Well, the New York Times finally decided to dial in to the ongoing seismic mess in Oklahoma. And while the coverage highlights the potential conflicts of interest and ability of the oil and gas industry in that state to dampen if not entirely prevent criticism of its operations, it doesn’t exactly shed a lot of light on the problems of saying why there are these earthquakes and it doesn’t help folks to understand how these earthquakes might be connected to the wells in question.  Rather than get into the mud and argue the details in Oklahoma (you can read the 2014 Science paper if you want to see how that is done), consider a much simpler system.

For the past 24 years, the Bureau of Reclamation in southwest Colorado has been pumping saline water into a deep aquifer (the goal is to reduce the salinity of Colorado River…