was 120° East of the Great Pyramid at Giza. As I blogged at the time, he was out by  8° 46', or 765 km. Not that this pseudo-fact would have had any actual meaning even if he'd been spot on.

        His follow-up, a few days after the main event, left us all in no doubt of his ignorance of geophysics. It was this:

That "Fukushima" was a Planned Event -- by "someone" -- is almost a certainty now; I mean, what are the odds of ANOTHER major quake (the 7.1 a couple days ago) -- complete with similar tsunami warnings -- with an epicenter (and depth!) only a few miles different from the earlier, devestating [sic] 9.0 quake ... and all, by "acident [sic]?!"

The man is incompetent. No further comment needed.

3 comments:

expat said...

Binaryspellbook has started a new blog which looks like being an interesting collection of Hoaglandisms.

Dee said...

"The man is incompetent. No further comment needed."

Yeah, well, it's the Hoag, always going boldly there where he really should not have gone considering his severe limitations with maths, calculating odds, web editing or any basic scientific method when it comes to assessing spurious data.

His talent surely includes drumming up excitement and making space science interesting and mysterious. Which would have been perfect in planetariums but now it often looks as if it's still 1980 for him in so many ways. You know, the time of SRI's anomaly and paranormal research, Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds, CIA mind control program, Empire Strikes Back, Sagan's Cosmo, Viking data and debate...

Dee

Chris Lopes said...

@Dee
The part about him being able to drum up excitement is perhaps the biggest tragedy in the story of Hoagland. Had he stuck to real science, he could have been a Bill Nye the Science Guy type of performer. He's entertaining enough (or used to be, his current presentations are 3 hour snore-fests) to hold an audience, but he just doesn't like to compete with people who know what they are talking about. So he chose the dark side and decided to play in the pseudo-science world.

As to the topic at hand, the Fukushima Tragedy was one of those things Hoagland just used as something to talk about on C2C and his FB page. The lives of the people involved meant nothing to him, as did the truth of his claims. It was another example of Hoagland using real world events to create another pulp-scifi story that he can pretend is science. I don't think he even bothered to write another one of his stupid "papers" on the subject.