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Global Warming May Have Killed the Dinosaurs
The Fun Guy sent in a link to the American Society for Microbiology site, your leading news source for everything between nano and macro. The site is featuring a story about new research into the KT barrier extinction: the period in history where the dinosaurs went extinct, along with a number of other families of species. For a number of years scientists have theorized that an impact on the Yucatan peninsula was responsible for the species crash, but microbiological examination of marine organisms of the time indicate life persisted for another 300,000 years after the 'Chicxulub impact'. The researchers at Princeton who made this discovery theorize that global warming caused by a volcanic eruption in India is a more likely culprit for the world-wide devastation. The article generalizes that there is no 'smoking gun' for this event, and further research is required.
"For a number of years scientists have theorized that an impact on the Yucatan peninsula was responsible for the species crash, but microbiological examination of marine organisms of the time indicate life persisted for another 300,000 years after the 'Chicxulub impact'."
Wow, I wonder if there's still life on the planet in question...
It is also consistent with the fossil record, which shows huge amounts of charcoal cinders near the K-T boundary wherever you look, and a drastic change in the types of pollen present.
The article claims based on microbiological analysis from drill cores in Texas that the impact event, the tsunami event often associated with the impact, and the KT boundary, are all quite distinct in time, and all are distinct from the changes in microfosils that they think are indicitave of the dinosaurs dying. The article ends with a ridiculous statement that implies birds evolved after the KT event rather than before. Birds are not dinosaurs. Birds survived the KT event. Dinosours did not.
Curiously, they do not discuss how an impact of the type they claim to identify was not associated with a tsunami. Nor is there mention of how the irridium got into the KT boundary layer without an impact.
Whenever you see anyone filling in an area of uncertainty with a trendy, crisis-du-jour explanation, you should be very sceptical. The odds that a major socio-economic/political concern today just happens to be related to a mass extinction in the distant past are extremely low. The odds of scientists (and reporters) letting current concerns bleed into their hypotheses is on the other hand extremely high.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
It's sad that there's a massive following of climate change deniers online. . .
.volcanos eruputing. For decades volcanoes have been well understood to cause global cooling by spreading ash into the high atmosphere which reflects solar radiation.
Look up, "The Year Without a Summer."
It was caused by . .
It's sad there's a massive following of the global warming is going to kill us all promoters online and off, to the extent that they've had to warp everything bad that happens, everytime, everywhere, to the effects of global warming.
Even ice ages fercrisakes.
No, I am not a global warming denier. 12,000 years ago Ireland was just emerging from under a sheet of glacial ice. Now there are palm trees in Kerry. Sea levels have risen about 400 feet. Things have clearly warmed up a bit. You'd have to be a kook to deny that. I'm a global climactic instability insistor. It's always, going up, or down; and sometimes even sideways (large, but local, changes. See the Sahara).
The climate will stop changing when the Sun expands and strips away the atmosphere; and not one minute before.
If this really bothers you go build yourself a biodome out beyond the Heliopause, but good luck controling its climate.
KFG
Every time one of these simple-minded "scientists" proclaims Chicxulub didn't do it, because of "X", it reminds me how badly science suffers from monomania.
It's really not that difficult: the Earth's climate has demonstrated multiple stable (more than a few million years) and metastable states, ranging from snowball to hothouse, with side trips through conditions like our current glacial/interglacial metastate. The rate at which climate state can change, once change begins, is generally faster than species, particularly those embedded in "eco-web", can follow. When the Chicxulub event happened, the global climate state was moved toward a different one which was not conducive to the major fauna of the time, the dinosaurs. It didn't kill everything overnight (except near ground zero), but may have thrown off the timing of mating, reduced the efficiency of some primary plant's life-cycle, or in some other way moved the birth rate of the dinosaurs to below replacement (less efficient animals have fewer reserves and are more vulnerable to disease, for example). Some species and ecosystems may have required a few hundred thousand years to dwindle away, but the impact triggered that particular extinction event. Other events, such as the Permian-Triassic extinction, are more likely to have been caused by vulcanism.
Volcanos cause short term cooling until the ash falls out. Many volcanos erupting together cause longer term warming owing to the higher CO2 concentration.
c ould-be-paid-for-by.html you may want to closely scutinize what
has influenced your opinion here.
s -selling-solar.html
You seem to want the climate to be entirely free from constraints of cause and effect, it can go wherever it wants for no reason at all. This is, I think, what you mean by instability. Climate feedbacks do occur but this is not the same thing as the butterfly effect which makes weather difficult to predict. Climate follows forcing and both the short term aerosols that you cite and the long term GHG balance have definite effects on climate.
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Because this false equating of weather behavior and climate behavior has been a major part of a well funded attempt to decieve the public http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/your-opinion-
Skeptical about global warming? Who cares, you can still save money by switching to solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
If I remember correctly during the age of the dinos the earth was MUCH warmer than today. The O2 content of the atmosphere was also MUCH higher. Also believe it or not the whole asteroid/comet thing killing the dinos off is a theory. Not all of the scientific community is convinced that theory is correct.
Or, not. I think the dead, liquid dinosaurs are the scapegoats. I think people are afraid to admit that its that pesky Sun, on a warming cycle, and volcanic action, there's been a lot, and just plain cycles.
People are afraid to admit it because then it is out of our control, and one thing people really like is to be in control.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Well, that's the polite way of phrasing it. Basically they're just arrogant. They don't understand global warming (or evolution) and they really think that their own seat-of-the-pants assessment is more insightful than that of scientists who make their living analyzing the data. The virulent strain of populism that defines American culture encourages this. Evangelical Christianity encourages this. The media plays into it. The media exists to sell toothpaste and beer, and you don't sell as much toothpaste and beer if your message to viewers is "you don't understand things as well as you think you do, because you lack the education." It's a sad, self-perpetuating situation, but you (and all likeminded people) are stuck in a never-ending cycle of refuting the same claims, again and again and again and...
Let's address this logically:
1) It took several super volcanos going off at the same time and spewing millions upon millions of tons of contaminants into the air to cause the planet to cool. One volcanic eruption occured in Minnesota and dumped nearly 20 feet of ash in locations several hundred miles away. Keep in mind that this our planet, doing what it does and sending us all into a series of ice ages.
2) Given the recovery capacity of the planet, what makes you think your puny a$$ vespa or even my brontosaur vehicle can spew enough crap to cause climatic change?
3) My behemoth puts off emissions that have to be measured in ppm and ppb - thats parts per million and parts per billon. That means you have to have millions and billions of cars to get any kind of a quantity.
4) If all the volcanic eruptions made the planet cool off, isn't it finally getting back to normal now?
5) If you don't agree with any of the above, kindly submit temprature data from the pertinent geological epoch and explain where your themometer was located.
I'm not saying global warming is complete crock, but I don't think that they've proven their case. Seriously, there's no money in everything being fine. When there's money involved, I'd like to see proof.
HDGary secures my bank
Actually, since global warming occurs between every ice-age, regardless of mankind, you can actually THANK global warming for the existence of most of the life on the planet.
Mine is Good
Put those 4 things together and the "science" of climate change has a problem. The problem is simple: scientifically, we cannot use the scientific method to predict change because our best models are not yet scientifically predictive. That's an absolute problem, and it can't be fudged by wishful thinking.
We know many facts --- most of the measurements are not in doubt. The trouble is, we can't add those facts together because the underlying model isn't working even to first order. You HAVE to be able to model major effects like the glaciation cycle before you can be confident that your model is valid for smaller effects like a 1 or 2 degrees C of additional contributory greenhouse heating.
The fact that the vast majority of climatologists believe that we are witnessing unprecedented global warming and that man's outpouring of CO2 is the key factor in it really has no bearing on the above. Science is not about beliefs. And it's not about witnessing diverse effects in the world around us and mentally putting 2 and 2 together. That's not science.
The only thing that's really certain is that we're witnessing an unprecedented rise in CO2 levels, and that the extra CO2 is undoubtedly a contributing factor for any climate change. And that's it. That's all we know. The rest is supposition, and the results from our GCM simulations cannot be accepted as gospel because they are quite severely limited, and do not match history, and we know it.
I'm not actually a skeptic on global warming at all (personally), but I absolutely refuse to attribute to science a prediction that the scientific method cannot currently deliver. It's a matter of scientific integrity.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I'm a skeptic of anything so obviously incorrect, and much of the crud being presented as "research" by both the devotees and naysayers is definitely incorrect. The very little solid work is lost amidst the garbage.
That's why I'm skeptical about most of the claims being made by all the axe-grinders, be they doomsdayers or not.
Personally I think its a bit of both.
We certainly contributed but it was going to happen anyway.
Even better than the wiki is this
I thought there was a recent Slashdot article where profs weren't taking Wikipedia as a reference in term papers because of potential inaccuracies and bias?