Scientists Have Uncovered a Disturbing Climate Change Precedent
During the rise of mammals, Earth's temperatures spiked in a scary way that the planet may experience again soon.
PETER BRANNEN
AUG 6, 2018
They were strange days at the beginning of the age of mammals. The planet was still hungover from the astonishing disappearance of its marquee superstars, the dinosaurs. Earth’s newest crater was still a smoldering system of hydrothermal vents, roiling under the Gulf of Mexico. In the wake of Armageddon our shell-shocked ancestors meekly negotiated new roles on a planet they inherited quite by accident. Before long, life settled into new rhythms: Earth hosted 50-foot-long boas sliding through steam-bath jungles, birds grew gigantic in imitation of their dearly departed cousins, and mildly modern mammals we might squint to recognize appeared. Within a few million years, loosed from under the iron heel of the vanished giants, they began to experiment. Early whales pranced across a Pakistani archipelago on all fours, testing out life in the water. The first lemur-like primates leapt from the treetops, and hoofed things of all varieties dashed through the forest.
But the most striking feature of this early age of mammals is that it was almost unbelievably hot, so hot that around 50 million years ago there were crocodiles, palm trees, and sand tiger sharks in the Arctic Circle. On the other side of the blue-green orb, in waters that today would surround Antarctica, sea-surface temperatures might have topped an unthinkable 86 degrees Fahrenheit, with near-tropical forests on Antarctica itself. There were perhaps even sprawling, febrile dead zones spanning the tropics, too hot even for animal or plant life of any sort.
This is what you get in an ancient atmosphere with around 1,000 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide. If this number sounds familiar, 1,000 ppm of CO2 is around what humanity is on pace to reach by the end of this century. That should be mildly concerning.
“You put more CO2 in the atmosphere and you get more warming, that’s just super-simple physics that we figured out in the 19th century,” says David Naafs, an organic geochemist at the University of Bristol. “But exactly how much it will warm by the end of the century, we don’t know. Based on our research of these ancient climates, though, it’s probably more than we thought.”
Last week, Naafs and colleagues released a study in Nature Geoscience that reconstructs temperatures on land during this ancient high-CO2 hothouse of the late Paleocene and early Eocene epochs—the sweltering launch to the age of mammals. And the temperatures they unearthed are unsurprisingly scorching.
To study Earth’s past, scientists need good rocks to study, and fortunately for geologists and fossil-fuel companies alike, the jungles and swamps of this early age of mammals left behind lots of coal. The Powder River Basin in the United States, for instance, is filled with fossil Paleocene swamplands that, when burned today, contribute about 10 percent of U.S. carbon emissions. Naafs’ team studied examples of lower-quality coals called lignites, or fossilized peat. They had been collected around the world (everywhere from open-pit coal mines in Germany to outcrops in New Zealand), and spanned the late-Paleocene and early-Eocene epochs, from around 56 to 48 million years ago. They were able to reverse engineer the ancient climate by analyzing temperature-sensitive structures of lipids produced by fossil bacteria and archaea living in these bygone wetlands, and preserved for all time in the coal. The team found that, under this past regime of high CO2, in the ancient U.K., Germany, and New Zealand, life endured mean annual temperatures of 23–29 degrees Celsius (73–84 degrees Fahrenheit) or 10–15 degrees Celsius (18–27 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than modern times.
“These wetlands looked exactly how only tropical wetlands look at present, like the Everglades or the Amazon,” Naafs says. “So Europe would look like the Everglades and a heat wave like we’re currently experiencing in Europe would be completely normal. That is, it would be the everyday climate.”
That modern European heat wave has, in recent weeks, sent sunbathing Scandinavians and reindeer to the beach in temperatures topping 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the Arctic Circle. It has also ignited devastating wildfires across Greece and triggered an excruciating weekend for Spain and Portugal. But over 50 million years ago this would have been the baseline from about 45 to 60 degrees latitude. Under this broiling regime, with unprecedented heat as the norm, actual heat waves might have begun to take on an unearthly quality.
“Perhaps a heat wave in Europe would be something like 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) for three weeks. We don’t know.” So that was life in the late Paleocene and early Eocene in the high mid-latitudes. But closer to the equator in this global sweat lodge, the heat might have been even more outrageous, shattering the limits of complex life. To see exactly how hot, Naafs’ team also analyzed ancient lignite samples from India, which would have been in the tropics at the time—that subcontinent still drifting across the Indian Ocean toward its eventual mountain-raising rendezvous with Asia. But unfortunately, the temperatures from these samples were maxed out. That is, they were too hot for his team to measure by the new methods they had developed. So it remains an open question just how infernal the tropics became in these early days of our ancestors, but some computers tasked with recreating this planet spit out the stuff of science fiction.
“Some climate models suggest that the tropics just became a dead zone with temperatures over 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) like in Africa and South America,” says Naafs. “But we have no data so we don’t know.”
Naafs’ work fits into a larger developing picture of Earth as an almost unrecognizable greenhouse planet of the distant past. University of Colorado paleontologist Jaelyn Eberle recently returned to her office in Boulder from Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian High Arctic, where she’s been doing research since the 1990s. Ellesmere is as far north as you can get before you fall off North America and run into Père Noël drifting over pack ice. Here, featureless highlands overlook ice-choked fjords and a lone Peary’s caribou might mingle with a dozen musk oxen under a vast Nunavut sky. There are also polar bears, but Eberle luckily hasn’t had any run-ins so far—though perspective can play tricks on you at the top of the world, and a snow-white artic hare on its hind legs at the appropriate distance can appear threatening enough.
“You pick up your gun and get all nervous and worried and then look through your binoculars ... It’s just a rabbit,” says Eberle.
But Eberle isn’t venturing this far north just for the occasional hair-raising encounter with polar wildlife. Her target is warmer-weather fauna. Though there are no trees here at the top of the world, there are tree stumps. And they are around 50 million years old.
“The fossil forests on Ellesmere are spectacular,” Eberle says about the ecosystem entombed in the arctic soils. “You start really looking into them and you go, ‘Wow. We are dealing with a rainforest.’”
Eberle is a vertebrate paleontologist and though there’s the aforementioned odd musk ox passing by her camp to consider, in the rocks below she has her pick of animals to study.
“You’ve got alligators, giant tortoises, primates, things like that. We have these big hippo-like animals called Coryphodon. You have tapirs—so you’ve got tapirs living pretty close to the North Pole in the early Eocene, which today—clearly tapirs are not at the North Pole,” she says, laughing.
The presence of these animals suggests a very warm world indeed. And yet, there is a seeming disconnect, between traditional projections for future warming—like those made by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which predicts around 4 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by the end of the century under a business-as-usual emissions scenario (still frightening) and sea-level rise measured in mere inches (still frightening)—and the scarcely recognizable Earths buried in the rocks and created under similar CO2 regimes, like those that Eberle unearths.
One obvious way to reconcile this disparity is by noticing that the changes to the ancient earth took place over hundreds-of-thousands to millions of years and (IPCC graphs notwithstanding) that time won’t stop at the end of the 21st century. The changes that we’ve already set in motion, unless we act rapidly to countervail them, will similarly take millennia to fully unfold. The last time CO2 was at 400 ppm (as it is today) was 3 million years ago during the Pliocene epoch, when sea levels were perhaps 80 feet higher than today. Clearly the climate is not yet at equilibrium for a 400-ppm world.
And it won’t be for quite some time. And anyway, we’re clearly not content to stop at just 400 ppm. If we do, in fact, push CO2 up to around 1,000 ppm by the end of the century, the warming will persist and the earth will continue to change for what, to humans, is a practical eternity. And when the earth system finally does arrive at its equilibrium, it will most likely be in a climate state with no analog in the short evolutionary history of Homo sapiens. Most worryingly, the climate models that we depend on as a species to predict our future have largely failed to predict our sultry ancient past. And though the gulf is narrowing, and models are catching up, even those that come close to reproducing the hothouse of the early Eocene require injecting 16 times the modern level of CO2 into the air to achieve it—far beyond the rather meager doubling or tripling of CO2 indicated by the rock record.
Clearly we are missing something, and Naafs thinks that one of the missing ingredients in the models is methane, a powerful greenhouse gas which might help close the divide between model worlds and fossil worlds.
“We know nothing about the methane cycle during these greenhouse periods,” he says. “We know the hotter it gets the more methane comes out of these wetlands, but we know nothing about the methane cycle beyond the reach of ice cores which only goes back 800,000 years ... We know tropical wetlands pump much more methane into the atmosphere compared to [cooler] wetlands. And we know methane can actually amplify high-latitude warming, so maybe that’s some of the missing feedback.”
In many ways these ancient worlds are not analogs to our own. We have to be careful when making comparisons between the two. The early age of mammals was a different world. The continents were in slightly different positions, leading to a vastly different ocean circulation and boundary conditions quite unlike our own world, 50 million years on—with all the tectonic, oceanographic, and biological changes that come with such a yawning expanse of time. But artificially jam enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and Naafs thinks that many of the wildest features of the early age of mammals could be recreated.
“If we were to burn all the fossil fuels and wait a few centuries we might return to this,” he says. “Basically every type of paleoclimate research that’s being done shows that high CO2 means that it’s very warm. And when it gets very warm, it can be really, really, really warm.”
Richard94611 wrote:
Scientists Have Uncovered a Disturbing Climate Change Precedent
During the rise of mammals, Earth's temperatures spiked in a scary way that the planet may experience again soon.
PETER BRANNEN
AUG 6, 2018
They were strange days at the beginning of the age of mammals. The planet was still hungover from the astonishing disappearance of its marquee superstars, the dinosaurs. Earth’s newest crater was still a smoldering system of hydrothermal vents, roiling under the Gulf of Mexico. In the wake of Armageddon our shell-shocked ancestors meekly negotiated new roles on a planet they inherited quite by accident. Before long, life settled into new rhythms: Earth hosted 50-foot-long boas sliding through steam-bath jungles, birds grew gigantic in imitation of their dearly departed cousins, and mildly modern mammals we might squint to recognize appeared. Within a few million years, loosed from under the iron heel of the vanished giants, they began to experiment. Early whales pranced across a Pakistani archipelago on all fours, testing out life in the water. The first lemur-like primates leapt from the treetops, and hoofed things of all varieties dashed through the forest.
But the most striking feature of this early age of mammals is that it was almost unbelievably hot, so hot that around 50 million years ago there were crocodiles, palm trees, and sand tiger sharks in the Arctic Circle. On the other side of the blue-green orb, in waters that today would surround Antarctica, sea-surface temperatures might have topped an unthinkable 86 degrees Fahrenheit, with near-tropical forests on Antarctica itself. There were perhaps even sprawling, febrile dead zones spanning the tropics, too hot even for animal or plant life of any sort.
This is what you get in an ancient atmosphere with around 1,000 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide. If this number sounds familiar, 1,000 ppm of CO2 is around what humanity is on pace to reach by the end of this century. That should be mildly concerning.
“You put more CO2 in the atmosphere and you get more warming, that’s just super-simple physics that we figured out in the 19th century,” says David Naafs, an organic geochemist at the University of Bristol. “But exactly how much it will warm by the end of the century, we don’t know. Based on our research of these ancient climates, though, it’s probably more than we thought.”
Last week, Naafs and colleagues released a study in Nature Geoscience that reconstructs temperatures on land during this ancient high-CO2 hothouse of the late Paleocene and early Eocene epochs—the sweltering launch to the age of mammals. And the temperatures they unearthed are unsurprisingly scorching.
To study Earth’s past, scientists need good rocks to study, and fortunately for geologists and fossil-fuel companies alike, the jungles and swamps of this early age of mammals left behind lots of coal. The Powder River Basin in the United States, for instance, is filled with fossil Paleocene swamplands that, when burned today, contribute about 10 percent of U.S. carbon emissions. Naafs’ team studied examples of lower-quality coals called lignites, or fossilized peat. They had been collected around the world (everywhere from open-pit coal mines in Germany to outcrops in New Zealand), and spanned the late-Paleocene and early-Eocene epochs, from around 56 to 48 million years ago. They were able to reverse engineer the ancient climate by analyzing temperature-sensitive structures of lipids produced by fossil bacteria and archaea living in these bygone wetlands, and preserved for all time in the coal. The team found that, under this past regime of high CO2, in the ancient U.K., Germany, and New Zealand, life endured mean annual temperatures of 23–29 degrees Celsius (73–84 degrees Fahrenheit) or 10–15 degrees Celsius (18–27 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than modern times.
“These wetlands looked exactly how only tropical wetlands look at present, like the Everglades or the Amazon,” Naafs says. “So Europe would look like the Everglades and a heat wave like we’re currently experiencing in Europe would be completely normal. That is, it would be the everyday climate.”
That modern European heat wave has, in recent weeks, sent sunbathing Scandinavians and reindeer to the beach in temperatures topping 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the Arctic Circle. It has also ignited devastating wildfires across Greece and triggered an excruciating weekend for Spain and Portugal. But over 50 million years ago this would have been the baseline from about 45 to 60 degrees latitude. Under this broiling regime, with unprecedented heat as the norm, actual heat waves might have begun to take on an unearthly quality.
“Perhaps a heat wave in Europe would be something like 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) for three weeks. We don’t know.” So that was life in the late Paleocene and early Eocene in the high mid-latitudes. But closer to the equator in this global sweat lodge, the heat might have been even more outrageous, shattering the limits of complex life. To see exactly how hot, Naafs’ team also analyzed ancient lignite samples from India, which would have been in the tropics at the time—that subcontinent still drifting across the Indian Ocean toward its eventual mountain-raising rendezvous with Asia. But unfortunately, the temperatures from these samples were maxed out. That is, they were too hot for his team to measure by the new methods they had developed. So it remains an open question just how infernal the tropics became in these early days of our ancestors, but some computers tasked with recreating this planet spit out the stuff of science fiction.
“Some climate models suggest that the tropics just became a dead zone with temperatures over 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) like in Africa and South America,” says Naafs. “But we have no data so we don’t know.”
Naafs’ work fits into a larger developing picture of Earth as an almost unrecognizable greenhouse planet of the distant past. University of Colorado paleontologist Jaelyn Eberle recently returned to her office in Boulder from Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian High Arctic, where she’s been doing research since the 1990s. Ellesmere is as far north as you can get before you fall off North America and run into Père Noël drifting over pack ice. Here, featureless highlands overlook ice-choked fjords and a lone Peary’s caribou might mingle with a dozen musk oxen under a vast Nunavut sky. There are also polar bears, but Eberle luckily hasn’t had any run-ins so far—though perspective can play tricks on you at the top of the world, and a snow-white artic hare on its hind legs at the appropriate distance can appear threatening enough.
“You pick up your gun and get all nervous and worried and then look through your binoculars ... It’s just a rabbit,” says Eberle.
But Eberle isn’t venturing this far north just for the occasional hair-raising encounter with polar wildlife. Her target is warmer-weather fauna. Though there are no trees here at the top of the world, there are tree stumps. And they are around 50 million years old.
“The fossil forests on Ellesmere are spectacular,” Eberle says about the ecosystem entombed in the arctic soils. “You start really looking into them and you go, ‘Wow. We are dealing with a rainforest.’”
Eberle is a vertebrate paleontologist and though there’s the aforementioned odd musk ox passing by her camp to consider, in the rocks below she has her pick of animals to study.
“You’ve got alligators, giant tortoises, primates, things like that. We have these big hippo-like animals called Coryphodon. You have tapirs—so you’ve got tapirs living pretty close to the North Pole in the early Eocene, which today—clearly tapirs are not at the North Pole,” she says, laughing.
The presence of these animals suggests a very warm world indeed. And yet, there is a seeming disconnect, between traditional projections for future warming—like those made by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which predicts around 4 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by the end of the century under a business-as-usual emissions scenario (still frightening) and sea-level rise measured in mere inches (still frightening)—and the scarcely recognizable Earths buried in the rocks and created under similar CO2 regimes, like those that Eberle unearths.
One obvious way to reconcile this disparity is by noticing that the changes to the ancient earth took place over hundreds-of-thousands to millions of years and (IPCC graphs notwithstanding) that time won’t stop at the end of the 21st century. The changes that we’ve already set in motion, unless we act rapidly to countervail them, will similarly take millennia to fully unfold. The last time CO2 was at 400 ppm (as it is today) was 3 million years ago during the Pliocene epoch, when sea levels were perhaps 80 feet higher than today. Clearly the climate is not yet at equilibrium for a 400-ppm world.
And it won’t be for quite some time. And anyway, we’re clearly not content to stop at just 400 ppm. If we do, in fact, push CO2 up to around 1,000 ppm by the end of the century, the warming will persist and the earth will continue to change for what, to humans, is a practical eternity. And when the earth system finally does arrive at its equilibrium, it will most likely be in a climate state with no analog in the short evolutionary history of Homo sapiens. Most worryingly, the climate models that we depend on as a species to predict our future have largely failed to predict our sultry ancient past. And though the gulf is narrowing, and models are catching up, even those that come close to reproducing the hothouse of the early Eocene require injecting 16 times the modern level of CO2 into the air to achieve it—far beyond the rather meager doubling or tripling of CO2 indicated by the rock record.
Clearly we are missing something, and Naafs thinks that one of the missing ingredients in the models is methane, a powerful greenhouse gas which might help close the divide between model worlds and fossil worlds.
“We know nothing about the methane cycle during these greenhouse periods,” he says. “We know the hotter it gets the more methane comes out of these wetlands, but we know nothing about the methane cycle beyond the reach of ice cores which only goes back 800,000 years ... We know tropical wetlands pump much more methane into the atmosphere compared to [cooler] wetlands. And we know methane can actually amplify high-latitude warming, so maybe that’s some of the missing feedback.”
In many ways these ancient worlds are not analogs to our own. We have to be careful when making comparisons between the two. The early age of mammals was a different world. The continents were in slightly different positions, leading to a vastly different ocean circulation and boundary conditions quite unlike our own world, 50 million years on—with all the tectonic, oceanographic, and biological changes that come with such a yawning expanse of time. But artificially jam enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and Naafs thinks that many of the wildest features of the early age of mammals could be recreated.
“If we were to burn all the fossil fuels and wait a few centuries we might return to this,” he says. “Basically every type of paleoclimate research that’s being done shows that high CO2 means that it’s very warm. And when it gets very warm, it can be really, really, really warm.”
b Scientists Have Uncovered a Disturbing Climate ... (
show quote)
An interesting read but I dare say it would not move the needle at Trumpnation.
eden wrote:
An interesting read but I dare say it would not move the needle at Trumpnation.
Maybe if the information came from someplace other than the home of the hockey stick model...?
Richard94611 wrote:
Scientists Have Uncovered a Disturbing Climate Change Precedent
During the rise of mammals, Earth's temperatures spiked in a scary way that the planet may experience again soon.
PETER BRANNEN
AUG 6, 2018
They were strange days at the beginning of the age of mammals. The planet was still hungover from the astonishing disappearance of its marquee superstars, the dinosaurs. Earth’s newest crater was still a smoldering system of hydrothermal vents, roiling under the Gulf of Mexico. In the wake of Armageddon our shell-shocked ancestors meekly negotiated new roles on a planet they inherited quite by accident. Before long, life settled into new rhythms: Earth hosted 50-foot-long boas sliding through steam-bath jungles, birds grew gigantic in imitation of their dearly departed cousins, and mildly modern mammals we might squint to recognize appeared. Within a few million years, loosed from under the iron heel of the vanished giants, they began to experiment. Early whales pranced across a Pakistani archipelago on all fours, testing out life in the water. The first lemur-like primates leapt from the treetops, and hoofed things of all varieties dashed through the forest.
But the most striking feature of this early age of mammals is that it was almost unbelievably hot, so hot that around 50 million years ago there were crocodiles, palm trees, and sand tiger sharks in the Arctic Circle. On the other side of the blue-green orb, in waters that today would surround Antarctica, sea-surface temperatures might have topped an unthinkable 86 degrees Fahrenheit, with near-tropical forests on Antarctica itself. There were perhaps even sprawling, febrile dead zones spanning the tropics, too hot even for animal or plant life of any sort.
This is what you get in an ancient atmosphere with around 1,000 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide. If this number sounds familiar, 1,000 ppm of CO2 is around what humanity is on pace to reach by the end of this century. That should be mildly concerning.
“You put more CO2 in the atmosphere and you get more warming, that’s just super-simple physics that we figured out in the 19th century,” says David Naafs, an organic geochemist at the University of Bristol. “But exactly how much it will warm by the end of the century, we don’t know. Based on our research of these ancient climates, though, it’s probably more than we thought.”
Last week, Naafs and colleagues released a study in Nature Geoscience that reconstructs temperatures on land during this ancient high-CO2 hothouse of the late Paleocene and early Eocene epochs—the sweltering launch to the age of mammals. And the temperatures they unearthed are unsurprisingly scorching.
To study Earth’s past, scientists need good rocks to study, and fortunately for geologists and fossil-fuel companies alike, the jungles and swamps of this early age of mammals left behind lots of coal. The Powder River Basin in the United States, for instance, is filled with fossil Paleocene swamplands that, when burned today, contribute about 10 percent of U.S. carbon emissions. Naafs’ team studied examples of lower-quality coals called lignites, or fossilized peat. They had been collected around the world (everywhere from open-pit coal mines in Germany to outcrops in New Zealand), and spanned the late-Paleocene and early-Eocene epochs, from around 56 to 48 million years ago. They were able to reverse engineer the ancient climate by analyzing temperature-sensitive structures of lipids produced by fossil bacteria and archaea living in these bygone wetlands, and preserved for all time in the coal. The team found that, under this past regime of high CO2, in the ancient U.K., Germany, and New Zealand, life endured mean annual temperatures of 23–29 degrees Celsius (73–84 degrees Fahrenheit) or 10–15 degrees Celsius (18–27 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than modern times.
“These wetlands looked exactly how only tropical wetlands look at present, like the Everglades or the Amazon,” Naafs says. “So Europe would look like the Everglades and a heat wave like we’re currently experiencing in Europe would be completely normal. That is, it would be the everyday climate.”
That modern European heat wave has, in recent weeks, sent sunbathing Scandinavians and reindeer to the beach in temperatures topping 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the Arctic Circle. It has also ignited devastating wildfires across Greece and triggered an excruciating weekend for Spain and Portugal. But over 50 million years ago this would have been the baseline from about 45 to 60 degrees latitude. Under this broiling regime, with unprecedented heat as the norm, actual heat waves might have begun to take on an unearthly quality.
“Perhaps a heat wave in Europe would be something like 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) for three weeks. We don’t know.” So that was life in the late Paleocene and early Eocene in the high mid-latitudes. But closer to the equator in this global sweat lodge, the heat might have been even more outrageous, shattering the limits of complex life. To see exactly how hot, Naafs’ team also analyzed ancient lignite samples from India, which would have been in the tropics at the time—that subcontinent still drifting across the Indian Ocean toward its eventual mountain-raising rendezvous with Asia. But unfortunately, the temperatures from these samples were maxed out. That is, they were too hot for his team to measure by the new methods they had developed. So it remains an open question just how infernal the tropics became in these early days of our ancestors, but some computers tasked with recreating this planet spit out the stuff of science fiction.
“Some climate models suggest that the tropics just became a dead zone with temperatures over 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) like in Africa and South America,” says Naafs. “But we have no data so we don’t know.”
Naafs’ work fits into a larger developing picture of Earth as an almost unrecognizable greenhouse planet of the distant past. University of Colorado paleontologist Jaelyn Eberle recently returned to her office in Boulder from Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian High Arctic, where she’s been doing research since the 1990s. Ellesmere is as far north as you can get before you fall off North America and run into Père Noël drifting over pack ice. Here, featureless highlands overlook ice-choked fjords and a lone Peary’s caribou might mingle with a dozen musk oxen under a vast Nunavut sky. There are also polar bears, but Eberle luckily hasn’t had any run-ins so far—though perspective can play tricks on you at the top of the world, and a snow-white artic hare on its hind legs at the appropriate distance can appear threatening enough.
“You pick up your gun and get all nervous and worried and then look through your binoculars ... It’s just a rabbit,” says Eberle.
But Eberle isn’t venturing this far north just for the occasional hair-raising encounter with polar wildlife. Her target is warmer-weather fauna. Though there are no trees here at the top of the world, there are tree stumps. And they are around 50 million years old.
“The fossil forests on Ellesmere are spectacular,” Eberle says about the ecosystem entombed in the arctic soils. “You start really looking into them and you go, ‘Wow. We are dealing with a rainforest.’”
Eberle is a vertebrate paleontologist and though there’s the aforementioned odd musk ox passing by her camp to consider, in the rocks below she has her pick of animals to study.
“You’ve got alligators, giant tortoises, primates, things like that. We have these big hippo-like animals called Coryphodon. You have tapirs—so you’ve got tapirs living pretty close to the North Pole in the early Eocene, which today—clearly tapirs are not at the North Pole,” she says, laughing.
The presence of these animals suggests a very warm world indeed. And yet, there is a seeming disconnect, between traditional projections for future warming—like those made by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which predicts around 4 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by the end of the century under a business-as-usual emissions scenario (still frightening) and sea-level rise measured in mere inches (still frightening)—and the scarcely recognizable Earths buried in the rocks and created under similar CO2 regimes, like those that Eberle unearths.
One obvious way to reconcile this disparity is by noticing that the changes to the ancient earth took place over hundreds-of-thousands to millions of years and (IPCC graphs notwithstanding) that time won’t stop at the end of the 21st century. The changes that we’ve already set in motion, unless we act rapidly to countervail them, will similarly take millennia to fully unfold. The last time CO2 was at 400 ppm (as it is today) was 3 million years ago during the Pliocene epoch, when sea levels were perhaps 80 feet higher than today. Clearly the climate is not yet at equilibrium for a 400-ppm world.
And it won’t be for quite some time. And anyway, we’re clearly not content to stop at just 400 ppm. If we do, in fact, push CO2 up to around 1,000 ppm by the end of the century, the warming will persist and the earth will continue to change for what, to humans, is a practical eternity. And when the earth system finally does arrive at its equilibrium, it will most likely be in a climate state with no analog in the short evolutionary history of Homo sapiens. Most worryingly, the climate models that we depend on as a species to predict our future have largely failed to predict our sultry ancient past. And though the gulf is narrowing, and models are catching up, even those that come close to reproducing the hothouse of the early Eocene require injecting 16 times the modern level of CO2 into the air to achieve it—far beyond the rather meager doubling or tripling of CO2 indicated by the rock record.
Clearly we are missing something, and Naafs thinks that one of the missing ingredients in the models is methane, a powerful greenhouse gas which might help close the divide between model worlds and fossil worlds.
“We know nothing about the methane cycle during these greenhouse periods,” he says. “We know the hotter it gets the more methane comes out of these wetlands, but we know nothing about the methane cycle beyond the reach of ice cores which only goes back 800,000 years ... We know tropical wetlands pump much more methane into the atmosphere compared to [cooler] wetlands. And we know methane can actually amplify high-latitude warming, so maybe that’s some of the missing feedback.”
In many ways these ancient worlds are not analogs to our own. We have to be careful when making comparisons between the two. The early age of mammals was a different world. The continents were in slightly different positions, leading to a vastly different ocean circulation and boundary conditions quite unlike our own world, 50 million years on—with all the tectonic, oceanographic, and biological changes that come with such a yawning expanse of time. But artificially jam enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and Naafs thinks that many of the wildest features of the early age of mammals could be recreated.
“If we were to burn all the fossil fuels and wait a few centuries we might return to this,” he says. “Basically every type of paleoclimate research that’s being done shows that high CO2 means that it’s very warm. And when it gets very warm, it can be really, really, really warm.”
b Scientists Have Uncovered a Disturbing Climate ... (
show quote)
The trouble you have is that there is an inconvenient fact hidden in Al Gore's inconvenient truth.
In Al Gore's movie, " An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore pointed out that there is a correlation between Carbon Dioxide and warmer temperatures. "It's complicated," he said, "but, it's there."
The trouble is that the carbon dioxide doesn't bring warm temperatures, it's the warm temperature that increase the carbon dioxide.
75% of the earth is covered in water, when the temperature rises, it increases the life forms in the ocean that exhale carbon dioxide. This increase in life forms is what increases the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, in direct proportion to the increase in temperature.
This in not an instantaneous relationship. The maximum increase in temperature is off set the maximum increase in carbon dioxide by 800 years.
The maximum decrease in carbon dioxide, is also off set the maximum decrease in temperature by 800 years.
How do we know this?
By the ice core drills taken from every glacier across the world.
Glaciers that are hundreds of thousands of years old to glaciers in Antarctica that are over a million years old.
The great global warming swindle - Full version
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELfQ7FI6ZocThe Great Global Warming Swindle - Full Movie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-m09lKtYT4Al Gore Humiliation: NASA Study Confirms Sea Levels Are FALLING
http://www.teaparty.org/al-gore-humiliation-nasa-study-confirms-sea-levels-falling-254701/BREAKING: NASA Drops Global Warming Truth Bomb, People Are Stunned,
A new NASA study has found that a geothermal heat source underneath the ice caps, consisting of heated rock and volcanic activity, is the real reason why the ice caps are melting — not global warming.
Scientists have long speculated that a geothermal heat source, called a mantle plume, lies directly underneath a significant portion of Antarctica. This recent study, however, has explained how the ice sheet collapsed so rapidly in an earlier era of rapid climate change and why the ice mass is so unstable today.
http://www.teaparty.org/breaking-nasa-drops-global-warming-truth-bomb-people-stunned-276558/Richard Lindzen, Ph.D. Lecture Deconstructs Global Warming Hysteria (High Quality Version) (excellent coverage)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sHg3ZztDAGlobal Warming Alarmists Caught Doctoring '97-Percent Consensus' Claims
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/05/30/global-warming-alarmists-caught-doctoring-Debunking the 97% 'consensus' on global warming
a Canada-based group calling itself Friends of Science has just completed a review of the four main studies used to document the alleged consensus and found that only 1 - 3% of respondents "explicitly stated agreement with the IPCC declarations on global warming," and that there was "no agreement with a catastrophic view."
http://www.onepoliticalplaza.com/t-40661-35.html#142604Antarctic ice shelf melt 'lowest EVER recorded, global warming is NOT eroding it' Jan 3, 2014
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/03/antarctic_ice_shelf_melt_lowest_ever_rec
Richard94611 wrote:
Scientists Have Uncovered a Disturbing Climate Change Precedent
During the rise of mammals, Earth's temperatures spiked in a scary way that the planet may experience again soon.
PETER BRANNEN
AUG 6, 2018
They were strange days at the beginning of the age of mammals. The planet was still hungover from the astonishing disappearance of its marquee superstars, the dinosaurs. Earth’s newest crater was still a smoldering system of hydrothermal vents, roiling under the Gulf of Mexico. In the wake of Armageddon our shell-shocked ancestors meekly negotiated new roles on a planet they inherited quite by accident. Before long, life settled into new rhythms: Earth hosted 50-foot-long boas sliding through steam-bath jungles, birds grew gigantic in imitation of their dearly departed cousins, and mildly modern mammals we might squint to recognize appeared. Within a few million years, loosed from under the iron heel of the vanished giants, they began to experiment. Early whales pranced across a Pakistani archipelago on all fours, testing out life in the water. The first lemur-like primates leapt from the treetops, and hoofed things of all varieties dashed through the forest.
But the most striking feature of this early age of mammals is that it was almost unbelievably hot, so hot that around 50 million years ago there were crocodiles, palm trees, and sand tiger sharks in the Arctic Circle. On the other side of the blue-green orb, in waters that today would surround Antarctica, sea-surface temperatures might have topped an unthinkable 86 degrees Fahrenheit, with near-tropical forests on Antarctica itself. There were perhaps even sprawling, febrile dead zones spanning the tropics, too hot even for animal or plant life of any sort.
This is what you get in an ancient atmosphere with around 1,000 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide. If this number sounds familiar, 1,000 ppm of CO2 is around what humanity is on pace to reach by the end of this century. That should be mildly concerning.
“You put more CO2 in the atmosphere and you get more warming, that’s just super-simple physics that we figured out in the 19th century,” says David Naafs, an organic geochemist at the University of Bristol. “But exactly how much it will warm by the end of the century, we don’t know. Based on our research of these ancient climates, though, it’s probably more than we thought.”
Last week, Naafs and colleagues released a study in Nature Geoscience that reconstructs temperatures on land during this ancient high-CO2 hothouse of the late Paleocene and early Eocene epochs—the sweltering launch to the age of mammals. And the temperatures they unearthed are unsurprisingly scorching.
To study Earth’s past, scientists need good rocks to study, and fortunately for geologists and fossil-fuel companies alike, the jungles and swamps of this early age of mammals left behind lots of coal. The Powder River Basin in the United States, for instance, is filled with fossil Paleocene swamplands that, when burned today, contribute about 10 percent of U.S. carbon emissions. Naafs’ team studied examples of lower-quality coals called lignites, or fossilized peat. They had been collected around the world (everywhere from open-pit coal mines in Germany to outcrops in New Zealand), and spanned the late-Paleocene and early-Eocene epochs, from around 56 to 48 million years ago. They were able to reverse engineer the ancient climate by analyzing temperature-sensitive structures of lipids produced by fossil bacteria and archaea living in these bygone wetlands, and preserved for all time in the coal. The team found that, under this past regime of high CO2, in the ancient U.K., Germany, and New Zealand, life endured mean annual temperatures of 23–29 degrees Celsius (73–84 degrees Fahrenheit) or 10–15 degrees Celsius (18–27 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than modern times.
“These wetlands looked exactly how only tropical wetlands look at present, like the Everglades or the Amazon,” Naafs says. “So Europe would look like the Everglades and a heat wave like we’re currently experiencing in Europe would be completely normal. That is, it would be the everyday climate.”
That modern European heat wave has, in recent weeks, sent sunbathing Scandinavians and reindeer to the beach in temperatures topping 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the Arctic Circle. It has also ignited devastating wildfires across Greece and triggered an excruciating weekend for Spain and Portugal. But over 50 million years ago this would have been the baseline from about 45 to 60 degrees latitude. Under this broiling regime, with unprecedented heat as the norm, actual heat waves might have begun to take on an unearthly quality.
“Perhaps a heat wave in Europe would be something like 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) for three weeks. We don’t know.” So that was life in the late Paleocene and early Eocene in the high mid-latitudes. But closer to the equator in this global sweat lodge, the heat might have been even more outrageous, shattering the limits of complex life. To see exactly how hot, Naafs’ team also analyzed ancient lignite samples from India, which would have been in the tropics at the time—that subcontinent still drifting across the Indian Ocean toward its eventual mountain-raising rendezvous with Asia. But unfortunately, the temperatures from these samples were maxed out. That is, they were too hot for his team to measure by the new methods they had developed. So it remains an open question just how infernal the tropics became in these early days of our ancestors, but some computers tasked with recreating this planet spit out the stuff of science fiction.
“Some climate models suggest that the tropics just became a dead zone with temperatures over 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) like in Africa and South America,” says Naafs. “But we have no data so we don’t know.”
Naafs’ work fits into a larger developing picture of Earth as an almost unrecognizable greenhouse planet of the distant past. University of Colorado paleontologist Jaelyn Eberle recently returned to her office in Boulder from Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian High Arctic, where she’s been doing research since the 1990s. Ellesmere is as far north as you can get before you fall off North America and run into Père Noël drifting over pack ice. Here, featureless highlands overlook ice-choked fjords and a lone Peary’s caribou might mingle with a dozen musk oxen under a vast Nunavut sky. There are also polar bears, but Eberle luckily hasn’t had any run-ins so far—though perspective can play tricks on you at the top of the world, and a snow-white artic hare on its hind legs at the appropriate distance can appear threatening enough.
“You pick up your gun and get all nervous and worried and then look through your binoculars ... It’s just a rabbit,” says Eberle.
But Eberle isn’t venturing this far north just for the occasional hair-raising encounter with polar wildlife. Her target is warmer-weather fauna. Though there are no trees here at the top of the world, there are tree stumps. And they are around 50 million years old.
“The fossil forests on Ellesmere are spectacular,” Eberle says about the ecosystem entombed in the arctic soils. “You start really looking into them and you go, ‘Wow. We are dealing with a rainforest.’”
Eberle is a vertebrate paleontologist and though there’s the aforementioned odd musk ox passing by her camp to consider, in the rocks below she has her pick of animals to study.
“You’ve got alligators, giant tortoises, primates, things like that. We have these big hippo-like animals called Coryphodon. You have tapirs—so you’ve got tapirs living pretty close to the North Pole in the early Eocene, which today—clearly tapirs are not at the North Pole,” she says, laughing.
The presence of these animals suggests a very warm world indeed. And yet, there is a seeming disconnect, between traditional projections for future warming—like those made by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which predicts around 4 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by the end of the century under a business-as-usual emissions scenario (still frightening) and sea-level rise measured in mere inches (still frightening)—and the scarcely recognizable Earths buried in the rocks and created under similar CO2 regimes, like those that Eberle unearths.
One obvious way to reconcile this disparity is by noticing that the changes to the ancient earth took place over hundreds-of-thousands to millions of years and (IPCC graphs notwithstanding) that time won’t stop at the end of the 21st century. The changes that we’ve already set in motion, unless we act rapidly to countervail them, will similarly take millennia to fully unfold. The last time CO2 was at 400 ppm (as it is today) was 3 million years ago during the Pliocene epoch, when sea levels were perhaps 80 feet higher than today. Clearly the climate is not yet at equilibrium for a 400-ppm world.
And it won’t be for quite some time. And anyway, we’re clearly not content to stop at just 400 ppm. If we do, in fact, push CO2 up to around 1,000 ppm by the end of the century, the warming will persist and the earth will continue to change for what, to humans, is a practical eternity. And when the earth system finally does arrive at its equilibrium, it will most likely be in a climate state with no analog in the short evolutionary history of Homo sapiens. Most worryingly, the climate models that we depend on as a species to predict our future have largely failed to predict our sultry ancient past. And though the gulf is narrowing, and models are catching up, even those that come close to reproducing the hothouse of the early Eocene require injecting 16 times the modern level of CO2 into the air to achieve it—far beyond the rather meager doubling or tripling of CO2 indicated by the rock record.
Clearly we are missing something, and Naafs thinks that one of the missing ingredients in the models is methane, a powerful greenhouse gas which might help close the divide between model worlds and fossil worlds.
“We know nothing about the methane cycle during these greenhouse periods,” he says. “We know the hotter it gets the more methane comes out of these wetlands, but we know nothing about the methane cycle beyond the reach of ice cores which only goes back 800,000 years ... We know tropical wetlands pump much more methane into the atmosphere compared to [cooler] wetlands. And we know methane can actually amplify high-latitude warming, so maybe that’s some of the missing feedback.”
In many ways these ancient worlds are not analogs to our own. We have to be careful when making comparisons between the two. The early age of mammals was a different world. The continents were in slightly different positions, leading to a vastly different ocean circulation and boundary conditions quite unlike our own world, 50 million years on—with all the tectonic, oceanographic, and biological changes that come with such a yawning expanse of time. But artificially jam enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and Naafs thinks that many of the wildest features of the early age of mammals could be recreated.
“If we were to burn all the fossil fuels and wait a few centuries we might return to this,” he says. “Basically every type of paleoclimate research that’s being done shows that high CO2 means that it’s very warm. And when it gets very warm, it can be really, really, really warm.”
b Scientists Have Uncovered a Disturbing Climate ... (
show quote)
Complete athiestic and false opinion your attempting to sell as facts.100 reasons why climate change is natural and not man-made
HERE are the 100 reasons, released in a dossier issued by the European Foundation, why climate change is natural and not man-made:
1) There is “no real scientific proof” that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man’s activity.
2) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history.
3) Warmer periods of the Earth’s history came around 800 years before rises in CO2 levels.
4) After World War II, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions but global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.
5) Throughout the Earth’s history, temperatures have often been warmer than now and CO2 levels have often been higher - more than ten times as high.
6) Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time.
7) The 0.7°C increase in the average global temperature over the last hundred years is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate trends.
8) The IPCC theory is driven by just 60 scientists and favorable reviewers not the 4,000 usually cited.
9) Leaked e-mails from British climate scientists - in a scandal known as “Climate-gate” - suggest that that has been manipulated to exaggerate global warming
10) A large body of scientific research suggests that the sun is responsible for the greater share of climate change during the past hundred years.
11) Politicians and activists claim rising sea levels are a direct cause of global warming but sea levels rates have been increasing steadily since the last ice age 10,000 ago
12) Philip Stott, Emeritus Professor of Biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London says climate change is too complicated to be caused by just one factor, whether CO2 or clouds
13) Peter Lilley MP said last month that,
“fewer people in Britain than in any other country believe in the importance of global warming. That is despite the fact that our Government and our political class - predominantly - are more committed to it than their counterparts in any other country in the world”.
14) In pursuit of the global warming rhetoric, wind farms will do very little to nothing to reduce CO2 emissions
15) Professor Plimer, Professor of Geology and Earth Sciences at the University of Adelaide, stated that the idea of taking a single trace gas in the atmosphere, accusing it and finding it guilty of total responsibility for climate change, is an “absurdity”
16) A Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist, Willie Soon, said he is “embarrassed and puzzled” by the shallow science in papers that support the proposition that the earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming.
17) The science of what determines the earth’s temperature is in fact far from settled or understood.
18) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, unlike water vapour which is tied to climate concerns, and which we can’t even pretend to control
Richard94611 wrote:
Scientists Have Uncovered a Disturbing Climate Change Precedent
During the rise of mammals, Earth's temperatures spiked in a scary way that the planet may experience again soon.
PETER BRANNEN
AUG 6, 2018
They were strange days at the beginning of the age of mammals. The planet was still hungover from the astonishing disappearance of its marquee superstars, the dinosaurs. Earth’s newest crater was still a smoldering system of hydrothermal vents, roiling under the Gulf of Mexico. In the wake of Armageddon our shell-shocked ancestors meekly negotiated new roles on a planet they inherited quite by accident. Before long, life settled into new rhythms: Earth hosted 50-foot-long boas sliding through steam-bath jungles, birds grew gigantic in imitation of their dearly departed cousins, and mildly modern mammals we might squint to recognize appeared. Within a few million years, loosed from under the iron heel of the vanished giants, they began to experiment. Early whales pranced across a Pakistani archipelago on all fours, testing out life in the water. The first lemur-like primates leapt from the treetops, and hoofed things of all varieties dashed through the forest.
But the most striking feature of this early age of mammals is that it was almost unbelievably hot, so hot that around 50 million years ago there were crocodiles, palm trees, and sand tiger sharks in the Arctic Circle. On the other side of the blue-green orb, in waters that today would surround Antarctica, sea-surface temperatures might have topped an unthinkable 86 degrees Fahrenheit, with near-tropical forests on Antarctica itself. There were perhaps even sprawling, febrile dead zones spanning the tropics, too hot even for animal or plant life of any sort.
This is what you get in an ancient atmosphere with around 1,000 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide. If this number sounds familiar, 1,000 ppm of CO2 is around what humanity is on pace to reach by the end of this century. That should be mildly concerning.
“You put more CO2 in the atmosphere and you get more warming, that’s just super-simple physics that we figured out in the 19th century,” says David Naafs, an organic geochemist at the University of Bristol. “But exactly how much it will warm by the end of the century, we don’t know. Based on our research of these ancient climates, though, it’s probably more than we thought.”
Last week, Naafs and colleagues released a study in Nature Geoscience that reconstructs temperatures on land during this ancient high-CO2 hothouse of the late Paleocene and early Eocene epochs—the sweltering launch to the age of mammals. And the temperatures they unearthed are unsurprisingly scorching.
To study Earth’s past, scientists need good rocks to study, and fortunately for geologists and fossil-fuel companies alike, the jungles and swamps of this early age of mammals left behind lots of coal. The Powder River Basin in the United States, for instance, is filled with fossil Paleocene swamplands that, when burned today, contribute about 10 percent of U.S. carbon emissions. Naafs’ team studied examples of lower-quality coals called lignites, or fossilized peat. They had been collected around the world (everywhere from open-pit coal mines in Germany to outcrops in New Zealand), and spanned the late-Paleocene and early-Eocene epochs, from around 56 to 48 million years ago. They were able to reverse engineer the ancient climate by analyzing temperature-sensitive structures of lipids produced by fossil bacteria and archaea living in these bygone wetlands, and preserved for all time in the coal. The team found that, under this past regime of high CO2, in the ancient U.K., Germany, and New Zealand, life endured mean annual temperatures of 23–29 degrees Celsius (73–84 degrees Fahrenheit) or 10–15 degrees Celsius (18–27 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than modern times.
“These wetlands looked exactly how only tropical wetlands look at present, like the Everglades or the Amazon,” Naafs says. “So Europe would look like the Everglades and a heat wave like we’re currently experiencing in Europe would be completely normal. That is, it would be the everyday climate.”
That modern European heat wave has, in recent weeks, sent sunbathing Scandinavians and reindeer to the beach in temperatures topping 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the Arctic Circle. It has also ignited devastating wildfires across Greece and triggered an excruciating weekend for Spain and Portugal. But over 50 million years ago this would have been the baseline from about 45 to 60 degrees latitude. Under this broiling regime, with unprecedented heat as the norm, actual heat waves might have begun to take on an unearthly quality.
“Perhaps a heat wave in Europe would be something like 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) for three weeks. We don’t know.” So that was life in the late Paleocene and early Eocene in the high mid-latitudes. But closer to the equator in this global sweat lodge, the heat might have been even more outrageous, shattering the limits of complex life. To see exactly how hot, Naafs’ team also analyzed ancient lignite samples from India, which would have been in the tropics at the time—that subcontinent still drifting across the Indian Ocean toward its eventual mountain-raising rendezvous with Asia. But unfortunately, the temperatures from these samples were maxed out. That is, they were too hot for his team to measure by the new methods they had developed. So it remains an open question just how infernal the tropics became in these early days of our ancestors, but some computers tasked with recreating this planet spit out the stuff of science fiction.
“Some climate models suggest that the tropics just became a dead zone with temperatures over 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) like in Africa and South America,” says Naafs. “But we have no data so we don’t know.”
Naafs’ work fits into a larger developing picture of Earth as an almost unrecognizable greenhouse planet of the distant past. University of Colorado paleontologist Jaelyn Eberle recently returned to her office in Boulder from Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian High Arctic, where she’s been doing research since the 1990s. Ellesmere is as far north as you can get before you fall off North America and run into Père Noël drifting over pack ice. Here, featureless highlands overlook ice-choked fjords and a lone Peary’s caribou might mingle with a dozen musk oxen under a vast Nunavut sky. There are also polar bears, but Eberle luckily hasn’t had any run-ins so far—though perspective can play tricks on you at the top of the world, and a snow-white artic hare on its hind legs at the appropriate distance can appear threatening enough.
“You pick up your gun and get all nervous and worried and then look through your binoculars ... It’s just a rabbit,” says Eberle.
But Eberle isn’t venturing this far north just for the occasional hair-raising encounter with polar wildlife. Her target is warmer-weather fauna. Though there are no trees here at the top of the world, there are tree stumps. And they are around 50 million years old.
“The fossil forests on Ellesmere are spectacular,” Eberle says about the ecosystem entombed in the arctic soils. “You start really looking into them and you go, ‘Wow. We are dealing with a rainforest.’”
Eberle is a vertebrate paleontologist and though there’s the aforementioned odd musk ox passing by her camp to consider, in the rocks below she has her pick of animals to study.
“You’ve got alligators, giant tortoises, primates, things like that. We have these big hippo-like animals called Coryphodon. You have tapirs—so you’ve got tapirs living pretty close to the North Pole in the early Eocene, which today—clearly tapirs are not at the North Pole,” she says, laughing.
The presence of these animals suggests a very warm world indeed. And yet, there is a seeming disconnect, between traditional projections for future warming—like those made by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which predicts around 4 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by the end of the century under a business-as-usual emissions scenario (still frightening) and sea-level rise measured in mere inches (still frightening)—and the scarcely recognizable Earths buried in the rocks and created under similar CO2 regimes, like those that Eberle unearths.
One obvious way to reconcile this disparity is by noticing that the changes to the ancient earth took place over hundreds-of-thousands to millions of years and (IPCC graphs notwithstanding) that time won’t stop at the end of the 21st century. The changes that we’ve already set in motion, unless we act rapidly to countervail them, will similarly take millennia to fully unfold. The last time CO2 was at 400 ppm (as it is today) was 3 million years ago during the Pliocene epoch, when sea levels were perhaps 80 feet higher than today. Clearly the climate is not yet at equilibrium for a 400-ppm world.
And it won’t be for quite some time. And anyway, we’re clearly not content to stop at just 400 ppm. If we do, in fact, push CO2 up to around 1,000 ppm by the end of the century, the warming will persist and the earth will continue to change for what, to humans, is a practical eternity. And when the earth system finally does arrive at its equilibrium, it will most likely be in a climate state with no analog in the short evolutionary history of Homo sapiens. Most worryingly, the climate models that we depend on as a species to predict our future have largely failed to predict our sultry ancient past. And though the gulf is narrowing, and models are catching up, even those that come close to reproducing the hothouse of the early Eocene require injecting 16 times the modern level of CO2 into the air to achieve it—far beyond the rather meager doubling or tripling of CO2 indicated by the rock record.
Clearly we are missing something, and Naafs thinks that one of the missing ingredients in the models is methane, a powerful greenhouse gas which might help close the divide between model worlds and fossil worlds.
“We know nothing about the methane cycle during these greenhouse periods,” he says. “We know the hotter it gets the more methane comes out of these wetlands, but we know nothing about the methane cycle beyond the reach of ice cores which only goes back 800,000 years ... We know tropical wetlands pump much more methane into the atmosphere compared to [cooler] wetlands. And we know methane can actually amplify high-latitude warming, so maybe that’s some of the missing feedback.”
In many ways these ancient worlds are not analogs to our own. We have to be careful when making comparisons between the two. The early age of mammals was a different world. The continents were in slightly different positions, leading to a vastly different ocean circulation and boundary conditions quite unlike our own world, 50 million years on—with all the tectonic, oceanographic, and biological changes that come with such a yawning expanse of time. But artificially jam enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and Naafs thinks that many of the wildest features of the early age of mammals could be recreated.
“If we were to burn all the fossil fuels and wait a few centuries we might return to this,” he says. “Basically every type of paleoclimate research that’s being done shows that high CO2 means that it’s very warm. And when it gets very warm, it can be really, really, really warm.”
b Scientists Have Uncovered a Disturbing Climate ... (
show quote)
Continued
19) A petition by scientists trying to tell the world that the political and media portrayal of global warming is false was put forward in the Heidelberg Appeal in 1992. Today, more than 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners, from 106 countries have signed it.
20) It is claimed the average global temperature increased at a dangerously fast rate in the 20th century but the recent rate of average global temperature rise has been between 1 and 2 degrees C per century - within natural rates
21) Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw, Poland says the earth’s temperature has more to do with cloud cover and water vapor than CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
22) There is strong evidence from solar studies which suggests that the Earth’s current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades
23) It is myth that receding glaciers are proof of global warming as glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for many centuries
24) It is a falsehood that the earth’s poles are warming because that is natural variation and while the western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer we also see that the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder
25) The IPCC claims climate driven “impacts on biodiversity are significant and of key relevance” but those claims are simply not supported by scientific research
26) The IPCC threat of climate change to the world’s species does not make sense as wild species are at least one million years old, which means they have all been through hundreds of climate cycles
27) Research goes strongly against claims that CO2-induced global warming would cause catastrophic disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets.
28) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels are our best hope of raising crop yields to feed an ever-growing population
29) The biggest climate change ever experienced on earth took place around 700 million years ago
30) The slight increase in temperature which has been observed since 1900 is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term natural climate cycles
31) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels of some so-called “greenhouse gases” may be contributing to higher oxygen levels and global cooling, not warming
32) Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures
33) Today’s CO2 concentration of around 385 ppm is very low compared to most of the earth’s history - we actually live in a carbon-deficient atmosphere
34) It is a myth that CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas because greenhouse gases form about 3% of the atmosphere by volume, and CO2 constitutes about 0.037% of the atmosphere
35) It is a myth that computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming because computer models can be made to “verify” anything
36) There is no scientific or statistical evidence whatsoever that global warming will cause more storms and other weather extremes
Richard94611 wrote:
Scientists Have Uncovered a Disturbing Climate Change Precedent
During the rise of mammals, Earth's temperatures spiked in a scary way that the planet may experience again soon.
PETER BRANNEN
AUG 6, 2018
They were strange days at the beginning of the age of mammals. The planet was still hungover from the astonishing disappearance of its marquee superstars, the dinosaurs. Earth’s newest crater was still a smoldering system of hydrothermal vents, roiling under the Gulf of Mexico. In the wake of Armageddon our shell-shocked ancestors meekly negotiated new roles on a planet they inherited quite by accident. Before long, life settled into new rhythms: Earth hosted 50-foot-long boas sliding through steam-bath jungles, birds grew gigantic in imitation of their dearly departed cousins, and mildly modern mammals we might squint to recognize appeared. Within a few million years, loosed from under the iron heel of the vanished giants, they began to experiment. Early whales pranced across a Pakistani archipelago on all fours, testing out life in the water. The first lemur-like primates leapt from the treetops, and hoofed things of all varieties dashed through the forest.
But the most striking feature of this early age of mammals is that it was almost unbelievably hot, so hot that around 50 million years ago there were crocodiles, palm trees, and sand tiger sharks in the Arctic Circle. On the other side of the blue-green orb, in waters that today would surround Antarctica, sea-surface temperatures might have topped an unthinkable 86 degrees Fahrenheit, with near-tropical forests on Antarctica itself. There were perhaps even sprawling, febrile dead zones spanning the tropics, too hot even for animal or plant life of any sort.
This is what you get in an ancient atmosphere with around 1,000 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide. If this number sounds familiar, 1,000 ppm of CO2 is around what humanity is on pace to reach by the end of this century. That should be mildly concerning.
“You put more CO2 in the atmosphere and you get more warming, that’s just super-simple physics that we figured out in the 19th century,” says David Naafs, an organic geochemist at the University of Bristol. “But exactly how much it will warm by the end of the century, we don’t know. Based on our research of these ancient climates, though, it’s probably more than we thought.”
Last week, Naafs and colleagues released a study in Nature Geoscience that reconstructs temperatures on land during this ancient high-CO2 hothouse of the late Paleocene and early Eocene epochs—the sweltering launch to the age of mammals. And the temperatures they unearthed are unsurprisingly scorching.
To study Earth’s past, scientists need good rocks to study, and fortunately for geologists and fossil-fuel companies alike, the jungles and swamps of this early age of mammals left behind lots of coal. The Powder River Basin in the United States, for instance, is filled with fossil Paleocene swamplands that, when burned today, contribute about 10 percent of U.S. carbon emissions. Naafs’ team studied examples of lower-quality coals called lignites, or fossilized peat. They had been collected around the world (everywhere from open-pit coal mines in Germany to outcrops in New Zealand), and spanned the late-Paleocene and early-Eocene epochs, from around 56 to 48 million years ago. They were able to reverse engineer the ancient climate by analyzing temperature-sensitive structures of lipids produced by fossil bacteria and archaea living in these bygone wetlands, and preserved for all time in the coal. The team found that, under this past regime of high CO2, in the ancient U.K., Germany, and New Zealand, life endured mean annual temperatures of 23–29 degrees Celsius (73–84 degrees Fahrenheit) or 10–15 degrees Celsius (18–27 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than modern times.
“These wetlands looked exactly how only tropical wetlands look at present, like the Everglades or the Amazon,” Naafs says. “So Europe would look like the Everglades and a heat wave like we’re currently experiencing in Europe would be completely normal. That is, it would be the everyday climate.”
That modern European heat wave has, in recent weeks, sent sunbathing Scandinavians and reindeer to the beach in temperatures topping 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the Arctic Circle. It has also ignited devastating wildfires across Greece and triggered an excruciating weekend for Spain and Portugal. But over 50 million years ago this would have been the baseline from about 45 to 60 degrees latitude. Under this broiling regime, with unprecedented heat as the norm, actual heat waves might have begun to take on an unearthly quality.
“Perhaps a heat wave in Europe would be something like 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) for three weeks. We don’t know.” So that was life in the late Paleocene and early Eocene in the high mid-latitudes. But closer to the equator in this global sweat lodge, the heat might have been even more outrageous, shattering the limits of complex life. To see exactly how hot, Naafs’ team also analyzed ancient lignite samples from India, which would have been in the tropics at the time—that subcontinent still drifting across the Indian Ocean toward its eventual mountain-raising rendezvous with Asia. But unfortunately, the temperatures from these samples were maxed out. That is, they were too hot for his team to measure by the new methods they had developed. So it remains an open question just how infernal the tropics became in these early days of our ancestors, but some computers tasked with recreating this planet spit out the stuff of science fiction.
“Some climate models suggest that the tropics just became a dead zone with temperatures over 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) like in Africa and South America,” says Naafs. “But we have no data so we don’t know.”
Naafs’ work fits into a larger developing picture of Earth as an almost unrecognizable greenhouse planet of the distant past. University of Colorado paleontologist Jaelyn Eberle recently returned to her office in Boulder from Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian High Arctic, where she’s been doing research since the 1990s. Ellesmere is as far north as you can get before you fall off North America and run into Père Noël drifting over pack ice. Here, featureless highlands overlook ice-choked fjords and a lone Peary’s caribou might mingle with a dozen musk oxen under a vast Nunavut sky. There are also polar bears, but Eberle luckily hasn’t had any run-ins so far—though perspective can play tricks on you at the top of the world, and a snow-white artic hare on its hind legs at the appropriate distance can appear threatening enough.
“You pick up your gun and get all nervous and worried and then look through your binoculars ... It’s just a rabbit,” says Eberle.
But Eberle isn’t venturing this far north just for the occasional hair-raising encounter with polar wildlife. Her target is warmer-weather fauna. Though there are no trees here at the top of the world, there are tree stumps. And they are around 50 million years old.
“The fossil forests on Ellesmere are spectacular,” Eberle says about the ecosystem entombed in the arctic soils. “You start really looking into them and you go, ‘Wow. We are dealing with a rainforest.’”
Eberle is a vertebrate paleontologist and though there’s the aforementioned odd musk ox passing by her camp to consider, in the rocks below she has her pick of animals to study.
“You’ve got alligators, giant tortoises, primates, things like that. We have these big hippo-like animals called Coryphodon. You have tapirs—so you’ve got tapirs living pretty close to the North Pole in the early Eocene, which today—clearly tapirs are not at the North Pole,” she says, laughing.
The presence of these animals suggests a very warm world indeed. And yet, there is a seeming disconnect, between traditional projections for future warming—like those made by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which predicts around 4 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by the end of the century under a business-as-usual emissions scenario (still frightening) and sea-level rise measured in mere inches (still frightening)—and the scarcely recognizable Earths buried in the rocks and created under similar CO2 regimes, like those that Eberle unearths.
One obvious way to reconcile this disparity is by noticing that the changes to the ancient earth took place over hundreds-of-thousands to millions of years and (IPCC graphs notwithstanding) that time won’t stop at the end of the 21st century. The changes that we’ve already set in motion, unless we act rapidly to countervail them, will similarly take millennia to fully unfold. The last time CO2 was at 400 ppm (as it is today) was 3 million years ago during the Pliocene epoch, when sea levels were perhaps 80 feet higher than today. Clearly the climate is not yet at equilibrium for a 400-ppm world.
And it won’t be for quite some time. And anyway, we’re clearly not content to stop at just 400 ppm. If we do, in fact, push CO2 up to around 1,000 ppm by the end of the century, the warming will persist and the earth will continue to change for what, to humans, is a practical eternity. And when the earth system finally does arrive at its equilibrium, it will most likely be in a climate state with no analog in the short evolutionary history of Homo sapiens. Most worryingly, the climate models that we depend on as a species to predict our future have largely failed to predict our sultry ancient past. And though the gulf is narrowing, and models are catching up, even those that come close to reproducing the hothouse of the early Eocene require injecting 16 times the modern level of CO2 into the air to achieve it—far beyond the rather meager doubling or tripling of CO2 indicated by the rock record.
Clearly we are missing something, and Naafs thinks that one of the missing ingredients in the models is methane, a powerful greenhouse gas which might help close the divide between model worlds and fossil worlds.
“We know nothing about the methane cycle during these greenhouse periods,” he says. “We know the hotter it gets the more methane comes out of these wetlands, but we know nothing about the methane cycle beyond the reach of ice cores which only goes back 800,000 years ... We know tropical wetlands pump much more methane into the atmosphere compared to [cooler] wetlands. And we know methane can actually amplify high-latitude warming, so maybe that’s some of the missing feedback.”
In many ways these ancient worlds are not analogs to our own. We have to be careful when making comparisons between the two. The early age of mammals was a different world. The continents were in slightly different positions, leading to a vastly different ocean circulation and boundary conditions quite unlike our own world, 50 million years on—with all the tectonic, oceanographic, and biological changes that come with such a yawning expanse of time. But artificially jam enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and Naafs thinks that many of the wildest features of the early age of mammals could be recreated.
“If we were to burn all the fossil fuels and wait a few centuries we might return to this,” he says. “Basically every type of paleoclimate research that’s being done shows that high CO2 means that it’s very warm. And when it gets very warm, it can be really, really, really warm.”
b Scientists Have Uncovered a Disturbing Climate ... (
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See all 100 reasons why "man made global warming is a hoax
forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/100-reasons-why-climate-change-natural-and-not-manmade
Jack, to quote Trump, Jr, "I love it." Surely as an intelligent person, which I assume you are, you can look through this list of points and see that it is filled with non sequiturs and irrelevancies and factual errors. I am not going to spend a half hour debunking these one by one because to those who believe that global warming is not happening, is not a serious threat to man, and is not caused primarily by man's activities have closed minds. They refuse seriously to consider the overwhelming evidence. This screed of yours would make a wonderful take-home final exam for a class studying critical thinking. In the meantime, perhaps you'll enjoy this:Scientists Warn of 'Hothouse Earth,' 200-Foot Rise in Sea Levels
Image: Scientists Warn of 'Hothouse Earth,' 200-Foot Rise in Sea Levels
By Jason Devaney | Monday, 06 August 2018 09:55 PM
Global warming could result in average temperatures nearly 10 degrees higher than they are now and rising seas of up to 200 feet, according to a new paper.
An international team of scientists made the claim in a manuscript published Monday by the National Academy of Sciences.
"We explore the risk that self-reinforcing feedbacks could push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued warming on a 'Hothouse Earth' pathway even as human emissions are reduced," the paper's abstract reads.
"Crossing the threshold would lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past 1.2 million years and to sea levels significantly higher than at any time in the Holocene."
According to USA Today, the threshold cited by the authors could make the planet 6-8 degrees hotter. Sea levels could potentially rise anywhere from 30 feet to 200 feet.
"Our study suggests that human-induced global warming of [3.6 degrees] may trigger other Earth system processes, often called 'feedbacks,' that can drive further warming — even if we stop emitting greenhouse gases," the study's lead author Will Steffen said, according to USA Today.
That means the Earth faces the potential of runaway global warming at some point in the future.
"Collective human action is required to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a habitable interglacial-like state," the abstract reads.
jack sequim wa wrote:
Complete athiestic and false opinion your attempting to sell as facts.100 reasons why climate change is natural and not man-made
HERE are the 100 reasons, released in a dossier issued by the European Foundation, why climate change is natural and not man-made:
1) There is “no real scientific proof” that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man’s activity.
2) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history.
3) Warmer periods of the Earth’s history came around 800 years before rises in CO2 levels.
4) After World War II, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions but global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.
5) Throughout the Earth’s history, temperatures have often been warmer than now and CO2 levels have often been higher - more than ten times as high.
6) Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time.
7) The 0.7°C increase in the average global temperature over the last hundred years is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate trends.
8) The IPCC theory is driven by just 60 scientists and favorable reviewers not the 4,000 usually cited.
9) Leaked e-mails from British climate scientists - in a scandal known as “Climate-gate” - suggest that that has been manipulated to exaggerate global warming
10) A large body of scientific research suggests that the sun is responsible for the greater share of climate change during the past hundred years.
11) Politicians and activists claim rising sea levels are a direct cause of global warming but sea levels rates have been increasing steadily since the last ice age 10,000 ago
12) Philip Stott, Emeritus Professor of Biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London says climate change is too complicated to be caused by just one factor, whether CO2 or clouds
13) Peter Lilley MP said last month that,
“fewer people in Britain than in any other country believe in the importance of global warming. That is despite the fact that our Government and our political class - predominantly - are more committed to it than their counterparts in any other country in the world”.
14) In pursuit of the global warming rhetoric, wind farms will do very little to nothing to reduce CO2 emissions
15) Professor Plimer, Professor of Geology and Earth Sciences at the University of Adelaide, stated that the idea of taking a single trace gas in the atmosphere, accusing it and finding it guilty of total responsibility for climate change, is an “absurdity”
16) A Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist, Willie Soon, said he is “embarrassed and puzzled” by the shallow science in papers that support the proposition that the earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming.
17) The science of what determines the earth’s temperature is in fact far from settled or understood.
18) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, unlike water vapour which is tied to climate concerns, and which we can’t even pretend to control
19) A petition by scientists trying to tell the world that the political and media portrayal of global warming is false was put forward in the Heidelberg Appeal in 1992. Today, more than 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners, from 106 countries have signed it.
20) It is claimed the average global temperature increased at a dangerously fast rate in the 20th century but the recent rate of average global temperature rise has been between 1 and 2 degrees C per century - within natural rates
21) Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw, Poland says the earth’s temperature has more to do with cloud cover and water vapor than CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
22) There is strong evidence from solar studies which suggests that the Earth’s current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades
23) It is myth that receding glaciers are proof of global warming as glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for many centuries
24) It is a falsehood that the earth’s poles are warming because that is natural variation and while the western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer we also see that the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder
25) The IPCC claims climate driven “impacts on biodiversity are significant and of key relevance” but those claims are simply not supported by scientific research
26) The IPCC threat of climate change to the world’s species does not make sense as wild species are at least one million years old, which means they have all been through hundreds of climate cycles
27) Research goes strongly against claims that CO2-induced global warming would cause catastrophic disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets.
28) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels are our best hope of raising crop yields to feed an ever-growing population
29) The biggest climate change ever experienced on earth took place around 700 million years ago
30) The slight increase in temperature which has been observed since 1900 is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term natural climate cycles
31) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels of some so-called “greenhouse gases” may be contributing to higher oxygen levels and global cooling, not warming
32) Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures
33) Today’s CO2 concentration of around 385 ppm is very low compared to most of the earth’s history - we actually live in a carbon-deficient atmosphere
34) It is a myth that CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas because greenhouse gases form about 3% of the atmosphere by volume, and CO2 constitutes about 0.037% of the atmosphere
35) It is a myth that computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming because computer models can be made to “verify” anything
36) There is no scientific or statistical evidence whatsoever that global warming will cause more storms and other weather extremes
br br Complete athiestic and false opinion your ... (
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Richard94611 wrote:
Jack, to quote Trump, Jr, "I love it." Surely as an intelligent person, which I assume you are, you can look through this list of points and see that it is filled with non sequiturs and irrelevancies and factual errors. I am not going to spend a half hour debunking these one by one because to those who believe that global warming is not happening, is not a serious threat to man, and is not caused primarily by man's activities have closed minds. They refuse seriously to consider the overwhelming evidence. This screed of yours would make a wonderful take-home final exam for a class studying critical thinking.
In the meantime, perhaps you'll enjoy this:
Scientists Warn of 'Hothouse Earth,' 200-Foot Rise in Sea Levels
Image: Scientists Warn of 'Hothouse Earth,' 200-Foot Rise in Sea Levels
By Jason Devaney | Monday, 06 August 2018 09:55 PM
Global warming could result in average temperatures nearly 10 degrees higher than they are now and rising seas of up to 200 feet, according to a new paper.
An international team of scientists made the claim in a manuscript published Monday by the National Academy of Sciences.
"We explore the risk that self-reinforcing feedbacks could push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued warming on a 'Hothouse Earth' pathway even as human emissions are reduced," the paper's abstract reads.
"Crossing the threshold would lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past 1.2 million years and to sea levels significantly higher than at any time in the Holocene."
According to USA Today, the threshold cited by the authors could make the planet 6-8 degrees hotter. Sea levels could potentially rise anywhere from 30 feet to 200 feet.
"Our study suggests that human-induced global warming of [3.6 degrees] may trigger other Earth system processes, often called 'feedbacks,' that can drive further warming — even if we stop emitting greenhouse gases," the study's lead author Will Steffen said, according to USA Today.
That means the Earth faces the potential of runaway global warming at some point in the future.
"Collective human action is required to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a habitable interglacial-like state," the abstract reads.
b Jack, to quote Trump, Jr, "I love it."... (
show quote)
Richard, I have been unable to locate any of the articles that you reference above. Could you please include more specific info? A 200 ft rise in sea level? Can we be serious for a moment? I know you warmists are "hot" about your pronouncements but I, for one, am not ready to accept "facts" from just anyone.
Richard94611 wrote:
Scientists Have Uncovered a Disturbing Climate Change Precedent
During the rise of mammals, Earth's temperatures spiked in a scary way that the planet may experience again soon.
PETER BRANNEN
AUG 6, 2018
They were strange days at the beginning of the age of mammals. The planet was still hungover from the astonishing disappearance of its marquee superstars, the dinosaurs. Earth’s newest crater was still a smoldering system of hydrothermal vents, roiling under the Gulf of Mexico. In the wake of Armageddon our shell-shocked ancestors meekly negotiated new roles on a planet they inherited quite by accident. Before long, life settled into new rhythms: Earth hosted 50-foot-long boas sliding through steam-bath jungles, birds grew gigantic in imitation of their dearly departed cousins, and mildly modern mammals we might squint to recognize appeared. Within a few million years, loosed from under the iron heel of the vanished giants, they began to experiment. Early whales pranced across a Pakistani archipelago on all fours, testing out life in the water. The first lemur-like primates leapt from the treetops, and hoofed things of all varieties dashed through the forest.
But the most striking feature of this early age of mammals is that it was almost unbelievably hot, so hot that around 50 million years ago there were crocodiles, palm trees, and sand tiger sharks in the Arctic Circle. On the other side of the blue-green orb, in waters that today would surround Antarctica, sea-surface temperatures might have topped an unthinkable 86 degrees Fahrenheit, with near-tropical forests on Antarctica itself. There were perhaps even sprawling, febrile dead zones spanning the tropics, too hot even for animal or plant life of any sort.
This is what you get in an ancient atmosphere with around 1,000 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide. If this number sounds familiar, 1,000 ppm of CO2 is around what humanity is on pace to reach by the end of this century. That should be mildly concerning.
“You put more CO2 in the atmosphere and you get more warming, that’s just super-simple physics that we figured out in the 19th century,” says David Naafs, an organic geochemist at the University of Bristol. “But exactly how much it will warm by the end of the century, we don’t know. Based on our research of these ancient climates, though, it’s probably more than we thought.”
Last week, Naafs and colleagues released a study in Nature Geoscience that reconstructs temperatures on land during this ancient high-CO2 hothouse of the late Paleocene and early Eocene epochs—the sweltering launch to the age of mammals. And the temperatures they unearthed are unsurprisingly scorching.
To study Earth’s past, scientists need good rocks to study, and fortunately for geologists and fossil-fuel companies alike, the jungles and swamps of this early age of mammals left behind lots of coal. The Powder River Basin in the United States, for instance, is filled with fossil Paleocene swamplands that, when burned today, contribute about 10 percent of U.S. carbon emissions. Naafs’ team studied examples of lower-quality coals called lignites, or fossilized peat. They had been collected around the world (everywhere from open-pit coal mines in Germany to outcrops in New Zealand), and spanned the late-Paleocene and early-Eocene epochs, from around 56 to 48 million years ago. They were able to reverse engineer the ancient climate by analyzing temperature-sensitive structures of lipids produced by fossil bacteria and archaea living in these bygone wetlands, and preserved for all time in the coal. The team found that, under this past regime of high CO2, in the ancient U.K., Germany, and New Zealand, life endured mean annual temperatures of 23–29 degrees Celsius (73–84 degrees Fahrenheit) or 10–15 degrees Celsius (18–27 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than modern times.
“These wetlands looked exactly how only tropical wetlands look at present, like the Everglades or the Amazon,” Naafs says. “So Europe would look like the Everglades and a heat wave like we’re currently experiencing in Europe would be completely normal. That is, it would be the everyday climate.”
That modern European heat wave has, in recent weeks, sent sunbathing Scandinavians and reindeer to the beach in temperatures topping 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the Arctic Circle. It has also ignited devastating wildfires across Greece and triggered an excruciating weekend for Spain and Portugal. But over 50 million years ago this would have been the baseline from about 45 to 60 degrees latitude. Under this broiling regime, with unprecedented heat as the norm, actual heat waves might have begun to take on an unearthly quality.
“Perhaps a heat wave in Europe would be something like 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) for three weeks. We don’t know.” So that was life in the late Paleocene and early Eocene in the high mid-latitudes. But closer to the equator in this global sweat lodge, the heat might have been even more outrageous, shattering the limits of complex life. To see exactly how hot, Naafs’ team also analyzed ancient lignite samples from India, which would have been in the tropics at the time—that subcontinent still drifting across the Indian Ocean toward its eventual mountain-raising rendezvous with Asia. But unfortunately, the temperatures from these samples were maxed out. That is, they were too hot for his team to measure by the new methods they had developed. So it remains an open question just how infernal the tropics became in these early days of our ancestors, but some computers tasked with recreating this planet spit out the stuff of science fiction.
“Some climate models suggest that the tropics just became a dead zone with temperatures over 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) like in Africa and South America,” says Naafs. “But we have no data so we don’t know.”
Naafs’ work fits into a larger developing picture of Earth as an almost unrecognizable greenhouse planet of the distant past. University of Colorado paleontologist Jaelyn Eberle recently returned to her office in Boulder from Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian High Arctic, where she’s been doing research since the 1990s. Ellesmere is as far north as you can get before you fall off North America and run into Père Noël drifting over pack ice. Here, featureless highlands overlook ice-choked fjords and a lone Peary’s caribou might mingle with a dozen musk oxen under a vast Nunavut sky. There are also polar bears, but Eberle luckily hasn’t had any run-ins so far—though perspective can play tricks on you at the top of the world, and a snow-white artic hare on its hind legs at the appropriate distance can appear threatening enough.
“You pick up your gun and get all nervous and worried and then look through your binoculars ... It’s just a rabbit,” says Eberle.
But Eberle isn’t venturing this far north just for the occasional hair-raising encounter with polar wildlife. Her target is warmer-weather fauna. Though there are no trees here at the top of the world, there are tree stumps. And they are around 50 million years old.
“The fossil forests on Ellesmere are spectacular,” Eberle says about the ecosystem entombed in the arctic soils. “You start really looking into them and you go, ‘Wow. We are dealing with a rainforest.’”
Eberle is a vertebrate paleontologist and though there’s the aforementioned odd musk ox passing by her camp to consider, in the rocks below she has her pick of animals to study.
“You’ve got alligators, giant tortoises, primates, things like that. We have these big hippo-like animals called Coryphodon. You have tapirs—so you’ve got tapirs living pretty close to the North Pole in the early Eocene, which today—clearly tapirs are not at the North Pole,” she says, laughing.
The presence of these animals suggests a very warm world indeed. And yet, there is a seeming disconnect, between traditional projections for future warming—like those made by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which predicts around 4 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by the end of the century under a business-as-usual emissions scenario (still frightening) and sea-level rise measured in mere inches (still frightening)—and the scarcely recognizable Earths buried in the rocks and created under similar CO2 regimes, like those that Eberle unearths.
One obvious way to reconcile this disparity is by noticing that the changes to the ancient earth took place over hundreds-of-thousands to millions of years and (IPCC graphs notwithstanding) that time won’t stop at the end of the 21st century. The changes that we’ve already set in motion, unless we act rapidly to countervail them, will similarly take millennia to fully unfold. The last time CO2 was at 400 ppm (as it is today) was 3 million years ago during the Pliocene epoch, when sea levels were perhaps 80 feet higher than today. Clearly the climate is not yet at equilibrium for a 400-ppm world.
And it won’t be for quite some time. And anyway, we’re clearly not content to stop at just 400 ppm. If we do, in fact, push CO2 up to around 1,000 ppm by the end of the century, the warming will persist and the earth will continue to change for what, to humans, is a practical eternity. And when the earth system finally does arrive at its equilibrium, it will most likely be in a climate state with no analog in the short evolutionary history of Homo sapiens. Most worryingly, the climate models that we depend on as a species to predict our future have largely failed to predict our sultry ancient past. And though the gulf is narrowing, and models are catching up, even those that come close to reproducing the hothouse of the early Eocene require injecting 16 times the modern level of CO2 into the air to achieve it—far beyond the rather meager doubling or tripling of CO2 indicated by the rock record.
Clearly we are missing something, and Naafs thinks that one of the missing ingredients in the models is methane, a powerful greenhouse gas which might help close the divide between model worlds and fossil worlds.
“We know nothing about the methane cycle during these greenhouse periods,” he says. “We know the hotter it gets the more methane comes out of these wetlands, but we know nothing about the methane cycle beyond the reach of ice cores which only goes back 800,000 years ... We know tropical wetlands pump much more methane into the atmosphere compared to [cooler] wetlands. And we know methane can actually amplify high-latitude warming, so maybe that’s some of the missing feedback.”
In many ways these ancient worlds are not analogs to our own. We have to be careful when making comparisons between the two. The early age of mammals was a different world. The continents were in slightly different positions, leading to a vastly different ocean circulation and boundary conditions quite unlike our own world, 50 million years on—with all the tectonic, oceanographic, and biological changes that come with such a yawning expanse of time. But artificially jam enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and Naafs thinks that many of the wildest features of the early age of mammals could be recreated.
“If we were to burn all the fossil fuels and wait a few centuries we might return to this,” he says. “Basically every type of paleoclimate research that’s being done shows that high CO2 means that it’s very warm. And when it gets very warm, it can be really, really, really warm.”
b Scientists Have Uncovered a Disturbing Climate ... (
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What's that????? All that CO2 and hot air hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years BEFORE gas guzzling, V-8 powered Suburbans and Expeditions, BEFORE smoke belching steel mills, BEFORE coal and gas powered generating plants and BEFORE people heated their homes with coal, oil and natural gas?
Don't get me wrong, I believe in clean air to breathe, clean water to drink and swim in. I'm glad we have the technology to build clean burning engines, to treat sewer water so that can be safely returned to our rivers and streams. I like the reduction in the amount of chemical fertilizers and pesticides used in our food production the has been accomplished through the use of satellite technology. I'm 100% in favor of a cleaner better world to live in.
What I don't like is the use of false cause/effect relationships to mislead people into supporting political groups and candidates.
I don't like being urged to give up my freedoms based on fabricated "science".
I do have a question for the "man made" global warming crowd.
If global warming is, as you claim, "man made", what caused the melting of the glacier that covered most of the current North American continent just a few thousand years ago?
Did my grade school teacher lie to me, or did the scientist the wrote the text book lie to me AND her?
DotsMan wrote:
What's that????? All that CO2 and hot air hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years BEFORE gas guzzling, V-8 powered Suburbans and Expeditions, BEFORE smoke belching steel mills, BEFORE coal and gas powered generating plants and BEFORE people heated their homes with coal, oil and natural gas?
Don't get me wrong, I believe in clean air to breathe, clean water to drink and swim in. I'm glad we have the technology to build clean burning engines, to treat sewer water so that can be safely returned to our rivers and streams. I like the reduction in the amount of chemical fertilizers and pesticides used in our food production the has been accomplished through the use of satellite technology. I'm 100% in favor of a cleaner better world to live in.
What I don't like is the use of false cause/effect relationships to mislead people into supporting political groups and candidates.
I don't like being urged to give up my freedoms based on fabricated "science".
I do have a question for the "man made" global warming crowd.
If global warming is, as you claim, "man made", what caused the melting of the glacier that covered most of the current North American continent just a few thousand years ago?
Did my grade school teacher lie to me, or did the scientist the wrote the text book lie to me AND her?
What's that????? All that CO2 and hot air hundr... (
show quote)
Rather than saving people money in gas costs, cleaning up the air, or dealing with the climate crisis, the Trump administration announced its plan to roll back automobile fuel efficiency standards -- proposing to freeze the policy in a few short years.
Leah C. Stokes
Leah C. Stokes
Since cars and trucks are the largest source of carbon pollution in the United States, the existing regulations are crucial in the effort to stop the climate crisis. Limiting pollution for cars is also important for human health, because dirty air from cars is bad for all of us. And by increasing the distance a car can travel on a tank of gas, the existing policy will save Americans money at the pump.
In short, the existing standards benefit everyone in the country.
The administration's plan to roll back the policy is riddled with holes, both legal and factual. For decades, California has had the legal right to set its own fuel efficiency standards under the 1970 Clean Air Act, but the Trump administration wants to change that. It's not clear if the federal government has the right to. As a result, some inside the administration are concerned Trump's proposal won't hold up in court. The administration is also claiming that changing the policy will save lives by reducing road incidents and deaths. But their math doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Most experts are convinced that changing the rule will actually cost lives in car accidents.
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https://helpsavenature.com/why-are-glaciers-meltingWhy are Glaciers Melting Faster Today?
Today, glaciers are receding faster as compared to the past many centuries. Why this sudden change? Almost everyone believe that the prime reason for this is sudden and rapid industrialization which in turn has caused global warming -- the prime culprit of fast-melting glaciers.
Global warming is the rise in average global temperature that has happened over the past century. The 'industrial revolution' is the main cause of this rise in average temperature.
The indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels has resulted in extreme atmospheric pollution leading to this condition.
Coal is still burnt in huge quantities for various reasons such as electricity production.
Burning of oil is a major culprit in the past century.
Deforestation has increased to procure wood and make more space available for farming, resulting in an increase in carbon dioxide concentrations.
All these pollutants help in trapping more heat in the earth's atmosphere, increasing global temperatures.
It is due to this increase in temperature that glaciers are melting more than they actually should. When a glacier melts fully, it exposes the earth below. Glaciers absorb approximately 20% heat from the sun, reflecting back 80%. When the earth gets exposed, this percentage gets reversed. This in turn causes a further increase in temperature. This is a vicious trap which has already begun and it will be almost impossible for us to stop it totally.
In the future, the global temperature will, in all likelihood, keep increasing, melting glaciers even faster than they are today.
DotsMan wrote:
What's that????? All that CO2 and hot air hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years BEFORE gas guzzling, V-8 powered Suburbans and Expeditions, BEFORE smoke belching steel mills, BEFORE coal and gas powered generating plants and BEFORE people heated their homes with coal, oil and natural gas?
Don't get me wrong, I believe in clean air to breathe, clean water to drink and swim in. I'm glad we have the technology to build clean burning engines, to treat sewer water so that can be safely returned to our rivers and streams. I like the reduction in the amount of chemical fertilizers and pesticides used in our food production the has been accomplished through the use of satellite technology. I'm 100% in favor of a cleaner better world to live in.
What I don't like is the use of false cause/effect relationships to mislead people into supporting political groups and candidates.
I don't like being urged to give up my freedoms based on fabricated "science".
I do have a question for the "man made" global warming crowd.
If global warming is, as you claim, "man made", what caused the melting of the glacier that covered most of the current North American continent just a few thousand years ago?
Did my grade school teacher lie to me, or did the scientist the wrote the text book lie to me AND her?
What's that????? All that CO2 and hot air hundr... (
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Perfectly stated.....
Lindajoy brought this to my attention on a different post, same topic. Scientists just discovered Hugh volcanic activities under the artic. There are better articles but in the interest of saving myself time searching I pulled this one up.
http://today.uri.edu/news/researchers-discover-volcanic-heat-source-under-major-antarctic-glacier/So now all the melting and then expansion of the ice sheets have to do with the increasing or decreasing of volcanic activity.
Then you gotta live the scientist that went to the south pole expedition hoping to prove ice melt and their research shop got stuck nearly two hundred miles out from their target. The ship frozen in ice, required them to be airlifted out.
We have again as in the past climate change and the Bible precisely predicted it in this very age we live in.
A few decades ago scientists proved that volcanic activities were not significant enough to increase CO 2. At that time there were +/- 50 volcanic eruptions a year, but now they have increased to 50+/- every ten days or over 1500 per year, now proving volcanic activities are effecting our weather and Co2 output.
Made made Co2 by comparison would be throwing a cup of sand into the Saraha dessert and then claiming it caused adverse effects. One month of current volcanic activity pushes out more Co2 than all man made Co2 combined in the last two thousand years.
The liberals are the deniers of the truth and power behind the evil that created man made global warming hoax.
Its also worth noting that the Bible also precisely predicted the increase in volcanic activities during the age we live in.
God Bless America
God Bless Israel
God Bless and protect President Trump
Richard94611 wrote:
Jack, to quote Trump, Jr, "I love it." Surely as an intelligent person, which I assume you are, you can look through this list of points and see that it is filled with non sequiturs and irrelevancies and factual errors. I am not going to spend a half hour debunking these one by one because to those who believe that global warming is not happening, is not a serious threat to man, and is not caused primarily by man's activities have closed minds. They refuse seriously to consider the overwhelming evidence. This screed of yours would make a wonderful take-home final exam for a class studying critical thinking.
b Jack, to quote Trump, Jr, "I love it."... (
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Initially, you gave us the impression that you are an atheist, that you do not believe in a god or gods, that the existence of a supernatural being is just fantasy. Yet, as time passed and you continued to post your AGW dogma and doctrines, it became apparent that you were not simply passing these along, you were preaching and proselytizing.
The Religion of Global Warming has its own scripture and gospels. The God of Global Warming is Mother Nature, the Earth is Heaven, and mankind is the Devil and should be cast out from paradise. Your AGW religion has sponsored a host of fear mongering campaigns, fire and brimstone sermons, designed to terrify the gullible, especially the young, telling them they will burn in a hell if they don't repent. The Church of AGW has even spawned its own brand of terrorists.
You are to be commended, dick, for your steadfast faith in your eco-centric god. I have no doubt that many Christians and Muslims would envy your resolve.
Blade_Runner wrote:
Initially, you gave us the impression that you are an atheist, that you do not believe in a god or gods, that the existence of a supernatural being is just fantasy. Yet, as time passed and you continued to post your AGW dogma and doctrines, it became apparent that you were not simply passing these along, you were preaching and proselytizing.
The Religion of Global Warming has its own scripture and gospels. The God of Global Warming is Mother Nature, the Earth is Heaven, and mankind is the Devil and should be cast out from paradise. Your AGW religion has sponsored a host of fear mongering campaigns, fire and brimstone sermons, designed to terrify the gullible, especially the young, telling them they will burn in a hell if they don't repent. The Church of AGW has even spawned its own brand of terrorists.
You are to be commended, dick, for your steadfast faith in your eco-centric god. I have no doubt that many Christians and Muslims would envy your resolve.
Initially, you gave us the impression that you are... (
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Exactly, a demonic lead lie leading to a translucent means to an end.
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