Slashdot Mirror

Nope. Compare:

http://palaeos.com/tellurobiot...

http://publish.uwo.ca/~dmann/r...

Wow... truth hurts, huh?

I already listed a number of specific errors with Monckton's science, which you chose to ignore in favor of making false comparisons to religious cults.

I've learned over the years it is completely impossible to discuss science with the cult. It's like pointing out that virgin births and resurrection are highly improbably to someone who reads the Bible as literal truth.

Take your very first point for instance: CO2 time lags. It's absolutely irrational to assume that increased concentrations of CO2 800 yrs after the fact are the cause of warming rather than a consequence of it.

Furthermore, you engage in a classic logical fallacy: correlation equals causation. By taking a vanishingly small slice of Earth's geologic history, lining up CO2 and temp and then claiming that it is proof that CO2 invariably causes warming, the cult demonstrates it doesn't understand how real science works. The cult then proceeds to call a 100ppm rise to 370ppm a planetary emergency. You place all your faith in these cult leaders and their computer models, yet computer models are completely incapable of explaining an ice age with atmospheric CO2 in excess of 4000ppm. In fact, as Monckton pointed out, all you need to do is look a little further back into history and the correlation between CO2 and temperature falls apart completely.

Probably because that's all you've got.

Frankly, I have better things to do with my time than point out the flaws in your logic. As you've already demonstrated, you'll just fall back to your irrational religion and name calling, therefore doing so is quite pointless.

Since that amount of carbon has never been in the atmosphere at once we have no idea what it would be like.

There have been many times that amount of C in the atmosphere. About 500 million years ago, Earth went through an ice age with CO2 levels 8 to 20 time higher than they are presently.

The largest sink of carbon on the planet is not organic. It is limestone and dolomite. Those two absolutely dwarf the C locked in fossil fuels. All the fossil fuels on Earth sum up to about 9x10^15 grams. Total mass of C in limestone on the other hand is around 3x10^22grams. Soooo, about 3 million times as much C in limestone as in fossil fuels. Most of that was in the atmosphere. Most of that is now in the ground as a result of plankton and ocean sedimentation.

It may be enough to tip the atmosphere into a runaway state that would result in a Venus-like atmosphere. But that's beside the point.

It isn't beside the point... it is one of the stupidest thing you could possibly say. Who fed you that? Just saying something like that damages any credibility you might have. The atmosphere of Venus is 96.5% CO2. The atmosphere of Earth is roughly 380 parts per million (0.038%). In a hundred years of burning fossil fuels non stop, we've witnessed a rise in atmospheric CO2 of about 100ppm (0.01%). In the link above, you'll see that if you burned all the known fossil fuel reserves today, it would add roughly 77% more CO2 to the atmosphere for a total of what.... 0.07%? That's not even close to the Ordovician atmosphere, much less the Venusian.

The following site has a history of our top level classifications of life. It indicates that "5 Kingdoms" was developed in the 60's, though obviously it may have taken longer to get into school textbooks.

http://www.palaeos.com/Kingdoms/kingdoms.htm

Basically, the entire Earth was frozen over with a sheet of ice two miles thick, everything died and there was no oxygen in the atmosphere, for a period of a few hundred million years.

Palaeos.com has a good discussion of the conflicting evidence for the climate at this time. It doesn't match the Snowball Earth hypothesis particularly well, but then it doesn't match any other hypothesis, either. As Palaeos concludes: "You must be kidding! Conclusions are for people who understand what's going on."

Here's a link to a nice site that describes the conditions of the Earth, geological and ecological, in each Period. http://www.palaeos.com/Paleozoic/Silurian/Ludlow.h tm This specific part of the Silurian had CO2 levels 10x today's, yet the Earth still had some icecaps, and a rapidly diversifying ecosystem. The Silurian saw the devopment of simple land animals and plants, and jaws in fish.

There were earlier periods of high CO2, but they pre-date any significant life on land, and so are less interesting ecologically. CO2 falls and rises quite a bit as you move forward from the Silurian to the present, by amounts that are far greater than recent changes.

Heck, if you buy the "snowball earth" theory, which has been around a couple decades now without being debunked, CO2 level must have been very high indeed to melt the oceans. The vast slow cycle of CO2 regulation by geological activity dwarfs the faster cycles we care about in the Global Warming debate, but we understand those faster cycles even less.

The Hadean Eon were the hottest years of the Earth. It is theorized that it was over 1000 degrees Celsius in surface temperature.

Paris Hilton was quoted as saying, "That's hot!"

Incidentally no SUVs, chemical plants, aerosol cans or overclocked processors were found at the scene.

There is massive evidence of huge climate changes before Homo Sapiens emerged, with temperature changes at least ten times as high as has been observed though the last hundred years.

But life itself has changed our planet. Before life became established on Earth, and even for some one or two billion years afterwards, the air contained no free oxygen, but life changed this as photosynthesis produces oxygen as a waste product. Ironically, oxygen was poisonous to life at that time, but life evolved to cope with this poisonous gas.

If this works at all, which it does... it's DoublePlus Good.

As a website operator, I've been looking for this type of thing for a long time. Google'n "GNU FDL" doesn't get me the right results and I don't like raping Wikipedia, which I have done and will continue to do.

I'm always looking for free content that I can edit, improve upon or parody. I wish this could be extended to GPL code and GNU FDL documents as well.

What? It's like two more radio buttons right?

Time scale works like this (from larger to smaller): Eon -> Era -> Period -> Epoch -> Age

The Permian was the last period of the Paleozoic Era(which ending with the mass extinction). This was followed by the Mesozoic Era (whose first period was the Triassic). While Dinosaurs first appeared in the Triassic they become dominant during the Jurassic. Dinosaurs first appeared in the Carnian age (227 to 221 million years ago, durring the late Triassic) but were "small and insignificant: bipedal bird-like carnivores, insectivores, and herbivores. "

Is the guinea-pig a rodent?

No, the guinea-pig is not a rodent.

It seems that Nature is really into guinea-pigs!
This is a better writeup than the New York Times article, by the way. Although it does refer to them as rodents.

While I'm whoring, this page ought to settle some of the phylogenetic fracas here.

Re, could this be living proof of the evolutionary path that aquatic creatures took to make it to land...?

It's live wiggling proof that intermediate forms exist. An argument sometimes used against Darwinian evolution is that something in between species A and B couldn't compete with the fully functional A creatures now in their prime, nor would it yet have the equipment needed to be a successful B. But this guy looks like he's succeeding quite well as A fish that's Becoming amphibious (given a few tens of millions of years). If that's possible now, why not in the past as well?

Re, ...many millions (billions) of years ago...
Geologic time on a short page
Geologic time on a long page
Links to a lot of geological time charts

This site Precambrian Earth is a red hot mix of geology (from a lot longer ago than our amphibious ancestors) and what might be religion.