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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."
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)
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!
> Luck favors the bold. - Virgil
> Luck favors the well prepared. - Pasteur
Luck favors the lucky.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
Um ... these are in geological terms.
30 miles/hour is fast or slow depending on what sort of transportation you are talking about (walking vs. car vs. jet plane). 10 million is sharp vs 1100 million.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Then why do people like you care about news like this, when you claim the world is only a few thousand years old? You have to decide what to believe in: creationist or scientific lore.
In either way, assuming you are a supporter of the latter theory you should also know that global warming can have several different reasons.
The global warming that has happened since the widespread introduction of the car and petroleum products in the energy industry, as well as industrialised cattle farming, is real, in a very short time span. This is a thing we can do something about, but can't due to greed.
The global warming from natural reasons work on a much longer time span. This, on the other hand, is something we can't do anything about, and here GWB sure can't be blamed.
Just because the global temperature varies in a very long time span of thousands of years does not mean that the man-made environmental catastrophy that is happening is not real.
"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 ...
We learned to talk less than 100,000 years ago.
We've only been recording and passing down history for about 6,000 years. There may have been some damn mighty civilizations before then, but all knowledge of them is lost. (No Atlantis comments from the peanut gallery, it was a made up country Plato concocted for use in one of his books, and if he'd suspected people would have taken it seriously, he probably would have killed himself in despair)
We've already managed to drive a number of species to extinction, and filled the planet with toxins that are killing us off by various means, cancer among them.
A lot of people think we're likely to make the planet uninhabitable for our species withing a few generations.
Oh well. Whatever we do, we can't sterilize the planet. So long as there's enough bacteria and food left to keep going, it will evolve. We many not even be the first sentient species to evolve on this planet. There may have been something before us that polluted the world to the point where they died off. Our oil fields may very well be their landfills.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
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.
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
I was there was a 'buzzer' tag.
The majority of Scientists believe that human behavior 'contributes' to the already naturally occuring phenomenon of Global Warming. Humans are not the root cause, humans simply assist the process in speeding up, even slightly.
One thing most all of those scientists agree on is that Global Warming is happening. That shouldn't be part of the argument anymore.
The only thing that should be argued, tested, made into theories is what we, as humans, can do to slow or otherwise alter the course of Global Warming. One thing many Scientists believe is that we need to radically change our behavior in order to decrease our contributions to Global Warming.
This includes, but is not limited to, discovering cleaner sources of energy production and changing the design of cities and metropolitan areas to have a lower retention of heat. Right now, there are many ideas about how to go about doing that.
The final soltution to the possibility of the Earth losing the ability to support human life is to work towards being able to leave our planet, terraform or design methods to survive on planets that are nowhere near 'Earth Normals'. Colonization of our Solar System and then Extrasolar planets is what will allow our species to continue and thrive.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
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).
How do we know how fast warming occured before? We don't even know how fast the cooling occured. We know the average rate that it occured at, but we don't know the detailed rate it occured at. Comparing 100 years of daily data to 100 million years of millenial data is not a good way to compare.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
No, if impugn the work of scientists simply because it would fit your political agenda, and give no counter evidence to support your conspiracy theories, then yes, it is flame bait.