EARTH was a BAKING LIFELESS DESERT for 5 MILLION years Boffins have discovered that "lethally hot" ocean temperatures kept the Earth devoid of life for millions of years after the mass extinction that occurred 250 million years ago. Cracked earth The global wipeout that ended the Permian era, before dinosaurs, wiped out nearly all of the world's species. Mass extinctions like …
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So in the past the earth has been to the two extremes of a Snowball and a Desert.
It begs the question, is MMGW just speeding up the natural process?
I can imagine an alternative reality where the earth is cooling down and there are tax breaks on producing as much CO2 as possible to keep the planet warm.
"I can imagine an alternative reality where the earth is cooling down and there are tax breaks on producing as much CO2 as possible to keep the planet warm"
Yes that is great, imagination. Laudable. But it isn't science. Right now the science says that any cooling that may happen is thousands of years in the future. So in the meantime between now and then we are making the planet inhospitable, edging ourselves closer to "uninhabitable by our current civilisation". Maybe a race of evolved cockroaches will thank you for your continued CO2 emissions.
'What about life around the deep-water thermal vents? Is there any evidence of when that started up?'
The last time I was trawling the literature the evidence from genetic studies of the various species found around hydrothermal vents is that none of them are older than 100 million years and all have links back to well-established species found in more 'normal' conditions.
There are about half a dozen known vent provinces around the world with very little commonality of species between them. Instead it appears that different species evolve to occupy the same niches in different places.
Whether life started there remains an open question.
"There are about half a dozen known vent provinces around the world with very little commonality of species between them. Instead it appears that different species evolve to occupy the same niches in different places."
Interesting. One option would have been that if they *had* evolved when the whole ocean was at 40 C they would be fairly similar as the ocean cooled and they had to retreat back to these hot pockets.
That suggests they evolved at their sites *after* the global hot period.
Thanks for the info.
Indeed, not sure how they can reconcile these two statements;
"EARTH was BAKING LIFELESS DESERT for 5 MILLION years."
"In the dead zone, the tropics would have been very wet but with almost nothing growing, no forest, only shrubs and ferns, no fish or marine reptiles, just shellfish and virtually no land animals. Only the polar region would have offered any refuge from the blistering heat."
A desert means it doesn't rain (thus Antarctica is a desert). I suppose it is possible that the tropics were very wet in the sense there was lots of water but perhaps it never rained. If this is what they meant in the article they need to explain it better.
The day before yesterday it was cold. Yesterday, my friend and I were walking along a busy road, and the sun was shining. It felt nice and warm. "There's loads of cars here" said my friend. "That's what must be causing the heat". From there we walked into a shady, wooded area where there were no cars, and it felt much cooler. My friend was thus able to prove to himself and to me that it was indeed the cars and their exhaust that had been causing all the heat by the roadside. Was he missing something? He certainly didn't think so.
Lrn2Albedo : ) it depends on what the roads are made out of:
Fresh asphalt: 0.04*
Worn asphalt: 0.12*
New concrete: 0.55*
New white portland cement concrete: 0.7-0.8**
Old concrete: 0.25**
Conifer forest (summer): 0.08-0.15*
Deciduous trees: 0.15 to 0.18
If it were as simple as that, we could cool the planet by bulldozing the forests and replacing them with concrete parking lots. Furthermore, clear-cutting forests for crops or grazing would also be expected to cool the planet ***
Please note, I'm not advocating any such ridiculous action... just pointing out that your simplified explanation is oversimplified to the point of being somewhat misleading. Canopy effect, pervious vs. impervious (absorbed heat transferred into the atmosphere as water vapor instead of ΔT), and surface area (a topographic 1m² of concrete/asphalt is essentially 1m² - while a topographic 1m² of tree leaves is actually much more than that when you look at the surface area exposed to the atmosphere) - just to name a few.
There is a quite reasonable explanation why the temperature at 2m on an asphalt parking lot > concrete parking lot > field > forest... but albedo, by itself, is not it.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo#Terrestrial_albedo
** http://www.concretethinker.com/technicalbrief/Cool-Communities.aspx
*** http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Albedo-e_hg.svg&page=1
"In the dead zone, the tropics would have been very wet but with almost nothing growing, no forest, only shrubs and ferns, no fish or marine reptiles, just shellfish and virtually no land animals."
I'm not surprised the land animals were all dead with nothing to eat but shellfish served at 50C.
That is until our "Ancient Geo Engineers" showed up, read all about it in"Pyramid Gravity Force"............Stop drinking the Kool Aid.......and learn about the biggest discovery of the 10 thousand years..........OMG......! Who is in charge on this Planet..........? Stop drinking the Kool Aid and learn how the Earths temperatures are controlled in the Book "Pyramid Gravity Force" available on Amazon, find out how mans penitration in Cheops the great pyramid of Giza, disabled the great pyramid of Giza which controlled the Hawaiian Island vocanic activity. Yes the Giza pyramid was the Earths thermostat until crazy humans broke it, read how the Earth has missed a few crucial mini ice ages and how we have a chance of saving the planet by getting the Giza pyramids back on line. Ancient Geo Engineering is real......And we still have a chance to save planet earth from the massive tectonic plate movements that are coming to blast us all back into the stone age. Regardless of why the temperature rises on planet Earth, The pyramids are here to cool the planet down. We can't afford to do stupid anymore..............!This technology is written in all the ancient text.........Hello is anyone out there..............?
not so much save the planet, but preserve civilization. cos as any fule kno pyramids store time (duh) and slowly leak it out into whatevers inside them, this way razor blades can be placed in pyramids, taken back in time to when they were sharp, which allows men to be clean shaven, which is the mark of civilization (see anywhere-stan for proof)
simples
Yeah yeah yeah, I have yet to meet a scientist that knows what they are talking about. Unless they were there it is next to impossible to know what really happened back then. Articles like this make my blood boil because they are meaningless. I know I have got one for you: "10 million years ago lived a race of ninja turtles that were far more intelligent that us humans are today and did talk BS all the time"
>Yeah yeah yeah, I have yet to meet a scientist that knows what they are talking about.
Guess its bad luck you didn't meet the men that invented the antibiotics that very likely saved you or a loved ones life. Obviously science did invent it or half our children would die before 5 like has happened to humans all throughout history until about 50 years ago. Its ok though you can continue to reap the benefits without even realizing as you criticize evil science in you bible school class in a few days.
You have yet to meet a scientist that knows what they're talking about? And you chose to make your point on the internet... using a compute? Not a smart move.
Makes your blood boil? Did your book tell you what that liquid that runs through your body is, and how it works, or how to measure the temperature of said fluid?
Ninjas 10 million years ago? But your book says that is impossible as it all happened about 6000 years ago, and 'ninjas' have only been traced back as far as 1500 years ago, which means they too must have been made by the big man in the sky.
Finally, you mentioned how intelligent us humans are today, it's we humans. How intelligent we humans are today.
We messed it up before, causing fumingly hot temperatures that wiped out life, destroyed nearly all life, which then restarted, created land-animals, dinosaurs which were wiped out again by a meteor, then we got the chance for our species to strive, and now we are succeeding at it again, we are completing the cycle!!!
How many times have we destroyed the earth before? We must be getting pretty efficient at it by now right? It's the bloody Matrix!!
Ok all fun things aside, Lets get things in bloody perspective: We are COMPLETELY insignificant!!:
-- We can't diverge a meteor by sending Bruce Willis in a space shuttle to confront it (Armageddon 1998) (Ps .the space shuttle we scrapped because it was costing too much money to maintain, money we would rather use starting silly wars over living habits/religion).
-- We can't reignite the sun by nuking it.. (sunshine 2007) Think of it: If you line up a 100 earths its even smaller than the diameter of the sun. So do you really think that a nuke coming from earth is going to have an effect?
-- We can't create a black hole to suck up the earth, by making a grownups kid racing track under the mountains of Europe that collides stuff (Large Hadron Collider 2011) (really believe me on this, I did this when I was young, and it was a lot of fun, and I actually managed to break the window once by ramping the powered up racecar to jump, and it broke the window. But it never created a black hole..)
The only thing we do at the moment, is shit in our own bed. I am happy to discuss, how it is not smart to be shitting in your own bed, but concluding that we will end all life on earth for a million years is silly. We might be able to wipe ourselves out, but even that is pretty difficult, because next to roaches we might be one of the hardest species to exterminate: We are everywhere on this planet, and we can adapt to lots of different temperatures/threads/infections/diseases, so it probably will take something pretty nifty to destroy all of us..
And even if we do survive, is that our goal? To be some ever living organism on some planet? Maybe at some time we just got to make place for the new. Stop fighting it and embrace the inevitable, that's what evolution is about.... ;-)
One thing is pretty certain: The earth will be here, long after we are gone.
Who did it? Who were the selfish Permians driving around in their gas guzzlers spewing CO2 into the atmosphere and killing all the little kittens and polar bears? See, see this is what happens when we allow all those greedy bastards from Permia to chop down the old growth redwoods, and foul the air with their coal burning, smoke belching smokestacks.
It's not too late. Put our troops on their assault bicycles, charge the batteries in our sustainable industry army tanks, and invade Permia (no lead for the bullets though). I'm pretty sure Romney has some offshore accounts there, so make sure you get any papers you find lying around. And don't try to use the term "lying around" as a dog whistle for "lying about Libya," you racist SOB's.
Anyway, gather up all the Permian environment befoulers and get a rope!!
I am appalled at the level of idiocy that passes for 'research" and "researchers" today.
Maybe it is just me, maybe the media edits wordage to "get the point across" or something because I am just dumbstruck at what passes for peer-reviewed research today.
The premise: "....Boffins have discovered that "lethally hot" ocean temperatures kept the Earth devoid of life for millions of years ..." is so without merit that it lacks any note what-so-ever, let alone publication, let alone grants or financing.
It is like saying, without any real proof; "solar flares wiped the earth clean of life 5.5 billion years ago and could do it again..."
??????
Ummm no... Our body temperatures are maintained at that level because it is a balance point between optimum speed of cellular reactions v/s speed of denaturation of proteins at higher temperatures v/s energy expenditure and a couple other minor factors.
From a biochemical point of view, we're actually running so hot we're just short of the disaster curve where denaturation becomes so much of a problem we wouldn't be able to replace the things that break down this way fast enough.
[/simplification]
If external temperatures were that much higher, we'd have difficulty losing heat and probably all die of overheating. You see this effect in people with lower constitution when it gets a bit hot in Britain, now imagine it being twice that hot and even the thick skinned and well hydrated are going to be struggling.
But it's been covered below by someone who knows a bit more than me as to why we remain that hot (and how close we are to disaster) a dangerously high fever is only about 6 degrees C above what we comfortably tick along at.
Another interesting point for the climate modellers to incorporate
And the equally interesting factoid
"Ummm no... Our body temperatures are maintained at that level because it is a balance point between optimum speed of cellular reactions v/s speed of denaturation of proteins at higher temperatures v/s energy expenditure and a couple other minor factors."
Which implies an environment where you can *dump* heat to IE << 37 c. Which suggests that *if* the *minimum* global temperature hits 40 c we're *all* stuffed. I don't say it will, I don't think it should, but if it *did* homo sapiens would probably be out of business in a fairly short time.
Well done for more field work and a *much* longer baseline.
"Which implies an environment where you can *dump* heat to IE << 37 c. Which suggests that *if* the *minimum* global temperature hits 40 c we're *all* stuffed."
Actually it is worse than that. The human body creates heat output. We rely on sweating in a dry climate to dump that heat out. In a humid climate sweat doesn't work as evaporation slows.stops. This is why heat seems worse in a humid climate, why 33C in Singapore is awful hot, but 33C in the Australian desert is a nice day out.
Corollary- as the planet heats, and air is better at carrying moisture as well, the tropics may become uninhabitable with only a few degrees C rise. From Wikipedia (with references)
"Humans may also experience lethal hyperthermia when the wet bulb temperature is sustained above 35 °C (95 °F) for six hours"
"In Darwin [tropical Australia] the number of days over 35°C is expected to increase from 11 per year currently experienced to up to 69 by 2030 and up to 308 by 2070 without global action to reduce emissions. Coupled with the extremely high humidity that Darwin experiences during the wet season, higher temperatures are expected to adversely affect levels of human comfort."
So, we are building a planet where it will be impossible to survive in the tropics without air conditioning.
What are the temps oceans now, and what is the range of temperature on land? Our oceans average about 17 degrees C, with a great variation. The range is from -2 degrees C to 26 degrees, with variation depending on depth as well as latitude. Even if some parts of the ocean reached high temps, it does not follow that all, or even large parts of it would, just as oceans today vary considerably from the average ocean temp. It is not reasonable to believe that polar ocean temps would be too high to support life. Equatorial temps would be hitting the boiling point.
But just consider this obvious observation: Let's say oceans and the land at sea level were too high to support life. Land temps depend on a great many factors, not just ocean temps, that create an area's regional climate.What about higher elevations? There would be a great many places where the temps were tropical temps (or colder!), and with the added rainfall, life would abound. How much colder is the top of Mt. Everest than Death Valley? How about Antarctica? You just can't make the jump from South China being hot to the entire world being too hot to support life. The heat could just as easily been limited to a China Sea.
Give these guys an F for not considering the diversity of earth's climes, and making grandiose, sweeping conclusions not supported by their evidence.
My family and I have been waiting for the right time to reveal ourselves. The only thing we haven't been able to figure out is how to hack a Yahoo group which the admins refuse to grant us permission. Other than that, this has been a great vacation and we've been enjoying great weather. You all are awesome.
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