patrick.net

I just read the article on the study.

Very wet rain events are the trigger," said Wdowinski, associate research professor of marine geology and geophysics at the UM Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. "The heavy rain induces thousands of landslides and severe erosion, which removes ground material from the Earth's surface, releasing the stress load and encouraging movement along faults."

The hypothesis is that heavy rains cause surface material to move off some fault lines lessening the weight holding down the plates along those fault lines, and causing the earthquake to come sooner rather than later. This is sort of like loosing the grip of a vice preventing two magnets with like sides facing each other from separating.

Even if this hypothesis is true, it is not necessarily a bad thing for two reasons.
1. This might not increase the number of earthquakes but simply cause them to happen sooner rather than later.
2. If this does increase the number of earthquakes, then it should also decrease the severity of those earthquakes because the potential energy is being more often and won't build up as much. Lots of small earthquakes is better than a few large earthquakes.

However, based on what the article says, I doubt this is at all significant as the hypothesis only applies to a narrow set of fault lines.