Should we increase research into new areas of climate science?
I think it is prudent to spend money trying to understand why volcanoes erupt when they do and why earthquakes happen when they do. Clearly people have been working on the earthquake problem for a long time and made very little progress in forecasting earthquakes, but that doesn’t mean we should give up. I don’t believe similar investments have been made in volcano forecasting, presumably because most eruptions have been distant from US population centers, but that doesn’t mean that it will always be the case and it could be useful to expand research in that area. However, I don’t think the research should be specifically oriented toward whatever minor effect climate change may have on earthquake or eruption frequency, we first just need to learn more about why these things happen when they do. If we can get some handle on the mechanics of these events we can use those results to understand what effects isotatic rebound may have on their frequency, but we need to understand the primary
