Sure, paradoxes are right out. I share your natural inclination to avoid agreeing with a paradox. However, I must admit that I can't help but feel that your point is a total non sequitur to anything we've discussed so far.

Look, this is like claiming that a 250 horsepower car is 3 horsepower, if you stand a few hundred feet away. Or a hot dog has a lot more energy content, if it's on your plate rather than on some other plate halfway across the restaurant. You're completely ignoring the meaning of earthquake magnitude. It doesn't mean peak acceleration.

The city/precinct whatever of Fukushima did get hit by a magnitude 9 earthquake with an epicenter some distance away. There's no "claim" to it. That's just what happened.

I can do a whole lot better than that. It is possible to construct a oil tank that can survive a direct hit by the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs. It requires some heavy duty sci fi bullshit and geological eras of time, but it's doable.

Cool the Earth down to room temperature - all the way to the center of the planet. Then drill a 4000 mile long hole, drop your 50,000 gallons of oil in there, and presto! you have an oil tank with 4000 mile thick walls. Your average extinction level asteroid impact isn't going to do much more than scuff the paint.

Now, normally, it'd go without saying that nobody would do that, just like most people don't build tanks to withstand magnitude 9 earthquakes. It's not "pipedream" territory, but it is costly and impractical.

And this brings us back to the earliest post in this thread:

Even Germany with its vaunted regulations has this problem - every single time it floods. The regulations keep that level of normal accidental release of pollutants at a tolerable level - which is their purpose.

But I find it ridiculous that you then glibly downplay the huge earthquake and tsunami flooding on the basis that well the earthquake isn't actually that big (despite having an energy release roughly 30,000 times greater than your frequently cited hypothetical example of a point blank magnitude 6 earthquake) and flooding is flooding whether it be a rather sudden 15 meter surge of water (capable of pushing around large buildings and tanks) or a few centimeters of river overflow puddling in the street down the road.

Obviously, I disagree.

That depends on what you're doing. If you're integrating earthquake power over time, then it does matter. There's an obvious time dependency in that case, for example, the earthquake can continue (releasing yet more energy) rather than stop.

Magnitude 9.0.

And I've already corrected you on this misconception. Why continue to claim such things?

Then you don't know enough to carry on this discussion. From Wikipedia,

There is a lot of nuance here such as most of the energy of an earthquake gets transformed into heating not shaking. But it remains that magnitude doesn't measure peak "power" of an earthquake. It doesn't matter if the slipping fault takes a fraction of second or ten minutes to slip.

Why don't you find this "reliable source"?

It's not a straw man argument. For example, a number of organizations and governments including the IPCC and UK law are proposing heroic efforts and a huge curbing of human activity over the next few decades to avoid a modest 2 C rise in global temperature. That's only roughly 3 C over the 1850 climate baseline. And such a proposal ignores the actions of the countries who don't have restraining that climate change as a high priority (such as most of the developing world or the US).

Or whatever else could make global warming (or similar climate-related risk) worse in absence of the geoengineering solution.

My opinion is that these climate risks are greatly overstated as is, but that doesn't mean that I don't recognize the potential moral hazard in geoengineering approaches.

I suggest crossing that bridge when we come to it. If a few gigantic power generators turn out to be much cheaper than alternatives, then that can fund a renewal of the power line infrastructure to support them.

As an aside, your magnitude scales are goofed up. For example, a sedate pedestrian and hard peddling cyclist differ in power consumption by a factor of four or so. A train can use more power than a fighter jet (and it is a huge jump up from a car). And the Space Shuttle has well over half the power generation of the Saturn V at peak thrust.

Completely wrong. A magnitude 3 earthquake for example, might last only a fraction of a second. A magnitude 9 earthquake might under the right distance and local conditions have shaking that is no greater than the peak acceleration of the magnitude 3 earthquake, but it might last half an hour.

Yes, you're only experiencing a small portion of the power of the big earthquake even when integrated over this relatively long time, but that's still a lot more energy than you receive from the smaller earthquake.

Another way to look at it, is that the big earthquake releases about a million times as much "seismic moment" as the small earthquake and about a billion times more energy. Even an inverse square law isn't going to disperse that energy very much.

Not a fact as I've already explained. You continue to insist on an inappropriate use of the term, "magnitude". And the duration of shaking from a magnitude 9 earthquake would be much longer even if the peak acceleration is equivalent to that of a point blank 6 or 7 magnitude earthquake (which incidentally is another reason not to use magnitude here).

There's a moral hazard to anything that makes a risk less harmful. The result is that people tend to behave in a way that is more likely to cause the risk.

For example, various satellite and cell phone-based communication devices combined with a sophisticated US search-and-rescue system make the effects of getting lost in the middle of nowhere less dangerous. Hence, more people are just taking their chances.

The same thing will happen with geoengineering. Because it is there, someone will decide that they don't need to curb their activities as much.

There's plenty of land-based stuff such as changing the albedo of road systems, putting out coal bed fires, or seeding algae blooms in remote ocean spots (areas that have iron as a limiting factor).

Nobody is disagreeing with you here or that there are some benefits to regulation even for events that exceed the scope of the regulations' intentions. What I disagree with is your glib, uninformed assertion that German regulated buildings would hold up to a magnitude 9 earthquake and its aftereffects even one that's a moderate distance away.

My point all along has been, as I originally stated, that regulations aren't intended to fix extreme disasters like magnitude 9 earthquakes, but more likely disasters like the floods and structural failures that you mention as context for the German regulations.

For example, it's possible that Japan won't experience another magnitude 9 earthquake for centuries. So regulating to resist that extreme an event would impose some degree of cost over regulation for a weaker earthquake standard at little additional benefit.

I don't really know what you're trying to say here. It's pretty clear that these towns were hit by both earthquake and tsunami.

It's a fact not an idea. The energy released, for example, is fixed no matter where observers are relative to the earthquake and that energy release is in turn a straightforward function of the magnitude of the earthquake. The earthquake is magnitude 9 whether you're right on top of it or measuring a blip on your seismometer somewhere across the world. You can't speak of a magnitude 9 earthquake being a magnitude 6 earthquake somewhere else. That's not what magnitude means.

You're referring to acceleration. Even in that case, the magnitude 9 earthquake is going to cause a longer period of shaking, even if the peak acceleration of the earthquake is similar to that of a magnitude 6 earthquake.

First, it would drop inverse linearly if it were a point-source effect constrained to a surface. But here energy is at least partly radiated in three dimensions (a hemisphere crudely) not two.

Second, earthquakes, especially really big ones, aren't point sources. You would have to be a lot further away to see the "effect" of the earthquake dropped as inverse square of distance. The epicenter marks only one part of the earthquake zone.

Third, distance and speed of propagation is dependent on type of wave motion generated by the earthquake. Some part travels along the surface, some propagate directly through the Earth (with varying susceptibility to absorption by fluid-filled volumes).

Fourth, a big source of attenuation is heating effects/friction. In an area with a lot of fractured rock such as eastern Japan, earthquakes lose energy much more quickly than intact continental plates (such as the eastern US which has experienced far smaller but still widely felt earthquakes).

And as I noted earlier, interference and soil type can greatly affect how much shaking a particular location receives.

I point this out to demonstrate that merely stating an inverse square law misses considerable nuance of how earthquake energy dissipates.

Finally, let us keep in mind that it doesn't take a lot of tank ruptures to get a mess with about as much cancer causing power as what is alleged to have been released by Fukushima. They don't have have air-borne fallout - which IMHO is a more likely way for people to get dosed than to have the material dumped in the ocean, but I think it's a bad idea to ignore the relative effect of ocean and ground pollution releases from these two sources.

Maybe they will, maybe they won't. I don't think it's wise to assume the economics of power generation are going to be all that different.

So algae is not a pure, unalloyed good. Still doesn't mean that there's anything seriously wrong with creating algae blooms in certain areas in order to consume and sequester CO2.

Where's the evidence of this vast underestimate?