A candidate running for Senate in New Jersey attributed Friday’s east coast earthquake to climate change.
Christina Khalil, who is running for a Senate seat in New Jersey as a member of the Green Party, blamed the “climate crisis” for the unusual magnitude 4.8 earthquake that struck her state and several others bordering it on Friday. Khalil is hoping to take the seat currently occupied by longtime Democratic New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, who now faces numerous charges related to alleged bribery schemes involving Qatar and Egypt.
“I experienced my first earthquake in NJ. We never get earthquakes. The climate crisis is real,” Khalil wrote in a post shared on X, formerly Twitter. “The weirdest experience ever.” (RELATED: Dems, Media Push New Study Linking Climate Change To Inflation, But Economists Aren’t Buying It)
I experienced my first earthquake in NJ. We never get earthquakes. The climate crisis is real.
The weirdest experience ever.
— Christina Amira Khalil (@Christina4NJ) April 5, 2024
While Khalil suggests that climate change is responsible for the tremor, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) rejects that there is any connection between climate conditions and seismic activity.
“With the advent of seismology — the study of earthquakes — we now know that most quakes are caused by tectonic processes — forces within the solid Earth that drive changes in the structure of Earth’s crust, primarily the rupture of underground rock masses along faults,” according to Alan Buis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We also know that most earthquakes occur far beneath Earth’s surface, well beyond the influence of surface temperatures and conditions. Finally, we know the statistical distribution of earthquakes is approximately equal across all types of weather conditions. Myth busted.”
The myth that weather and earthquakes are linked spans back to antiquity, according to Buis. Aristotle, a philosopher who lived in Ancient Greece, “proposed in the 4th century B.C. that earthquakes were caused by trapped winds escaping from subterranean caves.”
“Overall, to keep this short, everything is connected. If you take the last 10 or 15 years of extreme climate weather, you take every single event, create a timeline, and put together and compare it to a timeline of U.S. military destruction, carbon use, and what corporations have done the last 10 or 15 years, I’m sure there would some interesting conclusions and finds. I’m confident there is a correlation,” Khalil told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Research is still on going because no one really knows what causes earthquakes. I rather see 18 billion dollars invested into research and solutions on climate rather than send F-15s over to destroy Palestine even further.”
“This isn’t me preaching, saying we need to get rid of the military, unfortunately we have complete morons running the country,” she added. “They decided to make international enemies and put millions of U.S. residents at risk.”
Menendez — whose job approval numbers have tanked in the wake of the scandal — recently announced that he will not be running for reelection as a Democrat, and Tammy Murphy, the wife of Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, withdrew from the race in March. Democratic New Jersey Rep. Andy Kim is the frontrunner in the Senate race, according to The Hill.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated with comments from Khalil
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