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Volcanic Warming Eyed in 'Great Dying'
gollum123 writes "AP writes on an article in the journal Science where an ancient version of global warming may have been to blame for the greatest mass extinction in Earth's history. 'In an event known as the "Great Dying," some 250 million years ago, 90 percent of all marine life and nearly three-quarters of land-based plants and animals went extinct. Researchers think the answer is Massive volcanic flows in what is now Siberia, and believe the extinctions were caused by global warming and oxygen deprivation over long periods of time."
...yet somehow they'll find a way to blame it all on George W Bush.
Hmmm.
I should have never given Dick Cheney that time machine. I was not aware of the mischief he was capable of.
Less oxygen = more nitrogen. Boy, are we going to have fun!
There's no grant money or political power to be gained in saying dinosaurs died from a meteor strike.
However, if you can say they all died from global warming and...oh, NO!!! the evil Americans are doing the same thing to the planet right NOW!!! Well,then, you can get some money and influence.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
When people climb tall mountains, they have to deal with lower oxygen. (Some people bring oxygen with them, but some don't). ...16% oxygen in the atmosphere doesn't sound like it would kill all those people... I would have thought people/dinosaurs/creaturse would have learned to just live with the lower oxygen levels by subconsciously taking more breaths... (but I'm not a biology person)
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
No one can agree on anything in the science field when it comes to this planet. Earth is more complex than anyone can comprehend or understand, it will outlast humans by a long shot, nothing we will do will kill it.
From the learning-from-history dept??
WTF are we supposed to learn from this, "Don't set the fucking volcanos off"?
If only the US had signed the Krakatoa-Pompeii Treaty, we wouldn't be getting fucked to death by these massive volcanic flows!!
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
"90 percent of all marine life and nearly three-quarters of land-based plants and animals went extinct"
And all this time I thought it was nine-tenths of all marine life, and 75% of land-based life that went extinct.
Mmmm baked vegetable and meat medley.
The sad part is that we'll be part of the main course....I'll have Geek au gratin please with a side of elephant home fries.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Yes there is. Let's try "This proves that Dumbya has the wrong priorities! He is wasting money on tax cuts for the rich that is better spent on defending us from meteor strikes!
now we have the great dying.
This bit o' work by Robert Frost seems appropriate now:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice
Slashdot...News for Nerds. Stuff about death.
I liked it better in the 70's when all of "pop" science was preaching that we were headed for a mini ice age. This global warming "religeon" is just a little much; espicially since there seems to be so much politic-ing involved.
ho hum
_GP_
The pop scientists today preaching phoney "global warming" theories say that those ice-age guys were not "real scientists". The cycle will likely come around again by 2020, with new pop scientists preaching global cooling, blaming Republicans, and calling the global warming guys of the past fakes.
From the article:
Studying a 1,000-foot thick section of exposed sediment, Ward's team found evidence of a gradual extinction over about 10 million years followed by a sharp increase in extinction rate that lasted another 5 million years.
Huh?
A Gradual extinction over 10 million years? Yeah, That's gradual all right.
The best part is the "sharp" increase over five million more years. So what he's saying is that a hell of lot of stuff died over 15 million years? Wowfuck.
If we've got 10 to 15 million years of fossil fuel to burn, I say screw it.
"Dear? you can turn up the heat now"
feh.
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
FROM: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=62 4&ncid=753&e=1&u=/ap/20050121/ap_on_sc/great_dying
-----
WASHINGTON - An ancient version of global warming may have been to blame for the greatest mass extinction in Earth's history.
In an event known as the "Great Dying," some 250 million years ago, 90 percent of all marine life and nearly three-quarters of land-based plants and animals went extinct.
Scientists have long debated the cause of this calamity -- which occurred before the era of dinosaurs -- with possibilities including such disasters as meteor impacts.
Researchers led by Peter Ward of the University of Washington now think the answer is global warming caused by volcanic activity. Their findings are reported in Thursday's online edition of the journal Science.
They studied the Karoo Basin of South Africa, using chemical, biological and other evidence to relate layers of sediment there to similar layers in China that previous research has tied to the marine extinction at the same period.
Studying a 1,000-foot thick section of exposed sediment, Ward's team found evidence of a gradual extinction over about 10 million years followed by a sharp increase in extinction rate that lasted another 5 million years.
Ward's team believes the extinctions were caused by global warming and oxygen deprivation over long periods of time.
Massive volcanic flows in what is now Siberia brought on the warming while, at the same time, geologic action caused global sea levels to drop, Ward explained in a telephone interview.
"Once you expose a huge amount of underwater sediment to the atmosphere, two very bad things happen -- a huge amount of carbon in the sediments is released and also methane. Once (methane) hits the atmosphere it's the most efficient greenhouse gas on the planet," he said.
That provided a one-two punch of warming and a decline in oxygen levels, he said.
"Some of us have been toying with the idea that dinosaurs evolved to be a low-oxygen adaptation," resulting from this era, Ward said. "We know birds can live at much lower oxygen concentrations than we do, and we and think there were similar lung adaptations in dinosaurs."
Currently the atmosphere consists of about 21 percent oxygen, but the addition of gases at that time could have lowered levels to 16 percent or less, Ward said.
"If you didn't live on the sea level you didn't live," he commented, reflecting the fact that oxygen concentrations decline with altitude. The result would have been to eliminate half the living space on the planet, said Ward.
The more recent mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs -- 65 million years ago -- has been linked to an impact by a large asteroid or comet that struck in an area off the coast of what is now Mexico and left a distinctive layer of dust worldwide.
Some researchers have argued that the Great Dying might also have resulted from such an impact, but Ward's team said it could find no evidence for such an event.
That doesn't mean there wasn't one, argues Luann Becker of the University of California at Santa Barbara, commenting that "the absence of evidence isn't evidence for absence."
Becker, who was not part of Ward's research team, said "they did a nice job of presenting the paleontological data and the stratigraphy, which seem to show some indication of an evolutionary change going on for a prolonged period of time." However, she added, she doesn't believe that addresses the subject of cause and effect.
"I think that this is an ongoing discussion," said Becker, who previously reported on a crater off the northwest coast of Australia that shows evidence of a large meteor impact at about the time of the early extinction.
Ward's research was funded by the NASA (news - web sites) Astrobiology Institute, the National Science Foundation (news - web sites) and the National Research Foundation of South Africa.
___
On the Net:
Science: http://www.sciencemag.org
http://www.sandstorming.com
> Luck favors the bold. - Virgil
> Luck favors the well prepared. - Pasteur
Luck favors the lucky.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's certainly not the first time Vulcanism* has been implicated in a mass extinction - the Deccan Traps, for instance, have been implicated in the KT event that is thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 Million Years ago. There's even a school of thought that says the Chicxulub event may have triggered a major convulsion in the Traps - double jeopardy, if you will.
Except that the earth is only about 4000 years old and fossils were put there to test our faith, right?
* I nearly typed 'vulvanism', but that's a different story.
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
Ward's team found evidence of a gradual extinction over about 10 million years followed by a sharp increase in extinction rate that lasted another 5 million years.
Over ten million years, you'd have to be a pretty hardy life form to not go extinct or evolve to adapt, surely? I mean, if mankind is still on this planet in ten million years, or even five million years, or even when Bush is out of office, I'll eat my hat. Apart from I'd be dead.
And can we stop talking about "heading for an ice age" when we've not finished the one we've got, yet? Thank you!
~~Every few years or so I'm accidentally fashionable!
so maybe global warming is natural, like some unpopular scientists have been saying all along! if it doesnt blame humans, the theory isn't valid.
With a B.S in Earth Science, I know a little about climate change due to increased CO2 concentrations. Let nobody say otherwise, I am very concerned about the effects of climate change. I drive a Toyota Echo, keep my heat at 66, and recycle my aluminum. Let the analogy busting begin...
Mthant =/CO2. Methane is a much more efficient greenhouse gas, and (in the presence of O2) has a much shorter residence time in the atmosphere. Residence times for CO2 are in the hundreds of years. Residence times for methane are below 10 years.
It certainly couldn't have been caused by nature...
Was it a flood?
The Earth may have had 10%s of CO2 until photosynthesis was underway and 1%s into the era of the dinosaurs (its .01%s now). This is determined from paleosoil chemistry and rock types. Its probably not too bad if it takes hundreds of thousands or millions of years to reach these levels. Life can adapt easily. Its a different case if only a few centuries or generations and much harder to adapt.
Discuss.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I have the utmost respect for people who do their best to improve the world around them, but lets face it, good intentions don't always amount to good effects. I think this is might be an attempt to re-integrate "global warming" into the world conciousness. There was, as the article stated, no cause-effect relationship. It was a large supposition that this activity generated a "greenhouse" effect that killed off everything. So lets spend money researching how the environment works before we go yelling how it ends.....
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
There must be a scientific version of Andy Warhol's aphorism: "theres a new theory every fifteen minutes". Whether its geology, astronomy, or medicine they cant seem to agree on a story.
Actually I am just being cynical. Some fields are finally showing convergence, such as cosmology where the evidence is starting to agree with each other. I suggest a lot of this "newest, greatest theory B.S." is publicity mongering by institutions trying get more grants.
To summarise, Nebraska is well known for its ash deposits - mined for cleaning products like Ajax - but no-one knew where it all came from.
Then in 1971, Mike Voorhies found a mass grave of prehistoric bones - sabre-toothed deer, zebra-like horses etc. - all killed by something big 12 million years ago. They were all buried under volcanic ash up to 3 metres deep.
One problem - no-one knew where all the ash came from.
Now Yellowstone was known to be pretty active, with its geysers, boiling mud-pools etc. but they couldn't find a caldera, ie. an actual volcano cone anywhere in the park.
But fortunately NASA were testing some high altitude photography techniques and decided to take some pictures of Yellowstone, thoughtfully dropping some copies off at the Visitor Centre. It was then that they realised that in fact Yellowstone is ONE BIG CALDERA - i.e. a 'superplume', 9000 square kilometres of crater left from some humungous explosion a long time back.
In Bill Bryson's words, "imagine a pile of TNT about the size of an English county and reaching 13 kilometres into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling about on top of".
He goes on, "The Yellowstone eruption of two million years ago put out enough ash to bury New York State to a depth of 20 metres ..."
And then there's the last supervolcano eruption in Toba, in northern Sumatra, 74,000 years ago. Studies of ice cores in Greenland show that at least 6 years of 'volcanic winter' followed, and that humans probably were at the brink of extinction, with maybe only several thousand of us at any one time for thousands of years after (which maybe explains our relative lack of genetic diversity).
Yes, volcanoes are more than fire and magma - every now and then there're some *really* big ones.
Forgive me if this is off-topic, but does any geologist here know why we have volcanic flows whereas when we refer to icebergs we have floes. The reason for the spelling difference isn't immediately apparent in any of the dictionaries.
I'm a graduate student, forgive me for this triviata.
--- There is a man in a smiling bag.
I suggest you read the papers here and here before continuing. Actually, I suggest that EVERYONE ON SLASHDOT read those papers; they will open your eyes.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
It is not obvious to me that changing oxygen levels would be all that destructive. We've known for a while that oxygen levels in the Triassic (following the "Great Dying") where some of the lowest in Earth's history. We have also known that oxygen concentration in the Carboniferous (50-100 Myr earlier) were some of the highest (perhaps 180% of modern value).
In the Carboniferous, what you see (in addition to extra nasty forest fires) is an explosion of gigantism among diffusion limited organisms. Such organisms, mostly insects and amphibans, have respiratory or circulatory systems that are limited by the ability of oxygen to diffuse through them. With higher O2 levels, such animals can develop larger body plans and clearly did in the Carboniferous. By contrast, falling O2 levels would probably be an evolutionary pressure towards dwarfism and smaller body plans.
After the Permian mass extinctions, we do see very few large animals. This might be associated with low O2 levels, but it might also be the results of an ecosystem so disrupted that it can't support large predators.
However, it would be hard to hang the extinctions on oxygen alone since oxygen levels seem to have fallened over a much longer period of time than the extinctions, and would not have affected all organisms equally. Perhaps coupled with volcanism and global warming it is enough, but personally I doubt it. I am inclined to favor models that talk about volcanism or other causes leading to stratification and toxicity in the oceans. If you are going to kill >90% of all oceanic species, it would seem that the best bet is to make the oceans unlivable for them.
However, this debate is likely to continue for a long time and we will no doubt hear many other theories before it is all done.
"The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles...hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages...And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet...the planet...the planet isn't going anywhere people... we are!" ~ George Carlin
I filtered through gollum123's article submission to find any political bias .. he's clean. Although I still believe that global warming is a big problem that we must do something about,. I cannot deny that nature itself is as big a problem:
All we can do is work on the stuff we can control. We cant control earthquakes, tsunamis from those, hurricanes etc.. we need to keep focussing on prediction and reducing emmisions. If we get taken out because the sun suddenly goes supernova (which shuoldnt happen) and blows the f*$@ out of the whole solar system, we can live with that ... or if an indistructible massive depleted uranium asteroid slams into the earth
By the way, I think we should be spending more money on probes like ESA's Rosetta that studies th sun than on Huygens which merely tells us about how we could kill ourselves off with freexing cold ethane rain just in case we cant kill ourselves off on this world ...
here are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production- with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas - parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia - where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree - a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars' worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.
To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. "A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale," warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, "because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century."
A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.
To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth's average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras - and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the "little ice age" conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 - years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.
Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. "Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data," concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. "Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions."
Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of west
The "great dying" was caused by the meltdown of the core reactors of the ships that brought the ancient astronauts to the Earth. This meltdown happened because the ancient astronauts had a near-religious belief in closed-source system architecture and software that by default had very poor security.
The few ancient astronaut advocates of the "open-source secure spacing initiative" were thought to have been killed as well, but what really happened was that they left the Earth, and colonized Titan (hence the problems with the Huygens probe's "A" transmitter and the overall secrecy surrounding data coming from Titan. Interestingly enough, the ESA Titan team seems to have at least some open-source advocates who we may readily suspect are cooperating with their Titanian brothers and sisters.
Seriously, do you ever suspect that some scientists are simply throwing darts at a "Wheel of Grant Funding Fortune" when coming up with these theories? Sure, maybe the volcanos did it. But it could have been a virus too (hey, that's a good one, do you know where I can apply for grant money?)
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
The rest of the ecosystem would probably not be so flexible.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
>With a B.S in Earth Science, I know a little about climate change due to increased CO2 concentrations.
A B.S. in something makes you qualified to "know" something?
What about all the Masters, Doctorates and Post-Doctorates that disagree with you?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
If I train in a low oxygen environment my body adapts or is custom to the low amount of oxygen. I'm not really undergoing any evolutionary changes am I?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Could you imagine if earth became like Planet Spaceball, with our leaders denying there's a lack of Oxygen while taking big gulps of branded bottled oxygen "PerriAir"?
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Gee whiz - ya think?
Remember how the new "Ice Age" was comming? That was brought to us by the same group of hippies screaming about "global warming"
Until we get the political agendas out of mass media "Science", I ain't buying it
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
The average temperature during the dino age was 3-5 degrees above what it is now; they seemed to take it ok. Now we are going to blame a big volcano for global warming? How about the ash it would put up and block sunlight (hmm, cooling) and cause respiratory problems. How about all the great gasses it released, such as CO2, SO2, and whatever else volcanos belch up.
I do not disagree that the planet may be getting warmer, but labeling an ancient volcano as killing off most life as global warming is just sensationalistic. The crap that is getting put out as "science" when it comes to global warming is starting to push the fringe of being reasonable. Didn't some guy say that we should all stop eating meat so we cull most of the cows so their methane gasses would no longer contribute to greenhouse gasses?
This place is getting nuts, and I haven't found any Vogon ships recently.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
You are closer to being a trillion cells. Or are you British?
1. A gigantic solar flare that cannot be handled by the earth's magnetic field, the process damages earth's magnetc field, and no traces of the flare are left behind.
2a. Collision with a 10-15 mile wide previously not deteced asteroid.
2b. Collision with a 10-15 mile wide previously detected asteroid.
This post was funny and insightful. Nevertheless, JPelorat has committed the cardinal sin of breaking from slashthink.
Now it's bad enough when we get local pertebations in weather that screw up the growing season. With global warming we start wandering into realms where the entire WORLD's growing patterns change. When you have millions of people starving in one country, while a previously uninhabited place starts being able to grow food like crazy, you get global wars as we all pile onto the new places like toddlers fighting over a cookie.
And if that weren't bad enough, where you have millions of starving people with compromised immune systems, epidemics aren't far behind.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
This is the Great Dying, about 250 million years ago. The dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago.
The Dinosaurs were killed by Giant Brains.
Don't be a smartass. Everyone knows that early dinosaurs took public transportation. It was those pesky cro-magnons who drove to work in their massive HUVs (hunting-utility vehicles) by themselves in the carpool lanes.
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
HOMER: Musn't crush, musn't kill! (he sits on a fish, killing it) Oh, i wish i wish i hadn't killed that fish
If you want a sense of how a change like this could radically change favored adaptations, think about grazing mammals that evolved to take advantage of grasses. As grasses became more prevalent, animals who could eat grass well exploded in population. Big niches got to be dominated by some pretty mundane-seeming adaptations to the digestive process. Seems like a subtle edge, doesn't it?
Reading the article, the folks making this argument have considered potential long-term adaptations to the atmospheric changes they're describing:
(People don't realize how radical the indirect effects of climate change could be, partly because they're thinking stuff like this. You know -- "If it gets warmer in the winter, I'll just wear less sweaters." If, say, the gulf stream were to shut down, and Europe's economies took a tremendous hit under a much cooler regional climate, putting on more sweaters will make as much sense as asking everyone in England to just "breathe less.")
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Let them tell me the planet is cooking as they plug in their car at night, or step outside and their nostrils freeze shut.
Wanks.
No worries, some of us do. Who knows, maybe even a significant portion will join in in the course of the next four years.
here in Canada right now. It's so cold I can't even tell if I'm freezing my ass off because it's numb :(
No, the scary part is the it could just as easily cause starvation in "First World" countries just as easily. Third world nations are simply more vulnerable, but there are still people alive today who remember "the dustbowl".
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
As for the small-minded ones, the aching in their brains is payback.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
I know what I last used "BS" to mean...
~~Every few years or so I'm accidentally fashionable!
A worse problem is strong acid gases like SOx. They move pH which takes time to adapt.
Is there nothing Sarbanes-Oxley cannot taint? Now even Ph must move moved to cater to the whims of this capricious law.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sorry but the "Ice Age is coming" climatologists were distinctly a minority in the 70s even at the peak of their popularity in popular culture. Scientist change their minds because that's the way science works. You get new information and experiments and you attempt to understand it in the framework of current theories. If the current theories don't explain the new data, you develop new ones. This is opposed to religion which claims to have the one truth, even if it doesn't fit the experimental data.
Thalasar
If it makes you feel better to think you play a role in the evolution of human race by driving a crappy plastic hybrid Honda, then by all means, be my guest.
"Whether its geology, astronomy, or medicine they cant seem to agree on a story."
Yeah, at least pedophile priests know the "Truth".
Mmmm, that's good flamebait!
I live in Denver!
No. However, if some of your kids die due to low oxygen levels, it is.
Ok then - I give up
Which is going to kill us first - The Ice age or Global warming? - Would they cancel each other out?
Should we all do our part to save mother earth by going out right now and buying Humvees to stave off the next ice age?
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
From the article:
Plants do photosynthesis, consuming carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. Why would a decline in oxygen levels kill them?
And something else: we humans have adapted to thin-air conditions quite easily. People live in Nepal and Tibet, and it did not even take evolution. Ordinary flatlanders can move to Tibet, too, and after a couple of weeks they have adapted to the thinner air. We are mammals, with big brains and a high metabolism, so we need a lot of oxygen. Surely the reptiles of 250 Million years ago needed much less oxygen, so why didn't they make it?
There must've been some other "evil multinationals" back then. May be, those dinosaurs had a more advanced civilization, than thought?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Ok. Let me put it to you simply. Our food requires certain growing conditions to produce enough crops to stuff your piehole. Too wet, too dry, too hot, or too cold and we have famine on a wide scale.
Just to play devils advocate - have we not greatly widened the growing conditions that can be tolerated for many crops by now?
Between genetic engineering, and technological abilities like crop warmers (don't think that's exactly the right term, but basically a way of warming croplands so they can yield in the winter) and large greenhouses, can not large numbers of crops sitll be produced even in fairly different climactic conditions?
Not to mention that if the climate changes, areas that can grow certain crops may just shift to other crops that can grow there naturally.
So when people start saying we're all going to starve, I become rather dubious. At least the First World countries would put much effort into ways to feed the populace, and third world countries while probably much worse off would probably be able to figure out something or get aid from the first world (which then of course would be kept back by stingy leaders in order to control the populace).
Humans and crops have adapted for a huge range of living conditions across the planet, and will continue to do so. We have a tremendious ability to adapt crops now that we have not had before, and that would surley play a role in keeping food flowing, even if at a reduced rate. Basically the first world countries now have so much food availiable to them already that a reduction to 1/10 could probably sustain the populace (if unhappily so).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Green house efficiency is characterized by the magnitutude and bandwidth of absorption in the infrared spectrum. On a PPM to PPM concentration comparison, Methane is about 22 times more effective at trapping infrared radiation than CO2. That the infrared absorption characteristic is independant of its longevity in the atmosphere. Methane oxidises in the presence of O2 and has residence times measured in decades. CO2 uptake by plants and oceans is much slower, with residence times measured in centuries. Long-term sequestration in carbonate sediments happens on scales measured in millenia.
The wikipedia entry is likely more clear than me.
Let's see: we are still in the 3rd deviation tail, 97-100% the coldest climate for the last 500 million years and we are "going to burn ourselves up." No doubt the Permian extinction is our fault too. It is hubris and stupidity to blythely assume we are players in competition with astrophysical and geological processes that we (mankind) don't really understand historically or quantitatively and that 98+% of the population is not even vaguely aware of.
I think that end of the Permian was probably four lemons - impacts, vulcanism, solar related inputs and max buildup of unreprocessed gases - but I am not going to get my panties in a wad if you only agree with 2-3. Think about it - life / infections are REALLY hard to eradicate, yet this was getting somewhat close. Have a miserable life folks. It is more important that we progress to a level II civilization that can really control or avoid extinction events like this. And not get sidetracked by parasitic priestly welfare agendas (can I sacrifice your children to the gods?) like GW (but don't get me started on GWB either).
Actually I am FAR more concerned about the politization of science and science education in our (US) schools that get distracted with GW even in AP science courses (yes or no, it simply is not the proper venue). Feels like we are headed for Brave New - Farenheit 451 in the US.
I don't think cancer is a toxin. We may have things that agravate cancer, but I have yet to hear of how cancer is actually caused. Only things that give you a greater risk of cancer.
On the other side, the main reason I have heard about cancer is that we are finally living long enough where cancer is actually getting to enough of the population to bother us. 100 years ago not enough people lived long enough to get cancer muh less for anyone to pay attention to it.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
bleh. Here's the Wiki.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas
nuff said.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/dayearth died.shtml/
I thought bush said it was the Libral Homo-agenda leading Communists that would lead to the mass dying.
/sarcasm
I trusted him!
Oh wait... he's not a scientist. He's not even what most would consider a "smart" individual. He's just another stupid US president.
at the same time, geologic action caused global sea levels to drop, Ward explained in a telephone interview.
What geologic action can cause global sea levels to change dramatically? I didn't know any could, I thought it had more to do with the balance between ice ages and warm ages.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
That's a lot of extinct animals. Do they actually have any fossils of them or are they just pulling these numbers out of their bums.
Whoever modded the parent as troll really is an idiot, or, perhaps, doesn't know what "Troll" means (of course, the two aren't mutually exclusive).
Not because I care about the environment, because I can't stand driving and parking is terrible in the chunk of town I work at.
Frankly, the only beef I have with SUV's are they chew up too many parking space downtown, I can't see around them in traffic, and they are gas guzzlers and widespread use if them for commuting is driving up everyone's fuel prices. But frankly, if driving one really floats your boat, more power to you.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
We Christians called it "the flood"...and it wasn't 250 mil. years ago.
Either I had a completely different liberal school system than everybody else, or this is not true.
I grew up in the 70's. "Pop science" clearly stated that humans were going to make the world warmer. Now it did say this was due to CO2 emmissions and opaque pollution such as particulates causing the greenhouse effect. You were a science geek if you understood why clouds would make the world warmer, when it seems obvious that the shade would make it colder. I certainly remember plenty of warnings in pop culture such as "Earth Day" that our pollution would "turn the world into Venus". I remember warnings that even clean fusion energy would not save us, as even the waste heat would trip the world into heating up. I remember "pop" science fiction talking plenty about a future where civilization overheated the world, for instance Larry Niven's Ringworld had an alien civilization moving their planet further from their sun to avoid overheating.
Now either I grew up in a completely different liberal school system (this was Massachusetts public schools) or you are trying to distort history.
It's quite possible you are being confused by "nuclear winter" which came out in 1978 or so. This was initially attacked precisely because it violated conventional wisdom that "bad things humans do will make the earth hot". It is probably true that "nuclear winter" became so popular that many people did start to think that "pollution will make the world cold" but this would have been around 1982.
Now "pop science" is certainly quite wrong (saying CO2 would cause the warming is just as wrong compared to today's science as claiming cooling would happen). But I do find it very alarming that people are willing to lie about history to try to make their point. A single Newsweek article reporting on some scientists saying conventional wisdom is wrong does not change history.
Obviously the mods have no sense of humor!
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
IIRC, it was Xenu, the guy the scientologists say took a bunch of aliens and crammed them into a VOLCANO where Hawaii is and blew them up, in what really comes off as the sort of wild yarn I wish I could come up with when I'm totally snokkered. If you'd read Copolymer's tale in Pyramids by Terry Pratchett, you had a similar idea. Keep in mind a "religion" is based upon this. Do you suppose they've seized upon this as evidents that L. Ron Hubbard's rantings were true?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
and produces junk science
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Having lived on an arable farm in w.sussex uk from 76 - 90 and still being in contact with people. I would say the growing season is longer. Winter cereals have a greater part of the winter at >3c so can grow more before winter. The only problems really have been that summer storms flatten the standing grain and we have had a few more of them.
"Scientist change their minds because that's the way science works. You get new information and experiments and you attempt to understand it in the framework of current theories."
I think the problem that some of us have is that scientists expect the rest of us to take what they say as fact, when in fact, it is just the best guess they can make today. All of science is suffering because the force of fact of experimental science is being used in the non-experimental sciences. Descriptive, historical, and other sciences are good, but they should not carry the same weight as experimental science.
It is pure guesswork that one even could conceivably model a global weather system for any useful timespan. The fact that we are expected to take these models as fact is just idiocy. I respect the fact that scientists should and need to try out theories and revise them, but I think they should also respect the rest of us to not take them seriously at this stage in their development.
Engineering and the Ultimate
The point is, that Global Warming is a farce that is going to happen wether we like it or not. And no amount of recycling, or battery powered cars, or Public Transportion, HEPA filters, or NON areosol cans are gonna stop it.
My advice: Go by a big giant UV resistant plastic bubble, climb in and curl up in the fetal position and live in fear. Or...you could just live your life, drive the car you want, use big aerosol cans of Cutter bugspray, and AquaNet Hairspray and be happy.
So we know the ferocious potential of lava flows now. Why can't we use active lava domes to destroy nuclear waste? Wouldn't that do the trick? I always wondered this, but was too afraid to ask the teacher for fear of being laughed at. Sad, I know, but does anybody know the potential for this type of thing?
Newsweek!?! You're basing assertions on the consensus of scientific thought in the 1970s based on an article in a news glossy?!?
*snigger*
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I heard some people talk about this at a symposium in Hamburg
last year (can't remember the names - damn!) Anyway, one of
the basic observations is that magnetic imaging techniques have
lead to a sufficiently accurate picture of the earth's molten core,
that they can simulate the activity *backwards* over basically
the entire history of the earth. "Bullshit" you say, "Navier-Stokes
is impossible to accurately numerically simulate, even over
short periods of time"; this is true, because of turbulence - but
the dynamic viscosity of the earth's core is so large, that effects
due to turbulence can be largely ignored. Anyway, the point is
that such simulations can detect when in the past major
volcanic hot spots occurred (i.e. volcanic eruptions producing
a cloud of toxic chemicals covering the earth for ~1000 years
or more). They suggested that there was a very close
correlation between the largest of these volcanic hot spots
with all 6 major extinctions (including the Permian extinction,
and the dinosaurs). Even more interestingly, they predicted
another volcanic hot spot of similar size due in only a few
10's of millions of years. Take a look at a relief map of
South Africa: there's a massive bulging plateau, with no
relationship to tectonic plates - apparently, underneath is
a major eruption, which will probably kill 50% of all species
alive now, or more, just waiting to get out.
I remember reading about volcanic eruptions being a cause of the Permian extinction about 6-8 years ago. How wierd.
... punctuates the article. Hard not to see a political spin in an article that dwells on a Global Warming tye-in with the Great Dying with what is very sparse evidence. In fact, the relation seems almost forced.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
They can't even predict a snow storm eight hours out. We just got five inches of a dusting here.
How the heck can anyone predict what's going to happen in 10 years with any amount of accuracy. What will happen will happen. Prepare for what we can and don't sweat the stuff we can't. When and if something happens we'll have to deal with it. I'm not sure it's real productive to try and prepare for things that might never happen. And it might be deterimental if something completely different and worse happens
--
odis didow fidos rostin boxen
I also grew up in the 70s and we were inundated with it at school, on museum field trips, on tv 'science' programs for kids *and* adults.
You grew up not just in a different school but a different universe from the rest of us. Global warming is the kewl new thing. Global ice age and freezing to death was the kewl 70s thing.
Who knows what the next thing will be once the Global Warming hysteria fades?
If the "big day" comes, I hope to have enough time to load up all my survival gear into my small aircraft, which has just enough range on full tanks of fuel to get me about halfway up into the cold wilderness areas of western Canada and find a place to build a cabin and try to survive. With one, maybe two refuelling stops, I could make it all the way up into the arctic regions. Enough gasoline can be obtained up there with the right *technique* to get the job done, since law & order and such rules of civilization won't really apply much anymore in such circumstances.
Why can't we use active lava domes to destroy nuclear waste
Either you're kidding, or you haven't thought about the effects of combusting assorted radionuclides and spewing radioactive metallic oxides that will be carried aloft and deposited as dust and ash for thousands of miles.
Da Blog
"Absence of evidence is not evidence for absence"
Global Warming is a joke of a research project that was underfunded and gave people a reason to harp on the big wigs making money in America.
There are countless ways to continue this research but there are some every important aspects people are missing when they are reading articles.
Two things that come off the top of my head are:
1. The sun is not a steady uniform supply of energy. I have never seen any studies showing the suns output over the last 6,000 years. This research is uncharted (to my knowledge) and plays a significant role in the climate of Earth.
2. Sea water. Everyone knows the equilibrium between bicarbonate, carbonate and carbon dioxide. These things haven't been investigated either, and with an slight fluxuation in energy from the sun, an equlibrium of the Earths proportion involving carbon dioxide could easily be pushed towards more carbon dioxide.
To bad the FDA can't get away with that kind of research and claims. Our drugs would be a lot more fun!
I am short and bald!
Notheless, I distinctly remember this. "nuclear winter" was considered a radical theory precisely because it contradicted conventional wisdom about what dirt in the air would do.
It is plausible that the theory has switched more times than you think. In the 40's and 50's a "coming ice age" appears to have been popular, though not caused by humans but a natural thing (witness many science fiction stories and magazine covers illustrating humans fighting the ice with nuclear power). Possibly in the 60's (i was a little too young to remember anything then) perhaps the "obvious" answer that dirt in the air would shade the ground and make it colder was considered popular. What I do remember was that it was "cool" to know that in fact dirt in the air would *trap* heat and make the world heat up, and thus human pollution would cause the air to heat up, you were then a science geek because you understood this.
Nuclear winter, as far as I remember, appeared in my last year of high school, and thus in 1979. Exactly the same response as you came out then: "but you were all saying it would get warm!!!"
I would like you to find anything other than a single Newsweek article from the 70's in the popular literature that predicts the world getting colder. I
I predict, with reasonable certainty, that the stock market index will increase over the next few decades. But, I can't predict whether it will move up or down today.
Funny, how that works, isn't it?
Based on his previous posts, I'd guess he's either confused.....or joking.
_______________________
Huh?
No amount of "tweaking" is going to make wheat grow in sand or mud. You can't build a greenhouse that's going to cover millions of square miles of land. And you can't irrigate where you have no water.
Actually, mud has pretty good growth potential as cropland, and even if some crops may not grow there so well (like wheat) others might (like rice). And there are drought-resistant strains of wheat that may fare well in dry (if not quite sandy) soil.
And you can indeed irrigate when you have no water, if you channel in the water from elsewhere. Unless you are seriously suggesting that whole nations would become one giant desert? I don't believe global warming experts are saying anything of the sort, perhaps you can provide a credible link.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What a butt-load of straw. Conflating stock market values with knowledge of climate trends.
Pick your unrelated topics and draw your untenable conclusions.
You are aware, aren't you, that the "experts" were predicting cooling in the 70's and heating now. Some of them are even the same experts.
So what you're saying is that you can predict the future climate, but the "experts" cannot? Why, exactly?
It's easy to see how a great flood would kill off 90% of all marine life.
But perhaps you'd better break it down, you know, for all of us retards out here.
The Deccan Traps occurred coincidentally at about the same time as the Chicxulub impact. Now there is an interesting feature on the surface of Mercury where a large impact on one side of the planet triggered crustal rupture on the exact opposite point of the planet ... since that is where the seismic waves were focused. I'm wondering, and I'm sure this has already occured to planetary scientists, if this might be the origin of the Deccan Traps. Recently some researchers suggested that 251 million years ago there was a large impact in what is now Northern Australia. The crater would be about the same size as Chicxulub.
So are we seeing another extinction caused by the double whammy of impact and vulcanism with the vulcanism causing even worse long term grie?
Bitter and proud of it.
I posted a comment on this somewhere else, but it should have been here.
There are claims that a large (Chicxulub size) impact occurred in Northern Australia 251 million years ago at the same time as the Permian Extinction. Two things come to mind:
Both the KT event and the Permian involved potentially very large long lived volcanic regions (Deccan Traps, Siberia) and asteroid impacts (well the Permian one isn't proven yet)
On Mercury there is evidence of a large region of the crust being ruptured due to the impact of an asteroid on the exact opposite side of the planet due to the focused shock waves
So could the Permian extinction have been triggered by an impact but brought to fruition by the vulcanism?
PS. If I had mod points and I hadn't already posted I would have given you a +1 Informative
Bitter and proud of it.
No. Keep in mind that evolution deals with genetic changes in populations. A person whose body increases red cell count in response to lower oxygen levels is not evolving. A population in which various heritable attributes become more frequent over generations because of lower oxygen levels is evolution by natural selection.
The theory about vulcanism leading to global warming as a cause of the "Great Dying," or as it is scientifically known, the Permian-Triassic extinction event, is not new. The researchers just found some more supporting evidence for this theory.
The Great Dying Permian-Triassic extinction event
Now to reply to my own post (don't want it to get modded down for my opinions of course)
It's hardly correct for AP to say they "now think" it's caused by vulcanism since that was probably their theory in the first place, they were probably looking for supporting evidence, not "omg look we discovered the cuase!!1". Crappily written article, the guy at the end even says "this is an ongoing discussion," probably in response to the AP writer saying "Can you tell us this caused global warming and the extinction?" for the 5th time.
If I had mod points right now, I'd give'em all to you
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
The first rule of Slashdot is you don't criticise Michael...
Anyway for a beautiful, comprehensive, authoritative debunking of this myth, read this excellent article by respected climate scientists with refs to articles in actual proper real peer-reviewed journals (as opposed to Newsweek.)
This has been a Climate TrollBuster service. YAAT(BYHL).HAND.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
it would be vaporized (before any radionuclides or uraniumoxides, as you call them) would be transported into the atmosphere
These chemical reactions (yes, even those at a few thousand C inside lava/magma) are too weak to affect the nuclear cores of the elements involved. What you would end up with, then, is a dirty cloud of radioactive vapour which would follow wind patterns for a while and then fall onto land as preciptation (rainfall) and dust. Look at a volcano - see all the stuff billowing up? Right not it's just smoke and dust. Imagine if it was radioactive!
Not a good idea.
Da Blog
I think the problem that some of us have is that scientists expect the rest of us to take what they say as fact, when in fact, it is just the best guess they can make today.
It is exactly the reverse. In almost everything that is published scientifically, it is made abundantly clear that there is uncertainty, hence the the title of the article: 'Volcanic Warming Eyed in Great Dying' and not 'Yup, it was volcanoes that did it'.
The fact that such language is used does not mean that they don't expect everyone else to follow along. Just look at how much influence weather-based science, which is still in its infancy, has on public policy, when it really should have very little influence at this stage in our knowledge.
Engineering and the Ultimate
The fact that such language is used does not mean that they don't expect everyone else to follow along.
Of course they hope that people will follow, but any scientist with any experience does not 'expect' it. Science is designed to be cautious and careful about what it says.
Just look at how much influence weather-based science, which is still in its infancy, has on public policy, when it really should have very little influence at this stage in our knowledge.
Considering the dramatic reduction in thickness of the Artic ice sheet, the measurable shrinkage of glaciers and the increased frequencies of hurricanes, I think that its absolutely vital that we use whatever science we have to influence polity.
640K years is enough to discover fire, cement, slavery, gov't, religion, science, literature, war, peace, entertainment, decadence, and final self-destruction.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Great dying starts with great dyes. If the quality of your dye is lacking, the end result will suffer. First, take a white T-Shirt, and start twisting it in random places, like you're wringing it out to dry. Next take a rubber band and place it at various points along your twist to keep it in place. These rubber bands will also serve as dipping points. First, dip the tip of the twist into the color of your choice, and then into your melted wax. The wax will prevent subsequent colors from mixing with the previous color. Continue dipping each band into the color of your choice, followed by the wax. Allow several hours for the dyes to set before submersing the entire shirt into boiling water to remove most of the wax. Careful: boiling water is hot, so be sure not to use your hands to hold the t-shirt down as scalding, or even thorough cooking of the hands may result. If you are under the influence of mind altering substances, which you must be in order to think tye dying is a good idea, have a friend or relative do this part for you. Once removed from the boiling water, place the t-shirt in a washing machine set to "hot," but be sure not to place any other clothing in the washer as dye transfer may result. Chances are you don't bathe or wash regularly anyway, so don't worry about subsequent washings -- just dab some patchouli oil around the smelly parts and enjoy the ride. Remember: the dinosaurs enjoyed great dying millions of years ago, and you can too! Happy dying.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
A little over the top sure, but mods, please have a heart. The guy at least managed to use both 'effects' and 'affects' properly, and in the same sentence no less. That's got to be a 1 in a million occurance around here ;)
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