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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.
Ironically, the dinosaurs are playing a leading role in our own Global Warming Saga.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
The most plausible work I've seen on the subject is based on Durda & Kring's recent work on giant impacts and heat of re-entry. Based on the size of the Chixculub (sp?) impact crater, they concluded that the heat of re-entering rock on ballistic trajectories would have heated almost the entire atmosphere to incandescence. This is global warming of a sort, I suppose.
I've seen talks by archaeobiologists who assert that the dinosaurs were simply broiled by the heat coming from the atmosphere. That theory nicely explains why small, burrowing creatures suddenly took off and why the seas weren't as strongly affected by the land: anything small enough to hide in a burrow, or agile enough to swim deep underwater for a few days survived (at least in numbers large enough to propagate); everything else was cooked. 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.
Disclaimer: I am not a paleontologist, I'm only an astrophysicist.
Obviously, the government needs to enforce reductions in volcanic emissions. In order to save our planet, we need to progress toward the use of more environmentally-friendly natural disasters.
"The findings suggest that global cooling led to a sea level drop from about 80 m to 30 m that apparently was more detrimental to foraminifera than was the Chicxulub impact, which occurred during the preceding warming." Maybe I'm missing something but I always thought the meteorite caused a lot of dust which obscured the sun and led to global cooling. That's what also happens with a volcano. So the Slashdot article says one thing but the article it cites says another. Hmm.
Nah. Everybody knows the real reason they died out.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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
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...
A professor of mine once pointed out something very interesting about the Indian volcano theory for the extinction of the dinosaurs. The Indian subcontinent was, 65 million years ago, more or less on the exact opposite side of the Earth from what would eventually become the Yucatan Peninsula. Remember that the Earth is really like a huge ball of liquid, molten rock (the mantle) with a thin crust of solidified material on the outside. What happens when you flick a water balloon really hard with your finger, but don't break it? The force of the blow causes waves to radiate throughout the water from the point of impact in all directions, and dissipates against the inside of the balloon. The point of strongest force for these waves will be on the direct opposite side of the balloon from the point of impact, which bubbles out briefly before returning to place.
On a global scale, a massive meteor impact would actually cause massive and very sudden volcanic eruptions on the opposite side of the Earth as it causes a wave of magma to concentrate on one very small spot.
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