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The Last Time Oceans Got This Acidic This Fast, 96% of Marine Life Went Extinct
merbs writes: The biggest extinction event in planetary history was driven by the rapid acidification of our oceans, a new study concludes (abstract). So much carbon was released into the atmosphere, and the oceans absorbed so much of it so quickly, that marine life simply died off, from the bottom of the food chain up. That doesn't bode well for the present, given the similarly disturbing rate that our seas are acidifying right now. A team led by University of Edinburgh researchers collected rocks in the United Arab Emirates that were on the seafloor hundreds of millions of years ago, and used the boron isotopes found within to model the changing levels of acidification in our prehistoric oceans. They now believe that a series of gigantic volcanic eruptions in the Siberian Trap spewed a great fountain of carbon into the atmosphere over a period of tens of thousands of years. This was the first phase of the extinction event, in which terrestrial life began to die out.
Because we've always had volcanoes and the oceans didn't acidify as a result?
"John, 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."
http://chem.tufts.edu/answersi...
Willfully ignorant? Fuck you. I accept the underlying premise that the climate is changing and mankind's activities are contributing a non-zero amount to that change. Pointing out the fact that the climate has changed before does not make me a denier and it speaks volumes about you that you feel the need to attack someone who largely agrees with you because they don't completely toe the party line.
Incidentally, the only things I don't accept are the doomsday rhetoric about the consequences of climate change and the proposed "solutions" that will ultimately accomplish nothing. Well, that's not entirely true, they'll massively increase energy bills in the first world while simultaneously halting development in the third world. But hey, who gives a shit, we've got ours, fuck all of those poor brown people.
Whether you're willing to admit it or not, energy is civilization and massively increasing the cost thereof condemns billions of people to remain in poverty. You'd do better to spend those countless trillions on preparing humanity for the change that we couldn't stop even if we axed all carbon emissions tomorrow.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.