Global Warming May Have Killed the Dinosaurs 269
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.
Irony Alert (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Irony Alert (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Irony Alert (Score:5, Funny)
Well, The Vatican [wikipedia.org] can fit on a Supertanker [wikipedia.org]. Almost.
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Re:Irony Alert (Score:5, Insightful)
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However, the bible nowhere mentions that there were no cars before the Flood. Granted, it also doesn't mention that there were cars. But if there were no cars, there surely shouldn't have been such a drastic global warming. So the Flood proves that there were cars befor
Bullshit! It was a high cholestrol diet (Score:2)
Good old witch hunting! I remember when the dinosaur kill-off was blamed on radiation (A big uranium meteorite), comets, and everything else.
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Or, not. I think the dead, liquid dinosaurs are the scapegoats. I think people are afraid to admit that its that pesky Sun, on a warming cycle, and volcanic action, there's been a lot, and just plain cycles.
People are afraid to admit it because then it is out of our control, and one thing people really like is to be in control.
Re:Irony Alert (Score:4, Insightful)
We certainly contributed but it was going to happen anyway.
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*Tossing the BS Flag* (Score:2, Insightful)
1) It took several super volcanos going off at the same time and spewing millions upon millions of tons of contaminants into the air to cause the planet to cool. One volcanic eruption occured in Minnesota and dumped nearly 20 feet of ash in locations several hundred miles away. Keep in mind that this our planet, doing what it does and sending us all into a series of ice ages.
2) Given the recovery capacity of the planet, what makes you think your puny a$$ vespa or even my bro
Re:*Tossing the BS Flag* (Score:4, Insightful)
People who make money from oil, the Chinese, the Indians, and everyone else who wouldn't have to do any cleaning up would probably disagree with that statement.
There is bugger all money in anthropomorphic climate change. There is instead a big cost in changing things if it turns out to be true and therefore a big financial incentive to deny it at all costs.
That means you have to have millions and billions of cars to get any kind of a quantity.
Not to mention all the other vehicles including planes, trains, trucks etc and all factories pumping out waste. In any case there might well be a billion cars on the roads of the world now; if not it probably isn't that far off.
Given the recovery capacity of the planet, what makes you think your puny a$$ vespa or even my brontosaur vehicle can spew enough crap to cause climatic change?
What does the recovery capacity of the planet have to do with whether the human race gets wiped out or not?
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Lake Toba was estimated to wipe out 60% of all human life on Earth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_volcano#Known_
The Yellowstone one is showing deformation of the lake currently,
so make sure and invest in geothermal and wind power, lol.
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Oh really? (Score:3, Interesting)
So Global Warming looks like a comet? Good thing McNaught isn't going to hit us, eh?
It's sad that there's a massive following of climate change deniers online, but such is the nature of the Internet - even the kooks have large communities that can email millions of people.
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Look up, "The Year Without a Summer."
It was caused by . .
It's sad there's a massive following of the global warming is going to kill us all promoters online and off, to the extent that they've had to warp everything bad that happens, everytime, everywhere, to the ef
Volcanos and warming (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Balderdash. For starters, I don't "want" anything. This goes a long way toward freeing me from whatever the current fashionable hysteria happens to be. For seconds, things happen because of causes. Nothing happens "just because."
That's magic. There is no magic. If there is something to the "paranormal" it isn't paranormal. If it happens, it happens for reason. Reasons are n
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On the other hand, the factors that go into climate are
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If you have Fear that the climate isn't warming you just might have a political bias. Uncertainy and Doubt are called "science." If you lack them, you aren't doing any. All you can legitimately do is define their limits . .
It is difficult to predict if your bicycle will fall to the left or to the right,. .
No. It's pretty simple really. In fact it was my field of research back in the 70s. Really. I can even determine which way it falls wi
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Good luck with that. There's some mental block that shows up in most people when they are given evidence that the last 10,000 years of relative stability in our climate was an abnormality, rather than the norm. On about a yearly basis now I'm reading about some new evidence pointing to some dramatic climate shift (on the order of 5-20 yrs) that happened sometime in the last hundred thousand years or so.
Kudos to you for your rational viewpoint on climate change. I'm not nearly the environmentalist you are,
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Butterfly effect [wikipedia.org]? Is this the new term for fluid dynamics?
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My favorite butterfly effect predates this idea: Chuang Tzu had a beautiful dream that he was a butterfly. From that day he was never certain that he was a philosopher dreaming of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a philosopher.
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Flutter by here to get solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/0 [blogspot.com]
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"The irony of our modern civilization is how incredibly inhuman it is. Our cities are most notable for being entirely devoid of the things necessa
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From the horse's mouth. [realclimate.org]
"You may be the center of your universe, but that doesn't imply that you are the center of the universe."
There is no reason to behave like a jerk simply because everything is utimately pointless. If everone decided to "go bush" tommorow, the "bush" would be a desert filled with rotti
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I beg to differ, read on...
"There is no such thing as science by consensus or by authority."
On the contrary, the philosophy that is the cornerstone of science is credited to Plato [wikipedia.org] and has the "authority" of passing 2400+yrs of scrutiny. This philosophy was later sumed up nicely by Decartes [wikipedia.org] with the simple statement, "I think therefore I am", in it's most recent incarnation the concept is known as "The matrix".
The founding concept of science litterally means that: not
The kooks dont deny it, they just have diff causes (Score:2)
mainstream commercial graphs and diagrams.
The kooks might only be saying, "hang on, are humans the 100 cause or perhaps 50% or 5%?"
The kooks are saying that official scientific results are very weak and unprofessional given the bad record keeping of past or perhaps
amaturish recording, temperatures in CBDs and urban areas are not reliable since theres a lot of local heating so they
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-Pardon my french, I'm trying a new tact with CO2 lovers this weekend.
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Yes, yes, McDork, we've heard it from you before. My question to you is still the same: Why don't you put up or shut up? If you are so convinced your a genius who can spot a flaw that thousands of papers have missed, do the science yourself and grab that Nobel, what are you waiting for?
"Could it be..."
No it couldn't, the energy comes from outside the "blanket", ie: the sun. As you yourself are constantly reminding us!
Your constant drivel and contradi
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Maybe we should "wreck them"? If "Economic growth" implies more pollution in the air, more waste in the landfills, more chemicals everywhere, more species being extinct, more water getting polluted etc. etc, maybe we should ask ourselves: Is it worth it? Quite a few people seem to think that "I'm all for saving the environment. Just as long as I don't have to do anything". But we need to do something. All of us. And the thing is that we in the west need to do
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"Without wrecking every economy in the world and more or less completely stopping third world development"
To malign climate models and then proffer far less robust economic models as justification to do nothing is bordering on religious dogma. Friedman's economic model has two major logical holes, it assumes resources are unlimited and polution is "someone else's problem", both assumptions are clearly
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I didn't know they were like felines. Do you have a reference, perhaps on Wikipedia or Uncyclopedia to back this up?
Global warming ... just not that way. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Global warming ... just not that way. (Score:5, Insightful)
The article claims based on microbiological analysis from drill cores in Texas that the impact event, the tsunami event often associated with the impact, and the KT boundary, are all quite distinct in time, and all are distinct from the changes in microfosils that they think are indicitave of the dinosaurs dying. The article ends with a ridiculous statement that implies birds evolved after the KT event rather than before. Birds are not dinosaurs. Birds survived the KT event. Dinosours did not.
Curiously, they do not discuss how an impact of the type they claim to identify was not associated with a tsunami. Nor is there mention of how the irridium got into the KT boundary layer without an impact.
Whenever you see anyone filling in an area of uncertainty with a trendy, crisis-du-jour explanation, you should be very sceptical. The odds that a major socio-economic/political concern today just happens to be related to a mass extinction in the distant past are extremely low. The odds of scientists (and reporters) letting current concerns bleed into their hypotheses is on the other hand extremely high.
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Well, THERE'S the problem! (Score:5, Funny)
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Every time a global warming story comes up, lots of readers throw out their own unsubstantiated (or more usually debunked) theories, without bothering with basic fact checking. Here, the parent is 'certainly interested' in geologic CO2 fluxes, but can't be bothered to search. Are geological CO2 fluxes being measured? Yes. It's called Wikipedia, people.
Sorry. But if someone throws out solar fluctuations as the primary reason for current
well, you're going to stay cross (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
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Well spoken. Good thing I get to knock up the wife now and again to relieve my cross feelings (#4 on the way- oops! So much for my carbon footprint...)
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Well said. There is a habit of mind that is common in America right now to deny facts that make one uncomfortable. A primary example of this is the denial of evolution by fundamentalist Christians. The fact of evolution, supported by increasingly massive amounts of evidence is denied, because the alternative would be to significantly revise one's view of the world, something that can often be very uncomfortable. This timid and cowardly habit of hiding from the truth can be very dangerous. People that h
Re:well, you're going to stay cross (Score:5, Insightful)
As a Christian who is able to think for myself, I'd like to make a response to your comments.
First, I agree somewhat with you. I too am uncomfortable with some of the politicization of the Church in America. The Church is at it's best when it is under pressure and persecution, not when it is wielding political power. I really don't care much for state religions myself.
However, I don't believe that Christians (even fundamentalists) has a monopoly on denying the truth. It is basic human nature to deny what we don't won't to see. The Bible actually describes and depicts this willful tendency of ours toward self-blinding.
I don't discount what scientists say, but then again I also treat it with some skepticism because I know that scientists are subject to the same problems that the rest of us are. Their judgment can be affected by self-interest just as much as you and me.
Also, I beg to differ on another point. Positive opinions on the topics you have mentioned are, with a doubt, held by many Christians. But, wouldn't you agree they are also held by many non-Christians also? Are "fundamentalist Christians" the only people who deny evolution? Are fundamentalist Christians the only people who are skeptical regarding global warming? Are fundamentalist Christians the only people who believe in free market capitalism?
I would ask you, why do non-Christians hold some of these same views you seem to be opposing? Are they somehow under the control of the same "force" as the "fundamentalist Christians"? How do you explain this?
Also, if you believe that "fundamentalist Christians" are somehow being controlled for the benefit of commercial interests, I think there is something else to take into account. You will probably find these same "fundamentalists" also hold some opinions antithetical to those of business. For example, many large businesses provide benefits for "same-sex partners." I don't think the fundamentalists like that. In this case, it seems they are thinking for themselves.
You also seem to be assuming that no one who honestly examines the facts on global warming, evolution, capitalism, etc., can come to an conclusion opposite to your own. Might I suggest that people of integrity can find themselves on opposites sides of an issue for reasons other than a desire not to face the truth?
Please remember that you are also bringing your own set of presuppositions to the discussion, and that there are factors influencing your thinking of which you not aware.
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No, fundamentalist Muslims also disagree with evolution, but they don't live in a society that went through the Enlightenment like the West did, so they don't couch their objections in scientif
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OTOH, most slashdotters with no background in physics, not even basic mechanics, much less fundamental physics, feel compelled to trust their own seat-of-the-pants views on string theory, dark energy, dark matter, etc...
Science is not, never has been, and never will be "someone". I think that you actually mean "I trust scientists.". Not that that is an entirely bad thing, but you ou
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I did. I trust the process, the model, the way of looking at the world. Individual scientists are fallible, but I trust the worldview because it tries to discover and understand the world around us as best we can. I appreciate you dedication to exact language, but my statement was correct as written.
I'm sure our
Speak for yourself, pal. (Score:3, Insightful)
The global warming issue has been the cause of some of the shoddiest "science" I've ever seen in my almost 30 years as a researcher. I don't think I've seen any other supposedly serious field of study with such a high proportion of almost completely bogus work.
I'm a skeptic of anything so obviously incorrect, and much of the crud being presented as "research" by both the devotees and naysayers is definitel
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Jesus, a world is flat theory comparison. (Score:2)
PWIFs will be PWIFs (Score:2)
You may be giving them too much credit for thinking. By and large, these people are PWIFs (People With Imaginary Friends) of one form or another, and once we have established that they are willing to accept internally inconsistent world views on the basis of no proof whatsoever (or, as they say, "on faith")--and often base their life around such world views--is it really fair to expect them t
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Just because you like a theory doesn't make it so (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Even better than the wiki is this [wikipedia.org]
I thought there was a recent Slashdot article where profs weren't taking Wikipedia as a reference in term papers because of potential inaccuracies and bias?
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Dude, you're right, you just asked a question. But there are so many fact-devoid assertions about climate change around here (on all sides, but mainly with the skeptics; being a contrarian is too-cool-for-school on
Cheers.
A large part of the problem... (Score:2)
So, if you are no
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Then read this [nasa.gov]. Surprise! The volcano argument is lame.
Your post is exactly what I am talking about [slashdot.org]; I should have teed off on you instead of that other guy. You have a belief (loosely stated as my poop can't possibly be as stinky as moose poop) and have found support for it with a number that is, by any sane reading of the data, wrong. There's plenty of holes to poke in climate change science, but where the increased atmospheric
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Thanks for having an open mind. Sorry for going off on your there.
The article says "global cooling" (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, it says both (Score:3, Informative)
Later, global cooling wiped out the ones that were left.
From what they can tell, the Chicxulub impact occured too early to have triggered the global cooling.
Not the first to suggest this.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Iridium layer (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Iridium layer (Score:4, Funny)
Easy, that is explained here [wikipedia.org] (search for iridium)
Current global warming problems are explained here [go.com]
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life persisted for another 300,000 years after (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow, I wonder if there's still life on the planet in question...
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All the howling about this is silly. We are of nature so what we do is natural. If we're to survive we will or we'll be wiped out and something else will come along.
I want to watch this on TV....from orbit...around another planet...very far away from earth.
What I have always wondered about... (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.unb.ca/passc/ImpactDatabase/CIDiameter
Wikipedia blurbs on the two largest (as usual, do more research to verify if interested:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vredefort_crater [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Basin [wikipedia.org]
There are also questions about a possible crater in Antarctica, but it's too new an announcement to know if the features observed are actually impact related: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/erthboom.htm [osu.edu]
My question is, why would the Chicxulub event have been so uniquely deadly?
I suppose one possible scenario is a double (or more) sucker punch of large impact followed by volcanic activity and/or other factors that happened to hit while the Earth was still recovering from the impact. Of course, that's a bit complex for a spectacular headline.
I hope work continues on this - it's a fascinating insight into our environment and might be useful in knowing how to safeguard ourselves against changes in the future.
Bushveld complex (Score:2)
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I went hunting the web to back up my armchair theory - that the Yucatan impact CAUSED the India lava flows directly (think bullet thru a ripe tomato)..
India is currently about opposite the Yucatan, but I'm not sure where the two sites were located 65 million years ago (How much continental drift?). BUT on the way to try to track down some semblance of support for my pet theory I found this article about a very large potential impact crater right beside India that hasn't yet made the impact datab
Nah, everybody knows the real reason (Score:5, Funny)
Nah. Everybody knows the real reason [danielbowen.com] they died out.
Boundry (Score:2)
There is quite a lot of evidence that in l
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simple-minded scientists (Score:3, Insightful)
It's really not that difficult: the Earth's climate has demonstrated multiple stable (more than a few million years) and metastable states, ranging from snowball to hothouse, with side trips through conditions like our current glacial/interglacial metastate. The rate at which climate state can change, once change begins, is generally faster than species, particularly those embedded in "eco-web", can follow. When the Chicxulub event happened, the global climate state was moved toward a different one which was not conducive to the major fauna of the time, the dinosaurs. It didn't kill everything overnight (except near ground zero), but may have thrown off the timing of mating, reduced the efficiency of some primary plant's life-cycle, or in some other way moved the birth rate of the dinosaurs to below replacement (less efficient animals have fewer reserves and are more vulnerable to disease, for example). Some species and ecosystems may have required a few hundred thousand years to dwindle away, but the impact triggered that particular extinction event. Other events, such as the Permian-Triassic extinction, are more likely to have been caused by vulcanism.
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Also, is oil really made from dead dinosaurs?
Global warming killed them eh? (Score:2, Insightful)
about those Indian volcanoes... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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"Further research" (Score:2)
Global Warming: The Universal Sin (Score:2)
I'm sorry but I think we're starting to reach a tipping point--and I'm not talking about the CO2 tipping point, either. I'm talking about the 'tipping point' where we've cryed wolf so many times in so many ways that the general public goes
Very old news (Score:2)
Where Dino *really* went... (Score:2)
What do they mean? (Score:2)
Well, life (and I'd venture as far as to say marine life too) obviously persisted after this disaster too.
They're talking like this was some catastrophy that destroyed life??
Mesoscopic (Score:2)
It wasn't just ONE THING you idiots (Score:2)
Try a *combination* of bad events and watch the devastation all add up. How about a series of volcanic eruptions and other possible solar events were causing a global warming crisis over a few hundred thousand years. Some creatures in the equatorial regions that couldn't adapt to the heat died off, as did those that ate them. You have large ecosystems in a very unstable state by trying to adjust.
The larger pliosaurs might have also died out in thi
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The issue here is that we might be warming the Earth artificially already, so when the natural process kicks in on top of our "contribution" we all could be royally screwed.
We are in fact supposed to be living in an Ice Age at the moment, so the "natural" warming ain't even here yet!
On the positive side, perhaps 75 million years in the future some giant cockroaches could use our liquified remains to fuel the SUVs!
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Anyhow, a very strong and sudden heat wave would be bad to all kinds of biota.
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What I don't get is that she's very dismissive of the Yucatan crater, saying it's too small. Well, it was big enough go spread iridium across the entire planet in pretty big concentrations, so I'm not sure what she's basing that off of. Her entire thesis seems to be that the crater is timed 300K years wrong, and that her volcano is closer to the time. But to me it seems that the best case she could make is that the crater in the Yucatan is the wrong one, since the die-off correlates very well with the ir
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I bet they could have even played the original Nintendo. Not Xbox though... too many buttons.
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(actually, it's been said that cattle produce more contributions to the global warming than cars these days)