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Global Warming 5 Million Years Ago In Antarctic Drastically Raised Sea Levels
An anonymous reader writes "As temperatures rise, scientists continue to worry about the effects of melting Antarctic ice, which threatens to raise sea levels and swamp coastal communities. This event, though, isn't unprecedented. Researchers have uncovered evidence that reveals global warming five million years ago may have caused parts of Antarctica's ice sheets to melt, causing sea levels to rise by about 20 meters."
Surely Allah caused a flood only 7000 years ago. It says so in Gilgamesh XI 700 BCC
3E51A207
It is well known that sea levels have been going up and down throughout the ages. The question now is whether or not we are acelerating these variations and whether life can adapt to them fast enough.
Aaaaarrghhh!! I'm SCARED!!!!
Or, we COULD say "Middle Miocene ice age 15 million years ago drastically lowered temperatures, lowered sea level 20m" as well, couldn't we?
Then it warmed, and melted, and sea levels rose. (The subject of the OP.)
Then it froze again, and sea levels dropped, since the last ice age ended only about 11,000 yrs ago.
It's almost like this shit is cyclic.
-Styopa
That was a long time before the bronze age.. Nobody was burning fossil fuels and dumping CO2 into the air. SO.... How does something like this happen? Can you believe there is some kind of natural process that we don't yet understand going on?
Problem with all of this is that if the process cycles are in the millions of years, it's going to be impossible to really know if your models are accurate because you only have a few thousand years of recorded history to validate your models with. Plus, you don't know if the system has been disturbed by some outside forces, say a meteor strike (think meteor crater) or volcanic eruption.
Interesting evidence guys, please keep looking into this..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Has anyone identified the high water mark? Apparently the continental shelf indicates the low mark - with all that extra land mass. This whole thing is cyclic, and we should not be surprised that it was a bad idea to build huge cities along the coastline of today. OK maybe surprised, but lets not pretend we can stop it.
Good thing our warming stopped.
Only 11,000 years ago or so sea levels rose by more than 100 meters worldwide, you don't have to go back millions. Our ancestors were alive and well around the world and saw it happen.
I often thinks of neolithic climatologists sitting around saying that they've learned that due to global warming the seas will rise by 100 meters, wiping out 100,000,000 square kilometers of prime land around the seacoasts, many large animals such as mammoths will be completely wiped out, surely the end of the world is coming and the human race will be wiped out... Makes our current concerns about a degree or two here or there look pretty wimpy, doesn't it?
How many thousands of years did it take for that warming... the equivalent of *one* century? But no, zillions of barrels of oil and coal, burned, can't *possibly* affect the whole world's climate, no, no....
mark
Global warming ... in Antarctica
Which is it?
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Can we finally admit that, yes, global warming is happening and, no, humans are not likely the cause?
Eh, who am I kidding, there are book deals to be made, movie franchises to be had and sanctimonious egos to be pumped!
Obviously this was our fault, and we just didn't learn our lesson the first time.
See, humans discovered fire about 5MYA, and used it extensively. The resulting, unexpected shock to the ecosystem threw Al Gore's predecessors for a loop and they could not react in time with a comprehensive set of punitive and financially devastating policies that of course affected everyone but themselves.
Those in Rich countries will be fine. Coastal cities will move inland to higher ground. The 80% of humanity that currently live in coastal regions around the world stand to lose the most, as most will not be insured when disasters strike (increasingly severe weather events). The problems of man-made climate change can be solved and mitigated by our governments, but we the people need to empower them to think long term. We need mega projects, Geo-engineering, adopt fuel efficient buildings and vehicles.
causing sea levels to rise by about 20 meters.
According to Wikipedia, the elevation of my town is 329 m. Thank god, for a second I thought I had something to worry about...
Before anyone smugly proclaims that this proves humans aren't responsible for climate change, remember that it's possible for some phenomenon to have multiple causes. It's entirely possible for there to be both natural and man-made causes for variations in climate. Giving examples of natural causes doesn't do anything to weaken the argument against anthropogenic climate change in this epoch.
If climate change is currently man-made, or partially man-made, or being made worse by human activity, then it's still worth bending every effort to slow or reverse it.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
It's been repeatedly. proven. that climate change is not caused by the actions of man
According to IPCC's WORST-CASE estimates (from which they have recently backed off), sea levels were not projected to rise by more than about a meter over the next 100 years.
I daresay we can adapt fast enough to that.
corporations
Whoa! We're going to cite corporations now to make our arguments? On slashdot?
Climate politics are amazing.
A quick review of cities in the US at or around sea level where 20M rise would be a disaster include...
LA, SF, SD, SJ, Portland, Seattle, Honolulu, Houston, Miami, Jacksonville, DC, Baltimore, Phili, Newark, Boston. That is probably about 1/2 the US population. Insurance even if you have it will not be useful, the companies will default. Insurance is for sharing risk. If 50% of your policy owners experience disaster, the company will not have the resources to pay it out. Life will certainly adapt, but probably in a Mad Max kind of way. Although I am not sure I buy the 20M number by 2100. That implies close to 6in/year and we are running closer to 1in/year. Obviously the faster the rise the more difficult to adapt. Although faster might cause us to abandon places like New Orleans instead of moating it like the netherlands does.
therefore humans are not likely the cause?
So next time, just chuck that cigarette butt out the window in the Colorado desert.
As temperatures rise
Temperature isn't rising.
scientists continue to worry about the effects of melting Antarctic ice
Scientists are presently worried about the credibility of their models, because reality has failed to comply.
See what happens when dinosaurs industrialize and drive cars!
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Look up the facts behind your "98%". That is actually only 75 out of over 10000 people in a survey. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/18/about-that-overwhelming-98-number-of-scientists-consensus/
Almost all life on earth (by biomass, or by number of individuals) is made up of single celled stuff living miles underground. It will be fine, mostly. Sure, we may lose some of the generic diversity and ecosystem complexity, but thats happened before. Life will be fine: life is very adaptive when you apply wide spread lethal selective force. The diversity will be decreased during the process, but it only takes a several million years to recover most of that.
The real question is how will the subset of life we are about do? Lots of people like to try and preserve native habitats which becomes a joke when the climate changes. The highly dependent higher order life forms and ecosystems will likely suffer the most. That includes almost everything most people think about then they consider life (people, most animals, large plants etc). We will likely continue to lose a lot of those over the next century. Because the change is so fast, the losses will greatly outpace the recovery and stabilization.
We may see wide spread invasive species, which effectively become mono-cultures and are thus vulnerable to wide spread pests and plagues. We are already seeing this, and it would happen to some extend due to our globalization even without climate change. This is bad, but there are worse threats.
What worries me is the population of humans. Since it naturally expands to the brink of what we can support, its always on the verge of collapse. If you shift the environment a bit, which places can support which amounts of people change, which means people will have to move (or die). There also tends to not be excess capacity to deal with things like plagues, heat waves, crop failures etc. if the exceed the norms. In the US every major natural disaster becomes a charity event because we don't have a system for handling them. This is the real problem, and its something that we could (but never will) fix.
So what I'm seeing is that the climate has never been stable but in fact been in flux long before man had a measurable impact on the scene.
Seems to me then that if the choice is between global warming and global cooling, I'll take global warming. Thank you for you time.
The paper is about the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet, not about sea levels.
There are no socioeconomic problems that can't be solved by a good 20 meter rise in the sea level.
Have gnu, will travel.
What moron marks this bs 'Insightful'?
40 years ago we were going into a deep freeze according to our climate "scientists"
So you've only got 30-40 years to explain the sudden reversal in terms of human behavior.
You don't have the whole of the industrial age because our course has recently reversed according to climate "scientists."
Work Safe Porn
Did you mean 'man is THE ONLY possible cause for a gloval wearing'?
I have gloves, when I wear them I do feel a certain amount of warming, so I guess you're good.
Never mind.
No brain, no pain.
Please explain why you are sure that the cessation of the ice age, with an accompanying moderation in temperature, is not what permitted human agriculture -- and not the reverse. Please describe an experiment to falsify your premise.
It's all the fault of those damn white American male Republicans. They are the ones responsible. They cause that global warming five million years ago and now they're doing it again!
I am betting the berths for those tankers were not designed for water thats 20m higher than it is now. People shrug their shoulders and say, who cares if Marthas Vineyard drowns? But we do not have the infrastructure in place to keep anything working if the sea levels rise.
That was nicely done.
Climatologists generally agree the natural trend was (relatively slowly) taking us into another ice age. I think this means the overall natural contribution to global warming is less than zero.
What is also unnatural is the rate of warming, which appears to be orders of magnitude faster than anything since the dinosaurs were wiped out (not counting smaller variations less than 2C).
People need to remember that sea levels have risen about 130m in just the last 20000 years (and go up and down by that amount about every 100000 years).
The article makes an interesting point, namely that there may be some additional sea level rise if temperatures go up again, but that's always been expected.
"I tell you what it is. It's your quote un-quote pollution control. I heard on talk radio you don't even need 'em. It's just the latest nazi government plot. Open your eyes, man, they're trying to control Global Warming. Get it Global. That's U.N. Commissars code for telling us what the temperature is gonna be in our outdoors. Let it warm up I say. See what Butchros Butchros Ghali Ghali thinks of that. We'll grow oranges in Alaska." - Dale Gribble
(null)
Dinosaur flatulence.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
In other words, the only reason it isn't 100% is that there are two idiots out there.
Funny that I knew that the most simplistic, mindless interpretation of the info in this article would be put forth by deniers. But it moves into the realm of sadness that it would be comment 1 & 2.
Ain't this what we call acceleration ?
They were there!
I am betting the berths for those tankers were not designed for water thats 20m higher than it is now. People shrug their shoulders and say, who cares if Marthas Vineyard drowns? But we do not have the infrastructure in place to keep anything working if the sea levels rise.
If it's going to take 100 years for a 1 meter rise, your 20 meter higher FUD is 2,000 fucking years away! Do you really think that any tanker berth built now or in the next 100 years will still be around in 2,000 years?
Do you not think that it is HIGHLY more likely that 50 year old terminals will be retired/destroyed and rebuilt in another location (because they have outlived their useful life) or, if in the same location, higher if needed for the next 50 years? Seriously! You are the precise type of ALARMIST that the so called "deniers" rail against.
20 meters sea level rise is over 2,000 years away, WORST CASE scenario. Your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandchildren's tanker berths will be just fine!
What fucking infrastructure do you know survives 2,000 years? Pharaoh should have listened to the soothsayers, the rising tide of sand will destroy the world!
Those would be jokes sir.
deniers
Get bent.
Knowing that there was warming so long ago pushes back the horizon in a set of political values we had formerly thought of as being much more recent. The researchers are now looking for supporting evidence, such as golf courses, tax cuts and municipal bond portfolios, from the period.
That if the antarctic ice sheets melted enough, there's a good chance that they'd break off and slide into the ocean and create a huge tidal wave? Nothing will adapt to such an instant catastrophe...except life that's at a high elevation.
That's what drives OUR cars.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
You're right, the "look a bird" tactic didn't work and we all still stared at the elephant.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
No current GCM can predict the cycle of glaciations given our orbital parameters as inputs. At best we can produce correlations, but those don't tell us anything about the physics.
Climatology is in far too primitive a state to achieve that at this time, and we don't even have a proper theory of cloud formation, let alone a theory of biotic circulation which strongly mediates the carbon cycle which is harder still. Early days.
We should have prepared 5 million years ago.
We're in the midst of the 6th mass extinction of biodiversity, but unlike the first 5 which had discernibly finite rates of loss, the current extinction is a vertical drop in the curve, effectively infinite rate of loss from the perspective of geological time.
As biodiversity plummets towards zero, at some unknowable point the biosphere will reach its tipping point, and the whole house of cards will collapse because the species are all interdependent.
When the biosphere dies, we die, so optimism isn't really justified.
This has nothing to do with global warming. It's caused by our idiotic "civilization" that has no interest in being friendly to nature.
so what did they use the drive their cars
?
If "adapting" means "build a 1m seawall around New York", then sure, just as soon as people stop arguing. It's not going to happen around every coastal city & town in the US though, so that's a massive cost to relocate all those prime coastal buildings and infrastructure. But the real damage comes from occasional storm surges like Hurricane Sandy; add 1m to that and half the city would be flooded. And of course, strong storms like that will also get more common.
Then there's the developing world; no seawalls for them. Saltwater surges ruin essential cropland and will displace millions in places like Bangladesh, creating a flood of starving refugees and political turmoil. Some island nations are already becoming unviable (q.f. Tuvalu).
Yes, we can and will adapt. But it's sure as hell going to cost a freaking bundle to do so - and the price will be in human suffering for countries that can't afford the dollars. Far cheaper to mitigate the changes ASAP, as the costs are rising every year we delay.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Solar, but tire manufacturing was much the same. In the end they had to get too close to the tar pits for petroleum....
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
If it runs out of patience, it'll be ruthless.
Casteism
As a geologist who studies paleoclimate, and has observed the evidence of past climate change, including sudden climate change in the rock record (something we call sequence stratigraphy) I find this entire discussion on slashdot a little like listening to a couple of geologists debating Windows 7 versus Windows 8. None of you know what the fuck you are talking about.
The article abstract doesn't reveal how sudden the sea (eustatic) level change was, only dating it to a wide interval of time. Other research on more recent climate change gives time scales of decades to a couple of centuries of large change. 5 MYA Pliocene geography was different than now. The land bridge connecting North and South America hadn't fully formed yet and so the warm equatorial current could get into the Eastern Pacific. The dynamics of cooling would be different although the layout of continents was well on its way to cooling the global climate overall. 20 M or about 60 feet of sudden eustatic sea level rise would drown most cities on the coasts of the world. If this happens suddenly, within a couple of decades, the effects would be very hard on us.
NOPE! With 7 of 8 bankrupt financial institutions in the housing crisis NOT having been banks, it is well demonstrated that it was LACK of regulation, specifically failure to outlaw derivative bundling of debt (Goldman Sachs prospectus noted the safety of the bundles, since government would never allow wholesale collapse of the market) which made house loans a zero risk - infinite profit engine of speculation. The problem, as usual, was the idiotic idea that the "worst of people, acting for the worst of reasons, will somehow do the best for everyone".
Like Communism, the failures of Capitalism are due to human greed.
In the '70s, scientists said another ice age was imminent, but it never happened. Man has always wanted to control the climate. Praying didn't work. Sacrificing virgins (when you could still find some) didn't work. Maybe paying scientists lots of money to research the problem and first tell us climate change is unprecedented (at least within the last couple hundred years) and then tell us this has happened before is a good use of public funds.....NOT.