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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.
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.
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!
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
We all know they died in Noah's Flood.
I'm pretty sure it was Noah's ark and God's flood.
I wonder if the mammoths had a water bottle in their carry-on, so the TSA wouldn't let them board.
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
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.
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.
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
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...