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Study Suggests Weather and Not Hunting Killed Off Wooly Mammoths
Big Hairy Ian writes, quoting the BBC: "A DNA analysis shows that the number of creatures began to decrease much earlier than previously thought as the world's climate changed. It also shows that there was a distinct population of mammoth in Europe that died out around 30,000 years ago. ... Dr Dalen worked with researchers in London to analyse DNA samples from 300 specimens from woolly mammoths collected by themselves and other groups in earlier studies ... [The researchers] speculate that it was so cold that the grass on which they fed became scarce. The decline was spurred on as the Ice Age ended, possibly because the grassland on which the creatures thrived was replaced by forests in the south and tundra in the north."
Scientist keep changing their mind on things! It's big science that's supporting research that shows that AGW is not the root of all evil! Wait, no.... it's liberal academics who are polluting our childrens's minds with nonsense like wholly mammoths not being hunted to extinction by savage humans!
I'm confused. Someone please point me to the right meme I'm supposed to employ against evil scientists here. Help me, Bill O'Reilly!
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
We all know they died in Noah's Flood.
"Don't worry about the mammoth numbers, I'm sure they'll adapt to the changing weather. Mammoths have been around a very long time you know."
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Or you know, the scientific method was used that refines theories, based on new evidence.
Maybe we should be like you, where we know that there's no human-induced climate change because we ignore the unprecedented rate of change in temperature over the past 2 centuries, and keep all our understanding exactly the same as when we were born.
Look, who's the bigger villain, humans with their penchant for turning anything that moves or doesn't move into a ___burger or climate change that is the current boogeyman?
Who knows? Let's face it, any number of factors from volcanoes to natural predators to climate change to caveman barbeques all likely shared guilt. The world isn't black and white and people need to stop thinking of everything as having a singular one dimensional true answer.
The liberals will argue the opposite, and use this just as another reason why guns are bad.
It was all them blasted cavemen with their fancy fires that caused it!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
So, you were never taught about "Ice Ages" in school?
Hey, whatever happened to nuclear apocalypse--radiation/nuclear winter/etc.? Anyone remember that one back in the 80's?
Did you somehow miss the whole Fukushima thing?
which is totally what she said
Humans killed off the dinosaours by hunting, why not the big elephants with tusks?
Weather kills all that lives there.
Have you seen the size of those things? They must have driven *HUGE* SUVs. No wonder climate change wiped them out.
This story is relatively old, isn't it?
http://evolve.zoo.ox.ac.uk/evolve/Oliver_Pybus_files/bisonMedia.pdf
And exactly where do you see them doing this?
Citation?
I'm waiting.
I'm still waiting.
Since climate change only happens because of human activity it's still our fault, right?
Their insatiable drive for 24/7 dishwashers eliminated the mammoth's ability to reproduce.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Wasn't the BBC the one who said we'd be ice-free by 2013?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Global Humidification
Seriously, ever wear a sweater on a hot, humid day? It'll kill ya!
or make you wish you was dead
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Did you somehow miss the whole Fukushima thing?
Ah, that's weak tea. A true 1983-style nuclear apocalypse has to have mutants on dune-buggies and wastelands (or at least bombed-out cities with lots of skulls laying around).
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
So, you were never taught about "Ice Ages" in school?
What, are we're talking about 3500 BCE, when Noah was chillin' with dinosaurs?
I am officially gone from
Can we not contribute to the confusion between climate and weather, please? I mean, we're mostly technically literate people here and can appreciate the need to stick to agreed-upon definitions of words, right?
Words have meaning.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Hey, whatever happened to nuclear apocalypse--radiation/nuclear winter/etc.? Anyone remember that one back in the 80's? Man, I'm old.
The parachute pants and narrow ties didn't disappear. The Russians and the USA still have huge stockpiles, and it should still concern you. You should also be worried about their nuclear weapons.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
your an idot
The BBC News version is pretty damn confusing.
""The picture that seems to be emerging is that they were a fairly dynamic species that went through local extinctions, expansions and migrations. It is quite exciting that so much was going on," he told BBC News."
The idea that they were a dynamic and occasionally migratory species, yet died out because they couldn't find GRASS seems a little odd. I mean, it's not like the last Ice Age ENTIRELY covered the planet with glaciers.
"They found that the species nearly went extinct 120,000 years ago when the world warmed up for a while. Numbers are thought to have dropped from several million to tens of thousands but numbers recovered as the planet entered another ice age."
So wait, I thought the theory was that they couldn't find food due to climate change? They almost went extinct when the climate warmed UP? Remember, we're talking about a climate SUBSTANTIALLY colder than today, with sea levels 120m or more below today's levels. The "warming" was to levels still quite a bit cooler than today....and grass is pretty common?
"The researchers also found that the decline that led to their eventual extinction began 20,000 years ago when the Ice Age was at its height, rather than 14,000 years ago when the world began to warm again as previously thought.
They speculate that it was so cold that the grass on which they fed became scarce. The decline was spurred on as the Ice Age ended, possibly because the grassland on which the creatures thrived was replaced by forests in the south and tundra in the north."
"But from about 20,000 years ago onwards, the population started the dramatic decline that led to its extinction, first on the mainland about 10,000 years ago, and finally on some outlying Arctic islands. The pattern seems to fit forcing by natural climate change: any role of humans in the process has yet to be demonstrated".'
This pattern fits no such thing. Maximum glaciation was reached about 22,000 years ago. Thus the mammoth population started its dramatic decline shortly after WARMING began. Now, granted, it's possible this was an inertial effect, the way it gets coldest in the morning as the sun is coming up, but the fact that the bulk of their decline was only 10,000 years ago (when the climate had significantly warmed and grasses were again widespread), their last remnants (that we know of) were on ARCTIC islands (why would they have gone North?), are both far better fits to the "human success killed them off" theories.
Frankly, this all sounds like bollocks to me, unless your sole goal was to try to spread more FUD that "warming" - of any kind, in any context, and from any start point - is "bad"...and that would be somewhere between politics and religion, not science.
-Styopa
Fortunately we didn't yet have a nuclear war to test those predictions.
Perhaps the Mammoths were too preoccupied trying to "save the earth" when it was themselves that needed saving!
your an idot
Yuo two
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Good news for hunters! By not hunting, you are actually contributing to a species demise!
Pull the trigger that makes you man...
Mammoth-type animals have actually appeared and gone extinct not once, but at about once every ice-age cycle.
That blew my mind when I heard it the first time.
That the last type the mammoths would have gone extinct because of climate change does not seem very far-fetched then, now does it.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
"If we cannot have perfect knowledge, we can't have any knowledge, and I'm an intellectually lazy snob"
All I could get out of what you posted..
You have to separate facts from culture. You have a nice menu of extintion causes to choose from, but culture have other priorities, Dinosaurs are still named antediluvian (from before the flood) or prehistoric (before written history) animals, no matter what killed them. Some of what you said are still potential extintion causes, i.e. for diseases, we have as precedent the black death that killed from 30 to 60% of the population in europe, overpopulation is a ticking bomb, but will not mean extintion, "just" a lot of deaths, and regarding nuclear apocalypse is a pending threat too (the country that had in account most wars and alikes in recent history have still the biggest nuclear arsenal).
Regarding climate change, it definately causes the extintion of species, i.e. an ice age kills species that depends on warm/hot climates, and happened a lot of them in earth history. But about the asteroid that "caused" the extintion of dinosaurs, is not that it hit in the head in each dinosaur, between other effects, it made the global temperature drop, that was one of the factors that contributed to a mass extintion. We got already hit by supervolcanos, the Toba eruption 70k years ago almost wiped mankind, but what killed us wasn't directly the eruption, but the global cooling that came after.
The current cultural problem regarding climate change is that this time wasnt a supervolcano or an asteroid the one that is causing the climate change and all its possible consequences, but us. And while the main factors contributing to it keep actively denying that is happening, it will keep increasing.
So what do you suggest? No one discus science or perform studies because there's a good chance in the future more information will come to light?
Let me suggest some reading for you: Relativity of wrong.
tl;dr :
... when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
Or you know, the scientific method was used that refines theories, based on new evidence.
Maybe we should be like you, where we know that there's no human-induced climate change because we ignore the unprecedented rate of change in temperature over the past 2 centuries, and keep all our understanding exactly the same as when we were born.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/noaa_gisp2_icecore_anim_hi-def3.gif
Or we can be like you and keep perpetuating memes about "unprecedented rates of change" and pretend there has never been any change in the climate before the evil humans and their "machinez" came along.
It's estimated that Homo Sapiens has been on this planet for around 200K years. This graph shows temperatures for the last 3/4 of a million years. Notice that it was warmer 110K years ago than it is now? So this isn't even "unprecedented" during our time on this planet, let alone before our ancestors climbed down from the trees.
Seriously, we all need to do (a lot) more to avoid poisoning ourselves. Yes the planet is warming. Yes we are contributing to it. Yes we need to work toward ways to mitigate this. The planet has been here for 4.5 billion years. I find it a little disingenuous to look at the temperatures from the last 1500 years and claim the sky is falling.
Words have meaning.
We live in a society here!
Hey, whatever happened to nuclear apocalypse--radiation/nuclear winter/etc.? Anyone remember that one back in the 80's? Man, I'm old.
In case you didn't notice WWIII didn't come (yet) so tens of thousands of nuclear warheads didn't explode all over the world whirling up tons of dust into the atmosphere causing a massive global drop in temperature. The only reason nobody talks about it today is because a full scale nuclear confrontation seems so unlikely, we're still more than capable.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Or you know, the scientific method was used that refines theories, based on new evidence.
How is this the scientific method? Where are the controlled, repeatable experiments?
This is mostly a bunch of speculation, with the trappings of science draped over it.
There are a host of things that can reasonably be called "controlled repeatable experiments" within the theory of human induced climate change. You're going to have to narrow down which specific hypothesis you're "concerned" with in the greater theory for me to address you query with an answer more specific than "you're wrong".
Actually, had our ancestors been driving all of those SUVs, the mammoths might still be with us---assuming they aren't too tasty.
So new evidence is that climate change and not human encroachment caused the extinction of a species 30,000 years ago?
Suck it, deniers.
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In school there was something called "The Ice Age" which we were told was some point in time before civilization when the entire earth was a huge ball of ice, after the dinosaurs died.
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Funny that you think the scientific method was used in relation to explaining ice ages and global warming/cooling... Historical sciences are guesses at best and typically have very little to do with the scientific method. This is why they are overturned often and in massive ways. The "faith" that people have put into global warming based on only history and computer models is staggering. And the zeal with which they have attacked anyone who disagrees smacks of burning people at the stake for believing in a round earth. It's closer to politics or religion than science, because a true scientist doesn't care if other people agree with his "side". In a true science, the facts will do that for them.
Of course, now we know that instead of their being no ice in 2013 (as predicted), there is actually so much ice that 20 ships are trapped in the arctic and most of the shipping lines are completely blocked. On the past 2 seasons of Deadliest Catch, they had to go home and take a break for a few weeks because the entire sea was full of ice, the most in 30-40 years.
This stuff is way more complicated than most people think and we are in the early stages of understanding it. To treat anyone as an idiot for having a difference of opinion at this early stage is just mind-blowing. And as for "unprecedented rate of change of temperature"? I don't think .5 degrees over 100 years is that big of a deal, especially when I question the accuracy being good enough to catch half a degree 100 years ago.
Climate changes. With or without man. We see a "fertile crescent" in Iraq that now looks like a massive desert (because they cut down all the trees). We see a California which was a desert which is now Mediterranean (because of man planting lots of trees). We see flash frozen mammoths (and don't know why). We know the earth has recovered from an ice age in the past, so it's pretty darn resilient.
The bottom line is you are right. We should do our best to keep learning because we really don't understand this stuff yet. But vilifying people that disagree and trying to stifle their funding and ruin their careers hampers that effort significantly. And that's what the GP was lamenting.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
It is said that ice ages caused the extinction of north america's earth worms, and the re-introduction of european nightcrawlers is destroying our forests by causing a change in the topsoil chemistry.
I say scientists are dumb. Okay, so some worms will till the soil, the nitrogen balance changes, leaves decay faster. These large shifts will impact how seedlings grow and thrive; over time, new seedlings which thrive better in an ecosystem with earthworms will outcompete the ones that take best to a worm-free system. Give it a few hundred years and the forests will change over--not suddenly and catastrophically collapse.
Scientists aren't even arguing that forests will collapse or mass extinctions will occur; I've seen arguments like "We need to slow the progression and spread of worms to keep some areas as they are, because there's some inherent value in that." Inherent value? A non-important ecological evolution and you want to lock that shit down and freeze state to as-it-is-now? You're arguing that growth and adaptation are not value; stagnation and stasis are value. Stagnation and stasis in the biosphere will weaken it and expose it to greater risk of failure under stress!
Humans fear change. Extinction of a species of which there are 30 alive on the planet and have been at most 250 alive on the planet in the past 500 years and they do nothing except nibble on some leaves of no plant in particular would be seen as a devastating catastrophe.
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Right. Weather is a day-to-day phenomenon which could be hot, cool, trend up or down. Climate is something entirely different and unrelated to weather. Its a thing we have to take on faith that we are damaging beyond repair even when weather trends the other way.
Have gnu, will travel.
Changing climates is a bitch for any species, no matter the rate. Evolution is a hash mistress and you get genes that adapt you really well to one circumstance, and when things change, the generalist k-selected species like cockroaches, algae, and e-coli kick your ass.
It's a little disingenuous to say that's similar to what's happening now. Human concerns are for relatively small temperature changes over REALLY REALLY REALLY short amounts of time, that threaten the stable conditions the agro-economies of the world are currently built on, not the continued existence of species.
Funny that you think the scientific method was used in relation to explaining ice ages and global warming/cooling... Historical sciences are guesses at best and typically have very little to do with the scientific method. This is why they are overturned often and in massive ways. The "faith" that people have put into global warming based on only history and computer models is staggering. And the zeal with which they have attacked anyone who disagrees smacks of burning people at the stake for believing in a round earth. It's closer to politics or religion than science, because a true scientist doesn't care if other people agree with his "side". In a true science, the facts will do that for them.
Yeah, we totally don't use science to understand things that already happened, like how the Sun formed, or how life operates, without directly observing those processes.
No wait, those are very well understood concepts in astronomy and biology, and you're a misguided idiot for pretending that science always happens in a test-tube.
Besides making things up, do you have anything to contribute?
The charts show an average change of some 0.2 degrees kelvin deviation from mean over decades, so yeah. Relatively small temperature changes.
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You have to understand, that's fast geologically speaking. It's not a lot but the time span in question is really damn short.
Scientists (in average, at least) are not dumb, but their knowledge is limited. Probably the current ecosystem is not fully understood (at least, going to microbes and even lower levels), and so how fragile is or at least how easy is to go from one ecosystem to a different another is not (fully?) known. But the problem with ecosystem is that we are part of it, most of what we depend on is part of it too. Introducing big changes won't kill all life probably, life eventually adapts, if changes are not too fast, but will the new environment be friendly with us?
Maybe is a bias, but i prefer to follow advice form people that know something on the topic, based on evidence, information gathering, and experimentation, and admit that that knowledge is far from complete, over the advice of people that think that they know everything, based on hints, prejudices and ridged information. The second kind could get random hits, but i prefer to play with loaded dices.
Seriously, we all need to do (a lot) more to avoid poisoning ourselves. Yes the planet is warming. Yes we are contributing to it. Yes we need to work toward ways to mitigate this. The planet has been here for 4.5 billion years. I find it a little disingenuous to look at the temperatures from the last 1500 years and claim the sky is falling.
They sky isn't falling but the roof is getting pretty leaky. The difference between a couple of thousand proto humans chasing herbivores off cliffs a couple of thousand years ago and 7 billion of the annoying creatures burning anything they can get their paws on is ecologically profound.
The planet will be here long after we're gone. But at the rate we're going it's likely that the entire human experience will be a narrow band of sediment trapped inside an alien archeologist's core sample.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Global warming is the source of all problems according to the BBC. Our selfish behavior today can be directly linked back to killing the Wooly Mammoths 30,000 years ago, dontcha know.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
You conflate 'scientists' with small groups of people interested in one aspect off an enormous topic.
"Science" does not have an opinion on what reintroduction off burrowing worms on the NA continent will do. Some people researching the field may have some observations and possibly opinions about the desirability or lack thereof of a particular issue, but that isn't some giant statist conspiracy that you're trying to make it into.
And yes, you CAN make the argument that 'slowing down' or avoiding changes might be beneficial - those arguments may or may not be true (or relevant in the long run) but they are reasonable and important items of discussion. You are unsuccessfully trying to toss any concerns about environmental change into the tree hugger basket. Sorry, the basket isn't big enough. Yes, at times we have to embrace change but when you have several billion people living at the ragged edge of existence you might want to look very carefully at what the changes are likely to be and what we might do to avoid them.
Some of those billions of people might end up being interested in your breakfast.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Actually I was paraphrasing the "I think there's some inherent value" quote from an actual researcher whose only reason for wanting to stop the spread of earthworms was that keeping things the way they are is inherently valuable in some unqualified way. He never claimed there would be catastrophic collapse; that's separate, a lot of researchers are saying that the forests may eventually be destroyed by worms changing the nutrient cycle by causing faster consumption of nitrogen resources and integration into the soil, and it's a very vacant and poorly-thought-out position.
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The difference between a couple of thousand proto humans chasing herbivores off cliffs a couple of thousand years ago and 7 billion of the annoying creatures burning anything they can get their paws on is ecologically profound.
These weren't proto-humans. If you want to talk about that far back, then we need to look at the past 6 million years as opposed to more relevant graph for the last seven-hundred-fifty-thousand. It's estimated (as I previously stated) that homo sapiens has been on this planet for the last 200K years. We were certainly still here 110K years ago when it was even hotter. If you look at that last graph you'll also notice that there was a serious decrease in the human population during a colder period around the time of the Toba super-eruption. At that time the human race was reduced to somewhere between 3K to 10K. The population was significantly more than that during the last warm period.
The point is, is that 110K years ago, humans were not the cause of the warming, and yet is was even more significant that what is occurring now. So it is not unprecedented.
The planet will be here long after we're gone. But at the rate we're going it's likely that the entire human experience will be a narrow band of sediment trapped inside an alien archeologist's core sample.
No doubt. and the ancestors of the cockroach will probably be burning our remains the same way we are the dinosaurs.
I'm not disputing that we need to mitigate the damage we are causing. Because we certainly should have started some time ago. I'm simply saying we need to dial back the BS. It's not helping. In fact, I think it's having the opposite effect. I remember the oil crisis in the 70's. Doomsayers were screaming that we were going to run out of oil in 10 or 20 years. Cars became better and more efficient. But then when 20 years past and oil production steadily increased and more oil than was even though existed was found, the general public lost interest. Then Americans started driving around in Hummers and all kinds of aircraft carrier sized vehicles. They basically got numb to the fear of oil running out. At least until the price of gas rose sharply a few years back. People become complacent when you bombard them with apocalyptic predictions that don't come true repeatedly. I fear that we are seeing more of this as time passes.
I didn't post that.
Oliver Pybus
It's not the change that's worrisome, it's the RATE of change that is. Change happens, always has. Climate takes millenia to change, it took thousands of years for the glaciers to retreat, for example. We're changing it measurably in decades, and noticeably in centuries. That's what's unprecedented.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
The experiment is to examine mammoth remains from diverse areas, to inspect the remains of the ecosystem, to look at the changes in isotopic take-up (a way to measure long-term temperature change) of organisms. If the findings are consistent across multiple you have your repeatable experiment. Just because something can't be done in a test tube doesn't mean it's not an experiment.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
You're replying to bluefoxlucid, he won't understand.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I... what? I was just clarifying a point, one I don't even thing he contradicted, and nothing in the immediate post history I can see implies any sort of unreasonable intransigence.
I've seen a number of viable, competing theories about why the Mammoths died out, but for whatever reason, people tend to ignore the obvious, they might all have had a hand in it.
and can drive extinctions? Wait, I'm confused, I thought humans caused climate change.because, you know, theres no way that todays climate change can be natural.....
It's estimated that Homo Sapiens has been on this planet for around 200K years. This graph shows temperatures for the last 3/4 of a million years. Notice that it was warmer 110K years ago than it is now? So this isn't even "unprecedented" during our time on this planet, let alone before our ancestors climbed down from the trees.
Love the way that graph has such thick lines you can barely read it... And judging by the hysterical captions, it looks like this is a "temperature rise always causes CO2 rise" meme. Those of us in the reality-based community understand that this historical sequence has a physical cause (Milankovich cycles) and don't take it as an absolute rule that prevents CO2 emissions from causing temperature rises...
Anyway, notice that yellow chunk at the far right? That is the development of agriculture. Notice how it is much lower than the 100Kya bump you are so proud of? Now imagine if we push global temperature (or Antarctic temperature, which is what your graph actually shows) up to that level. How well do you think our food supply is going to handle that?
Oh, but we can fix these problems with technology! Sure, that is working so well in Syria, where the underlying cause of the conflict is idiotic government responses to a long term drought. If we start shifting rainfall around by heating up the planet, do you think the responses will be any better in other locations? The Pentagon is betting not.
So yeah, the planet will survive and so might the species, but civilisation may not.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
a) Historical sciences do in fact use the scientific method: make observations-> make theories-> make more observations-> refine theories.
b) Climate science is not at an early stage. A few of the predictions were slightly off, but that just means refining the parameters a little, not throwing out the whole model.
I looked up the "no ice in 2013" you mentioned, it's here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7139797.stm. Notice that the actual estimates aren't predicting no ice until 2030 or 2040. We may be reversing the trend this year, but the longer trend is still towards less ice.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
I submit that populations dying out LONG ago have damn all to do with populations dying out NOT so long ago.
Unless the newer ones tripped over the bones of the older ones and broke their necks.
North America still had plenty of mammoths running around, healthy as clams, 4500, 3000, even 1500 years ago. The continent was warming up then, not chilling down.
The change in temperature from the height of the last glaciation (around 25,000 years ago) to the Holocene is only about +4 Kelvins. The difference between the height of the Little Ice Age and now only about 1 Kelvin. The increase from 1880 to now is about 0.8 Kelvin. It doesn't take a lot of temperature change to cause some pretty drastic changes from a human point of view.
(BTW, being the pedant I am I have to say Kelvin's don't have degrees even though they are the same size as a Celcius degree. Kelvins are an absolute measurement based on absolute zero.)
... especially when I question the accuracy being good enough to catch half a degree 100 years ago.
I see this all the time. People assume that just because the precision that the measurements were taken at in the past is somewhat less than it is today that it's invalid to express the aggregation of many of those measurements to a greater precision. This can be statistically shown to be wrong but perhaps the simplest example I can give is this. In baseball a player's batting average is commonly expressed to three decimal places and yet each measurement is a binary choice, either they got a hit (1) or they made an out (0)*. If you said the statistical aggregation of a players batting average had to be expressed to the precision of the measurement then all batters are batting 0.000 (or 1.000 if they miraculously manage to bat better than 0.500). The same principle applies to all areas where statistics are being applied.
*Things like walks or "hit by pitch" don't count in the batting average.
The natives who killed off (or not) the mammoths also killed off half of the other species in north and south america. So naturally suspicion falls on them.
The last time there might have been a "snowball Earth" was long before the dinosaurs died and in fact before the Cambrian explosion around 550 million years ago.
You will look back on the time when you held these ignorant views and feel embarrassed that you could be so naive. The science is good - your understanding of it is poor.
Livid Larry? Something like that.
Look, you've obviously been around Wikipedia a lot; but you have a lot to learn about how public school operates.
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And one day you will have selectively forgotten that you were such a pro-global warming zealot--long after the gloom-and-doom scenarios didn't materialize and the hippies have moved on to the next environmental fad for hating on humanity.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
If those wooly mammoths' digestive systems didn't create so much methane perhaps they wouldn't have caused so much global warming.
I remember growing up how asteroids, overpopulation, diseases, and shit like that once killed every species that ever went extinct. Now climate change did it all.
Incorrect. SOME mass extinctions were the result of climate change (like when the early anaerobic life produced too much of that poisonous oxygen). Some were caused by gamma ray bursts (which affected the climate by destroying the ozone layer and polluting the atmosphere with oxides of nitrogen), some by asteroids (this particular one was supposedly caused by a n object colliding with Canada, sending fresh water into the Atlantic and causing the retreating ice to grow again). It was once thought that disease killed the dinosaurs but they're pretty sure it was an asteroid hitting off the coast of Mexico.
Hey, whatever happened to nuclear apocalypse--radiation/nuclear winter/etc.?
The cold war ended.
Free Martian Whores!
Know what the brown hairy stuff scientists have been finding between the wooly mammoth's toes is? Slow Cro-Mags
Interestingly enough, I read an article about human lifespans and how it changed drastically about 30,000 years ago, giving us grandparents who were able to help spread knowledge across generations. Maybe if people were living twice as long, then humans were eating twice as many mammoths.
It is not a nit that unless stratigraphers are able to decipher daily weather reports from fossils and the horizons they are found on, that you are talking about climate.
Because of the problems of getting absolute dates and their precision being low, there is always the danger that causes get confused when the error bars of dates overlap or, worse, when gradual changes get telescoped into seeming catastrophies. So, there is persistant change in climate from late Pliocene on that stresses mammalian communities the world over, and there are sudden events that interceed, such as the glacials and interglacials and the arrival of Mankind, to confuse matters.
This is not unlike the debate over the robustness of dinosaur populations before the K/T event. Few doubt that a big event ended the Cretaceous, but we now know that the diversity of the fauna was very much in decline for several million years prior. Even though it is common to call the K/T event a catastrophic mass extinction event, we have the terrestrial predator birds and all the modern birds to attest that these things are usually matters of degree, If there had been no asteroid or massive trapps eruptions in India, the decimation of the large fauna may have still happened. It might have been less total and taken a longer time, but the fact that the terror birds and the rest of modern birds made it through may simply be a demonstration of degree and not kind. This is more of a statistical process.