Misleading title
It clearly looks more like a Super Star Destroyer.
Tsk tsk!
Some good news and bad news about global warming: The bad news is that Earth's rising temperatures could threaten coastlines, endanger wildlife, and - in some extreme cases - melt your ice cream. But it could also turn some of us into crystalline magnet men of immense size and power. Giant magnet creatures in my warm planet? …
Careful...
I remember these things from when I was a kid on Atlantis, and they are dangerous.
The temperature began to rise when our weather control machine broke down. Unfortunately, nobody alive knew how to fix it, since it had run flawlessly for generations.
To try to fix things, we gave up our favored means of transportation and invented the horse. But this did not stop the temperature from rising. Atlantian scientists told us that if the temperate continued to rise, the seas would soon follow. This dire warning alarmed many wealthy Atlantians, as they determined that their prime beach-front property could become worthless. We were determined to fix the problem.
Our respected and renowned scientists of the crystal invented these iron based life forms, to promote algae growth and absorb carbon. The entire economy was nationalized, then focused on mining iron to dump into the ocean to feed the ironite crystals.
It worked, and temperatures returned to normal. We had saved Atlantis.
But the government did not want to give up the control that it had gained.
Since the ironites were not being fed, they were rapidly dying. The government then declared that the ironites were endangered, and must be saved. So we continued to mine under Atlantis at a frantic pace, to feed them. Eventually, the mines were so large and extensive, that a minor earthquake caused all of Atlantis to collapse into the mines and the ocean.
Thankfully, my family was on vacation in Rome at the time.
Lazarus
"During aforementioned PETM, Earth's average temperature rose more than 9 degrees Fahrenheit as massive amounts of carbon entered the atmosphere in the space of only a few thousand years."
Damn dinosaurs didn't give a damn about their carbon footprint and look what happened!
Should have used a Prius-toric...
> Increased CO2 levels appear to have promoted dwarfing in mammals.
Nice to know that there is a mechanism built into us mammals that heps curb overpopulation, and if we're still alive in a thousand years time, we would have evolved such that adults will be the size of two year olds, and the Sherman Brothers will have to rethink the song "It's A Small World After All", since the world wouldn't be so small at that size.
Tux. Because in a thousand years emperor penguins will be bigger than an average human.
... The global warming was created by carbon released by an earlier civilization of Horse riding Monkey men. These magnetic crystals are all that is left of the memory array of their Paleolithic netbooks. If only we new how to read them we could find out what Paleoporn was all about.
Take a moment to think about what future civilizations would learn from the contents of your hard drive.
The expansion of large mammals occuring at the PETM does not mean that CO2 caused mammals to grow - or deathstars, for that matter. The two things just happened at the same time. Another reason could be that after the demise of the dinos, there was plenty of room and food, hence less pressure on fuel-inefficient organism designs.