Scientists Study Permian Mass Extinction Event As Lesson For 21st Century 235
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "About 252 million years ago, cracks in the Earth's crust in Siberia caused vast amounts of lava to spill out and blanket the region with about 6,000,000 cubic kilometers of molten material—enough to cover the continental U.S. at a one mile depth. It triggered a huge change in climate, causing a mass extinction event that killed roughly 90 percent of life on earth. Now Helen Thompson writes in the Smithsonian that a team at MIT has focused its efforts on this major extinction event, which marks the end of the Permian period and the beginning of the Triassic period. Their results suggest that the die-out happened a lot faster than previously thought — perhaps over a span of only 60,000 years. The shorter time scale means that organisms would have had less time to react and adapt to changes in climate, atmospheric CO2 and ocean acidity. Without the ability to adapt, they died. Other mass extinction events have also been narrowed down to short timeframes. The asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period only took about 32,000 years. A similar study of another mass extinction triggered by volcanic eruptions at the end of the Triassic period suggests it lasted less than 5,000 years. Even though all of these extinction events were caused by different things, the ecosystem collapse happened very quickly. 'Whatever the causes of the extinctions may be, and it looks like there are very different causes for some of them, the biosphere may collapse in very similar ways once it gets beyond a tipping point,' says Doug Erwin. Some scientists see the end of the Permian as a lesson for the 21st century (PDF) and say that understanding the conditions leading up to, within, and after a mass extinction event may help us to avoid human-induced ecosystem collapses in the future. As Erwin puts it, 'you don't want to start a mass extinction, because once a mass extinction begins, the prognosis is pretty grim.'"
Some scientists see the end Permian as a lesson (Score:2)
Is the lesson "let 90% of all life forms die out so the re-filling of ecological niches leads to greater biodiversity, and the possible re-emergence of the dinosaurs"? Because if so, dinosaurs are indeed pretty badass.
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Wha? You are a fan of Smurfette with silicon implants?
Ain't No Party... (Score:2, Funny)
3 Most destructive events in a planet's history (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Super Volcano
2) Asteroid
3) Intelligent life evolves.
Not even close (Score:5, Insightful)
The most destructive event was the evolution of blue-green algae, which killed off almost everything living on the planet at that time because of their poisonous waste product (oxygen).
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Mod parent up. That event is called the Oxygen Catastrophe for a reason.
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Let's not forget the RNA -> protein coding transformations, that created organisms able to use new kinds of amino-acids which may have killed everything else on Earth. Several transitions where only a single lineage survived.
Re:3 Most destructive events in a planet's history (Score:5, Funny)
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Geology disproved the global flood theory a few hundred years ago. Unless you want to argue the trickster set things up to trick us in which case all religions are just tricks as well.
Re:3 Most destructive events in a planet's history (Score:4, Interesting)
Intelligent life, while admittedly is a potential cause of, is actually the first possible defense that this planet's ecosystem has evolved against an extinction level event.
Stopping a super volcano might still be a bit of a stretch at this current time (give it time though), but the whole asteroid thing - intelligent life actually might have a chance, even right now, of stopping another big whack to the planet.
Think about how the shell evolved: might intelligent life be some kind of earth shell? some kind of life shield?
To be clear, I don't ascribe to some magical teleological aspect of the universe, nor some gaia hypotesis: I'm not saying this is WHY we are here or WHY we were made - but hey, shells evolve big and small - why couldn't we, humanity, become life and earths greatest ally?
Sure, we mightn't, but why we shouldn't nor couldn't?
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We should - it's our home, after all, and we'd be protecting ourselves.
But we seem more interested in claiming the Permian never happened, and trying to wipe out most life on the planet.
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In the end, I decided that star death is not part of a 'planet's history', rather it is part of the star's history.
I also ignored Gamma Ray bursts, blackholes, etc.
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Ar star will not go supernova. it will expand to be bigger then are orbit...and then contract. Intersting fact, the earth will still continue to orbit around the sun, it will just be a dead lifeless rock.
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Our star.
Our orbit.
And it's unlikely the Earth will still be here after Sol expands past our orbit, then contracts. Possible, but moderately unlikely.
Re:3 Most destructive events in a planet's history (Score:5, Insightful)
I considered it, but not all stars go supernova.
In the end, I decided that star death is not part of a 'planet's history', rather it is part of the star's history.
I also ignored Gamma Ray bursts, blackholes, etc.
No, Sol will never supernova, but the risk being referenced is that of a Near-Earth supernova [wikipedia.org]. If a star like IK Pegasi B touched off, 150 light years away, it would have significant effects on us here.
If you want to throw out consideration of nearby supernovas as "not part of the planet's history" then I contend you need to throw out consideration of asteroid impacts as well. Both are proven significant, exogenous, cosmological influences on our planet.
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They already took away the ability to disable ads this week... We have always been at war with Beta.
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The certainly did not. Mine is working fine.
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Started about 12,000 years ago with the extinction of most mega-fauna and continues on.
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When we create it, of course.
Aren't we already? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent is using the strawman fallacy. (Score:2)
Environmentalists certainly want you to believe that. It's funny how a group can hate humanity as much as they do and yet not commit mass suicide.
They are the ultimate hypocrites. They want the REST OF US to starve without GMO crops and transportation of food. But they themselves are far too heroic to die, of course.
Strawman
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Anthropocene isn't a formal epoch.
So you might want to wait until that happens for calling everyone ignorant and talking like it's an accepted epoch.
There have been less then 1000 extinctions in the last 100 years. Of course some people will go on about undocumented extinctions being 100,000 per year. Naturally they show no statistical proof of there claim.
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Most of their arguments for a potential global catastrophy hinge one a hypothetical "tipping point" beyond which the climate will no longer be in stable equilibrium and will spiral out of control. I haven't seen a plausible mechanism for this, but based on what we know about the climate, such tipping points probably do exist. On the other hand, we know this kind of thing has happened in the past without human intervention. The causes cited are always much larger than anything humanity has been capable of (h
Re:Aren't we already? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's funny how you can spend all your time worried about environmentalists, when it's the scientists you ought to be paying attention to. But I guess it's easier just to create strawmen and red herrings.
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"it's easier just to create strawmen and red herrings."
Only if you use science!
Has anyone noticed... (Score:5, Funny)
These extinctions always seem to take place at the transition from one period to another.
So I'd recommend being extra double careful round those times.
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These extinctions always seem to take place at the transition from one period to another.
So I'd recommend being extra double careful round those times.
So you are saying slashdot beta could cause a mass extinction event?
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Hint: If you ever left your basement and went out to find real women - those are the ones with boobies you look at on the PC but they won't look like supermodels, you'd find that this is already extremely common knowledge.
Here's a Good Summary (Score:5, Informative)
If you aren't concerned about this subject, you should be. It is possible that a 4C increase would lead to a 10C increase, wiping out nearly everyone and everything. A good BBC summary of the Permian mass extinction can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
For a really unsettling update:
http://guymcpherson.com/2013/0... [guymcpherson.com]
Re:Here's a Good Summary (Score:4, Insightful)
How do you come to the conclusion that a 4-10C rise will wipe out nearly everyone and everything?
I just never understood this mentality that rising temperatures will have an existential threat to humanity.
I'm not down playing it by any stretch. I'm sure mass areas will need to be evacuated. Farmland will be lost. Extreme weather will become more common. Flooding will take over entire cities. Some areas will become totally uninhabitable...
But I just don't see that being an existential threat to humanity. We're not blindly ruled by nature. We have irrigation systems. We can build better shelters. We can relocate to cooler parts of the planet that would become more habitable. We can control the climate we live in via AC and heating...
It will simply take a lot to truly wipe us out... and I'm just not convinced a 4-10C will be death of humanity.
Re:Here's a Good Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is the issue: At present, with only mild resource constraints on the major economies, those political entities are within a couple of hair's breadths away from going after each others throats. Fast forward to a time when climate changes disrupt most of those economies. Arable lands may change (not necessarily increase or decrease). If that happens, the losing country may get mighty upset. Fisheries may change provoking resource pressures on countries. Millions of people will be under pressure to leave areas that are negatively effected. Millions of other people just might not welcome those refuges with open arms and open wallets.
Couple with the fact that the human population is scheduled to double in the next generation or two and you have the perfect storm for some serious resource competition.
All wars are resource wars.
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Canada should be very, very scared.
Re:Here's a Good Summary (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it is not millions of people.
BILLIONS of people will be displaced if the water level rises even a moderate amount. Here is a fun toy [geology.com] It only covers part of the world, but the hyperlinked areas are illuminating.
Notice how even a small increase will shut down some of the most populated regions of the world as the cities are right on the coast. China will likely see a billion displaced. India might have a a half billion displaced.
The US might see only around 40 million displaced, but having New York, San Francisco, LA, Houston, Miami, and a bunch of others at least partially underwater or seasonally flooded will be difficult enough. That means rebuilding the infrastructure for millions of people in the United States alone. When Hurricane Katrina type flooding becomes an annual event due to higher sea levels, continuously rebuilding the cities will not be an option. People will be displaced and the annually-flooded buildings looted and condemned.
Wars are very likely. Look at India losing about half of its useful land and displacing so many people; suddenly all the land to the North looks mighty inviting, even with their arsenals. The Nile Delta flooding could displace seven million; there isn't much nearby green on the map for them to move to within the country. Netherlands probably won't survive as we know it, so what about erasing the line between them and Germany? That one at least has a chance of being somewhat civil.
When you combine the stress of losing a lot of land, some countries having their land vanish almost completely, and billions of displaced individuals, tensions are going to skyrocket very quickly.
Long-term real estate investors and the filthy rich have been picking up tracts of land in places that are elevated, cool, and have fresh water sources. Most people haven't really noticed.
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BILLIONS of people will be displaced if the water level rises even a moderate amount.
Over the course of centuries let us recall. The US alone has routine infrastructure capable of moving the entire population of the US every year (and 50 or so million people routinely use that infrastructure to move each year). And most land is valuable for what it can be used for in the next few decades, not it's supposed value a century from now.
Re:Here's a Good Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Over the course of centuries let us recall
No, because it's going to happen in bursts, Katrina style. Nobody will do anything preventively, then you'll have one or two ruined city with 10M people to move overnight. Then 5 years later rinse and repeat somewhere else. If all those people planned to move on their own free will, it would already be problematic to absorb in a healthy country with healthy economics. But when the shit hit the fans there's gonna be slums all over for a very long time.
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Couple with the fact that the human population is scheduled to double in the next generation or two
It's not. Current projections are that global population caps about 50% higher than today.
It's also worth noting that the countries which have the population problem don't have the nukes.
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However, losing 90% of the species means we lose a huge part of the ecosystem, and we depend on that ecosystem for far more than most folks understand.
Part two is that the world is already full of people. If anyone wants to migrate, they'll have to fight for it--which is not unknown to happen.
imo, most all the huge wars in the past have happened because of too many people and too few resources. Look forward to more as resources die off.
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Yeop, I agree.
But the problems will also be highly local. By that I mean some areas will be relatively okay. Others will be devastated. But most of us seem to cope and have coped just fine when devastating things happen in another part of the world.
Genocides happen, millions die... those of us not in the area seem to get by.
Wars and civil strife happen in Syria, the middle east, Africa... most of us not in the area get by okay.
Africa as a whole is already a crap hole... and most of us go through our days ok
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How long do you think a nuclear winter would last? The estimates I've seen are only a few years and even a few decades isn't very long compared to the 1000+ years for CO2 to get scrubbed from the atmosphere.
Re:Here's a Good Summary (Score:4, Informative)
At the end of the Permian era, 250m years ago, the global temperature rose by six degrees. That wiped out 95% of all life on earth.
That's why people come to that conclusion; it has happened before.
That, and the fact that just a few degrees may well kill off just about all marine life, raise sea levels, create deserts where there's currently farmland, melt the permafrost (releasing massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere, further accelerating global warming), melt the polar ice caps and the glaciers, deforest the rain forests, and basically make the world a hell-hole.
Sure, humanity could possibly survive; but at what cost and what kind of life would it be? We can't build AC and heating for the whole ecosystem...
Here's an interesting doomsday summary, degree by degree, from one to six degrees: http://globalwarming.berrens.nl/globalwarming.htm [berrens.nl]
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Why do you think it will stop at 10c? That's the feed back loop.
However, lets look at 10c, shall we?
Farmland dries up, wind has more energy. more dustbowls, almost no farmland. Increased rain washing away soil, and increase acidity and algae die offs mean are main O2 generator is dying rapidly.
Are glacier heat sinks will be gone, and there will be nothing to cool the ocean. The sea level rises, removing a lot of livable area.
Live stock will be severely crippled.
Without a freezing winter, diseases and insets
Re:Here's a Good Summary (Score:4, Insightful)
It's something about the sheer scale of it, at +10C India is the new Sahara. Is anyone going to build AC and irrigation for a billion people there? No, about 99% of them have to move - meaning, they have to invade someone - and they're hardly the only ones. You can have massive crop failures and if there's food for six billion people on a seven billion people planet, I think a lot more than one billion is going to die. Very quickly we could have a cascading failure because the war stops the tractors, destroys farmlands and crops. Maybe they even start employing scorched earth tactics to avoid it falling into enemy hands.
Going back to living off the land might be hopeless because the fish is dying, the game is dying, the plants are dying because they can't adapt quick enough. We probably don't stand a chance to feed the current population without modern agriculture anyway, the wildlife would soon be spent.You're right, I don't think humans as a race will go extinct, the climate changes alone aren't that bad. The climate changes and WWIII though? That could get rather nasty....
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You do understand, don't you, that there are many different commercial varieties of corn adapted to different climates varying from the tropical climates of Central America to the much cooler climate of Canada? If it gets too hot for whatever breed of corn you're now growing, farmers will simply shift to a more appropriate breed of corn, adapted to the new, warmer climate.
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Sorry, but that is absolutely idiotic. This is not scientific certainty, this is speculative alarmism, at its worst.
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It is possible that a 4C increase would lead to a 10C increase, wiping out nearly everyone and everything.
Except that it wouldn't. Even a relatively dramatic temperature increase like that leaves Earth quite habitable.
As to the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction (PTME), it is remarkable how ignorant scientists are and yet these claims keep being made. A few weeks ago, I had to endure a rather pointless argument with another slashdotter who kept claiming that today's CO2 growth rates were at least an order of magnitude greater than those during the PTME. I pointed out that the claim was made on the basis of two
Re:I should be? (Score:4, Informative)
I'll bite. The video describes the problem of a 4C increase in temperature that then causes methane trapped as ice in the permafrost and oceans to melt and go into the atmosphere. It's a positive feedback loop that results in at least a 10C increase (methane being a much more efficient greenhouse gas than CO2). The first step is warming by CO2, which then results in warming by methane. Several scientists are predicting a 20C increase by 2050 if the methane is allowed to escape into the atmosphere, which is essentially a planetary extinction event. The only thing that seems likely to prevent this scenario is total economic collapse, immediately. More details available in the second link. Hope that helps.
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Or, I don't know... capture it and burn it as fuel? The problem with you climate alarmists is you lack critical thinking skills.
I find it funny that you are claiming others lack critical thinking skills but you have shown a severe lack of thinking yourself. You do know that natural gas is wasted and allowed to escape when drilling for oil because it just isn't worth the effort to capture it. This is in a situation where they already have a well and the gas is coming out of it. Garbage dumps produce methane and it isn't captured and used for fuel because that would also cost too much money. They just burn it. But you are telling us t
Comparable? (Score:2)
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In the 21st century the dust comes from the nuclear war that's triggered by loss or resources.
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I'm reasonably sure that increased dust levels would likely subside within a few years, maybe a few decades. Radical increases in CO2 and the ensuing acidification in the oceans would take considerably longer to return to something approaching normal levels. That's rather the point. There are multiple ways that CO2 can be barfed into the atmosphere in vast quantities in a relatively short period of time, but getting rid of that CO2 may take a lot longer, and the effects of that rise in the amount of solar r
Re:Comparable? (Score:4, Funny)
Why is it so very hard for people to accept that increases in CO2 in the atmosphere, whatever their source, is not a good thing for a lot of species?
Higher CO2 concentrations and higher temperatures were the staple of the greatest periods of growth in biomass and biodiversity our planet has ever seen. I'm actively working to pump more CO2 into the atmosphere to accelerate this process. Existing species are boring. Lets get some new ones. Don't you liberals like evolution? Why would you actively work against it?
Re:Comparable? (Score:4, Informative)
Don't you liberals like evolution? Why would you actively work against it?
Depends on whether or not you're one of the survivors. Hard to know which side of the fence you will fall on when the shit hits the fan. Evolution changes the biosphere, evolution doesn't care whether your DNA and the rest of your corporal assets happen to get passed along.
There are lots of losers in evolution. You just might be one of them.
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Don't go getting Randall all worked up again.
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When the earth gets too hot, the extreme plant growth leads to the rise of giant animals like dinosaurs. We don't want to be eaten by dinosaurs.
Speak for yourself. Dinolingus and dinolatio are the best.
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So the extreme plant growth leads to giant animals? How quickly? By Tuesday?
Dangerous large animals can be made extinct very quickly by things like howitzers. I don't think the dinosaurs will be armed.
Or were you just making a joke?
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Why is it so very hard for people to accept that increases in CO2 in the atmosphere, whatever their source, is not a good thing for a lot of species?
oft times it is because they believe their livelihood depends on their not understanding.
Re:Comparable? (Score:4, Insightful)
So you reject out of hand the Permian report, you know, an actual geological example, because of some vague notion that higher-than-now CO2 was great for dragonflies?
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Those giant dragonflies and other large insects existed when the oxygen level of the atmosphere was considerably higher than it is now. It wouldn't be possible for them to get that big at the current level of oxygen because of the limitations of insect respiratory systems.
Volcanoes emit CO2 (Score:2)
Natural outcome (Score:3, Insightful)
Self-inflicted extinction event from anthropogenic activities could be seen as natural negative feedback mechanism. The equilibrium is restored.
I understand the future for the humanity and multitude of ecosystems may be grim but the nature will thrive nevertheless.
There are certain boundaries and one is that there's only one Earth. We can affect our future, and it's impossible to escape the consequences.
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If you're talking about on a species level, well, maybe, but I see little point in such a perspective.
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Just becasue you don't seem to get it, we Only the most outrages hubris assume are talking about the human species. That new equilibrium doesn't have to be one that's survivable by humans..or any species. Venus has an equilibrium.
Only the most outrages hubris would assume equilibrium = survivable by humans.
Darn... (Score:2)
Crump, Michigan misses out again.
Extinctions (Score:2)
So what was the difference between thevolcanic eruptions at the end of the Permian, and the ones at the end of the Triassic?
I just got the book The Sixth Extinction, and am starting to read it.
At those time scales, who cares? (Score:2)
5,000 years? 32,000 years? 60,000 years?
What about next month? Next year?
In the long run, we'll all be dead. Call me when they figure out how to avoid that, and then we'll talk about thousands of years.
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I suspect the actual extinctions took place much more quickly, while the after effects continued long enough that nothing could recover until the planet had stabilised. It's not like an asteroid or volcanic eruption took place and everything gradually died off over many thousands of years.
It would have been a relatively sudden shock, followed by hell on earth for the event duration, dissipating over the long haul. A few small pockets of relative hospitability would have held out long enough for the rest of
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In the long run, we'll all be dead. Call me when they figure out how to avoid that, and then we'll talk about thousands of years.
Why? If you already can't care about the future of other humans, then why should we expect you to be interested in contributing later?
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Well, a good way to start avoiding it is to mitigate global changes.
"In the long run, we'll all be dead"
People who say that are the worst of the species.
The Permian, when time stood still (Score:2)
Wait a minute (Score:2)
Is someone trying to compare an extinction event that release enough lava to cover the entire earth 12 metres deep to man-made CO2 emissions?
It's the Food Chain (Score:3)
Once food supply for an animal or human is disrupted, die offs are painfully quick.
Egypt once had a massive inland lake and streams that eventually dumped into the Nile thousands of years before Christ. Once the climate changed back toward desert, the entire population of humans disappeared in probably decades to a century in that region.
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Why are you assuming they died? Those populations may have just moved to a more habitable area.
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Bad math (Score:3)
6,000,000 cubic kilometers of molten material - enough to cover the continental U.S. at a one mile depth.
I don't think the submitter understands math. One mile is about 1.6 km, so 6,000,000 km^3 of lava would cover an area of 3,750,000 km^2. Yet when I check Wikipedia (and Princeton, and the other top 5 Google results), they all say the Contiguous United States [wikipedia.org] has an area of just over 8,000,000 km^2. That's an awfully big mistake. I hope the actual Stanford paper is of better quality than the Slashdot summary.
Re:Funny how fast things have went to panic mode (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think a lot of scientists say the end of the world is nigh. You seem to be confusing scientists with activists. I ignore the latter, but pay a great deal of attention to the former.
What these researchers are trying to say is that there are consequences to large amounts of CO2 entering the atmosphere. Now I can't say that human activity will produce as radical an increase as massive volcanism on the scale described in this article, but still, it ought to make you pause to think that maybe, just maybe, puling out millions of years of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere in the space of three centuries is probably not a great idea, and while the consequences likely won't be that 90% of life dies out, it will have some serious consequences for us and many of those critters we happen to inhabit this planet with.
But hey, I guess it's probably more comforting to make nasty accusations against scientists. That way, you don't have to do a thing and you can feel all clever and righteous. Those stupid scientists, how dare they remind us that we don't live in a vacuum. They must be crooked grant seekers.
Re:Funny how fast things have went to panic mode (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps that's because you don't have the faintest idea what the scientists are talking about. Have you even read the IPCC reports or any of the primary literature?
How are you any different than a Creationist at this point? Simply declaring "Those scientists are just spouting a religion" any different than what the kooks at Answers in Genesis say about biology?
Grow the fuck up. The universe doesn't give one single fuck about your ideology or pseudo-skepticism. Be a fucking adult and accept the reality that barfing massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere is not some neutral practice.
Fucking hell, people like you piss me off. So fucking lazy that you just latch on to the kooky green activists and make believe in your pathetic fact free minds that Al Gore somehow represents the climatology community.
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Have you even read the IPCC reports
Are you talking about the detailed IPCC reports, or the IPCC summaries written by non-scientist politicians that skip over the uncertainties and trumpet disaster as if it were a certain thing?
Re:Funny how fast things have went to panic mode (Score:4, Interesting)
I've read both. As well as the literature.
The uncertainties are not whether or not its happening, it's about the margin of error in the time line. As it is turning out, they(scientist who are an expert in this field) have been mostly too conservative in that.
Do you even understand the basic science of this?
Since you can't seem to look at science, that's look at the real world political practicalities. well, 1 of them.
China has the most to lose with global warming. Yet they agree its also man made. Do you think China is part of some environmentalist conspiracy?
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Since you can't seem to look at science, that's look at the real world political practicalities. well, 1 of them.
This sentence is a bit hard to parse.
China has the most to lose with global warming.
What does China have to lose? What's the scenario? Rising sea levels? Do you believe in some kind of global human extinction scenario?
Yet they agree its also man made. Do you think China is part of some environmentalist conspiracy?
I really don't pay too much attention to official pronouncements from communist propaganda outlets.
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China has the most to lose with global warming.
China evidently doesn't believe you else they would be doing something about it rather than increasing CO2 emissions year after year.
Do you think China is part of some environmentalist conspiracy?
Well, they're certainly benefiting economically from not having the climate change stuff applied to themselves. And it sure looks to me like they used the Kyoto Treaty as a weapon of economic warfare.
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Dude. If you are being paid to post this sort of rubbish please contact me. I want in.
I love the irony of your forming a conspiracy theory about my AGW skepticism.
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Nope, I've just becoming more and more suspicious that Global Warming isn't science at all. It looks more to me these days like religion. It's got its apocalypse, its satans, its prophets and saviors.
Please realize that "global warming" is not a single entity. There are many climate scientists. Some are given to hysterics, others are very conservative in their estimates. They don't speak with a single voice any more than (some group of people you like) are all idiots because (an idiot in that group) is an idiot and says (idiotic thing they say).
And it seems to be based on an unfalsifiable hypothesis, which I'm pretty sure isn't a part of any empirical "science" that I've ever been taught.
It is falsifiable. We're doing the experiment now. It's dumb to be DOING the experiment when we only have one climate is the point. There are many sub-hypo
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Re:Funny how fast things have went to panic mode (Score:4, Insightful)
".. And it seems to be based on an unfalsifiable hypothesis, .." .. none. You have no idea what the science is, do you?
What. The. Fuck?
You really have no clue, do you? I mean
That would be fine, but then you base your argument on your willful ignorance. Sickening.
Let me break it down.
1) Visible light hits the Earth. Testable and falsifiable. Check
2) CO2 is transparent to visible light. Testable and falsifiable. Check
3) When visible light strikes something, IR is generated. Testable and falsifiable. Check
4) CO2 absorbs IR energy. Testable and falsifiable. Check
5) More CO2 is put into then atmosphere that can be absorbed. Testable and falsifiable. Check
SO genius, explain to me where the energy is going if it isn't warming the atmosphere? Why are the scientific prediction actually happening?
If shit hits the fan, People like you should be the first against the wall.
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Funny how fast science can turn into outright doomsday panic when grant money is involved.
Grant money or Al Gore.
Re:Funny how fast things have went to panic mode (Score:5, Insightful)
Al Gore has little or nothing to do with actual research, and if grant money is your accusation, well then pretty much all publicly-funded science can be thrown out the door; everything from archaeology to high energy physics research. Are you that determined to reject climatology that most of the science that goes on in the world is disposable?
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Are you that determined to reject climatology that most of the science that goes on in the world is disposable?
It does make for an easy to swallow, mindless approach to a complicated and scary world. For many people, this is reason enough to go that route.
Re:Funny how fast things have went to panic mode (Score:4, Insightful)
Grant money
Because the NSF has so much more money to spend than ExxonMobil.
Al Gore
DRINK!
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A) One is alarmist and not scientists, pay attention to the scientists
B) It's been 25 years of mostly no series attempt to correct things. So the timeline has been getting shorter.
C) Scientists have almost always resented the most conservative numbers. This has been a mistak. Not that they should be alarmist, but they should also point out worst case.
D) If you are old enough to remember the 70's you would be aware the alarmists have been going on since then, and probalby even before
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My biggest problem?
Let's assume they are right, and we're all going to die if we don't do something.
What the fuck would you like us to do, precisely? And is it going to be better or worse than not doing anything at all?*
Few people seem to have an answer to that question. Which means the "answer" is really "Do nothing, pump a bit more money into research".
There. That's our emergency response. Can we all shut up now?
(* I can't actually think of much worse things in the immediate future than, say, oil runn
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Seems like we have only about 5000 to 50000 years to work this out. Better get busy then :)
Just put the hose extension of a Dyson on every rooftop and wash the filter daily. Atmosphere will be dust free in a matter of years. You can power the Dysons via solar in a matter of months.
Re:The asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs.. (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, it took 32768 years. Then its short int turned negative and killed the dinosaurs.
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It was because of global warming from an Ice Age that humans managed to get our of Africa.
If that never happened we'd be stuck in Africa due to uninhabitable deserts blocking the path north and the rest of the world would be ruled by the Neanderthals.
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So I'll admit my knowledge of the Cretaceous asteroid impact is the simplified version of public education combined with the History Channel. 32,000 years though? I thought it would have been a matter of decades, because the particulate matter thrown in the atmosphere reduced the incoming sunlight, which essentially reduced plant life substantially and having a cascading effect up the food chain. I would imagine that would take a couple of years to decades, but not millenia; what am I missing?
One question the TFA doesn't address is exactly what is meant by impact times. Certainly it's not the case that the event occurred one day and 32000 years later, everything is hunky dory. The volcanism events happened over hundreds to thousands of years, the asteroid impact, a couple of seconds. In the vulcanism scenario, I imagine that things changed pretty gradually, there may have been a 'tipping point' or several. In the impact scenario, the changes happen relatively rapidly with likely a long tail