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Comments 26 to 50 out of 126:

26. Quietman at 07:21 AM on 28 February, 2009
    David Only the Australian mammals? I was not aware of particularly large mammals in Australia. As for all the continents except Africa, what about the Indian subcontinent?
27. David Horton at 16:53 PM on 28 February, 2009
    "I was not aware of particularly large mammals in Australia" - no they became extinct some 25,000 years ago. It was mainly mammals, but did include some giant emu-like birds, and some giant reptiles. India I'm not sure about. There were extinctions in South East Asia though, as well as the Americas of course. The equivalent large animals of Africa (elephant, rhino, giraffe, lion etc) all survived for reasons which are debated. I think it is because Africa straddles the equator and climate change therefore always left some refuge areas.
28. Quietman at 18:24 PM on 1 March, 2009
    David Re: "but did include some giant emu-like birds, and some giant reptiles." Yes I am familar with these and I recall a large carniverous "roo" as well. The reptiles are / were varinids and there are claims made to their survival. South East Asia and the Indian subcontinent still have their large species (elephants, bengals and 8 to 10 meter pythons (with claims to larger). North America and Eurasia definately did not fare well, I agree. South America lost some of it's megafauna but they were not truely giants and many survived (again with rumors of still more). So it seems that the most poleward areas were hit hardest, no?
29. David Horton at 19:20 PM on 2 March, 2009
    "So it seems that the most poleward areas were hit hardest, no?" Well no, the hardest hit were those where a shift in climate to hotter drier times led to environmental conditions that large species couldn't cope with. And in addition on the continents whose geography precluded the formation of refuge areas - which is where Africa, straddling the Equator, comes in - whichever way the climate zones move in Africa you are always left with areas that can support megafauna. I am really not sure why you think that cooling conditions causes extinctions unless you think that this means global warming is a good thing. If that is the case you are going to be sadly disappointed.
30. Quietman at 06:29 AM on 3 March, 2009
    David Climate changes ineither direction causes extinction events. But it is a matter of degree. Warming opens up new environments at the same time as it makes existing ines more harsh. What happens is that life follows the environment. If it gets warmer life shifts poleward and colder it shifts towards the equator. This paper might help: Long-Term Cycles in the History of Life: Periodic Biodiversity in the Paleobiology Database Adrian L. Melott* Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, United States of America Abstract Time series analysis of fossil biodiversity of marine invertebrates in the Paleobiology Database (PBDB) shows a significant periodicity at approximately 63 My, in agreement with previous analyses based on the Sepkoski database. I discuss how this result did not appear in a previous analysis of the PBDB. The existence of the 63 My periodicity, despite very different treatment of systematic error in both PBDB and Sepkoski databases strongly argues for consideration of its reality in the fossil record. Cross-spectral analysis of the two datasets finds that a 62 My periodicity coincides in phase by 1.6 My, equivalent to better than the errors in either measurement. Consequently, the two data sets not only contain the same strong periodicity, but its peaks and valleys closely correspond in time. Two other spectral peaks appear in the PBDB analysis, but appear to be artifacts associated with detrending and with the increased interval length. Sampling-standardization procedures implemented by the PBDB collaboration suggest that the signal is not an artifact of sampling bias. Further work should focus on finding the cause of the 62 My periodicity.
31. Quietman at 06:45 AM on 3 March, 2009
    ps This agrees with earlier work done at Berkeley, from a 2005 article in the San Francisco Chronicle: "Mass extinction comes every 62 million years, UC physicists discover" David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor Thursday, March 10, 2005
32. Quietman at 06:54 AM on 3 March, 2009
    I did not copy the link but I did keep the article: With surprising and mysterious regularity, life on Earth has flourished and vanished in cycles of mass extinction every 62 million years, say two UC Berkeley scientists who discovered the pattern after a painstaking computer study of fossil records going back for more than 500 million years. Their findings are certain to generate a renewed burst of speculation among scientists who study the history and evolution of life. Each period of abundant life and each mass extinction has itself covered at least a few million years — and the trend of biodiversity has been rising steadily ever since the last mass extinction, when dinosaurs and millions of other life forms went extinct about 65 million years ago. The Berkeley researchers are physicists, not biologists or geologists or paleontologists, but they have analyzed the most exhaustive compendium of fossil records that exists — data that cover the first and last known appearances of no fewer than 36,380 separate marine genera, including millions of species that once thrived in the world’s seas, later virtually disappeared, and in many cases returned. Richard Muller and his graduate student, Robert Rohde, are publishing a report on their exhaustive study in the journal Nature today, and in interviews this week, the two men said they have been working on the surprising evidence for about four years. “We’ve tried everything we can think of to find an explanation for these weird cycles of biodiversity and extinction,” Muller said, “and so far, we’ve failed.” But the cycles are so clear that the evidence “simply jumps out of the data,” said James Kirchner, a professor of earth and planetary sciences on the Berkeley campus who was not involved in the research but who has written a commentary on the report that is also appearing in Nature today. “Their discovery is exciting, it’s unexpected and it’s unexplained,” Kirchner said. And it is certain, he added, to send other scientists in many disciplines seeking explanations for the strange cycles. “Everyone and his brother will be proposing an explanation — and eventually, at least one or two will turn out to be right while all the others will be wrong.” Muller and Rohde conceded that they have puzzled through every conceivable phenomenon in nature in search of an explanation: “We’ve had to think about solar system dynamics, about the causes of comet showers, about how the galaxy works, and how volcanoes work, but nothing explains what we’ve discovered,” Muller said. The evidence of strange extinction cycles that first drew Rohde’s attention emerged from an elaborate computer database he developed from the largest compendium of fossil data ever created. It was a 560-page list of marine organisms developed 14 years ago by the late J. John Sepkoski Jr., a famed paleobiologist at the University of Chicago who died at the age of 50 nearly five years ago. Sepkoski himself had suggested that marine life appeared to have its ups and downs in cycles every 26 million years, but to Rohde and Muller, the longer cycle is strikingly more evident, although they have also seen the suggestion of even longer cycles that seem to recur every 140 million years. Sepkoski’s fossil record of marine life extends back for 540 million years to the time of the great “Cambrian Explosion,” when almost all the ancestral forms of multicellular life emerged, and Muller and Rohde built on it for their computer version. Muller has long been known as an unconventional and imaginative physicist on the Berkeley campus and at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. It was he, for example, who suggested more than 20 years ago that an undiscovered faraway dwarf star — which he named “Nemesis” — was orbiting the sun and might have steered a huge asteroid into the collision with Earth that drove the dinosaurs to extinction. “I’ve given up on Nemesis,” Muller said this week, “but then I thought there might be two stars somewhere out there, but I’ve given them both up now.” He and Rohde have considered many other possible causes for the 62- million-year cycles, they said. Perhaps, they suggested, there’s an unknown “Planet X” somewhere far out beyond the solar system that’s disturbing the comets in the distant region called the Oort Cloud — where they exist by the millions — to the point that they shower the Earth and cause extinctions in regular cycles. Daniel Whitmire and John Matese of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette proposed that idea as a cause of major comet showers in 1985, but no one except UFO believers has ever discovered a sign of it. Or perhaps there’s some kind of “natural timetable” deep inside the Earth that triggers cycles of massive volcanism, Rohde has thought. There’s even a bit of evidence: A huge slab of volcanic basalt known as the Deccan Traps in India has been dated to 65 million years ago — just when the dinosaurs died, he noted. And the similar basaltic Siberian Traps were formed by volcanism about 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, when the greatest of all mass extinctions drove more than 70 percent of all the world’s marine life to death, Rohde said. The two scientists proposed more far-out ideas in their report in Nature, but only to indicate the possibilities they considered. Muller’s favorite explanation, he said informally, is that the solar system passes through an exceptionally massive arm of our own spiral Milky Way galaxy every 62 million years, and that that increase in galactic gravity might set off a hugely destructive comet shower that would drive cycles of mass extinction on Earth. Rohde, however, prefers periodic surges of volcanism on Earth as the least implausible explanation for the cycles, he said — although it’s only a tentative one, he conceded. Said Muller: “We’re getting frustrated and we need help. All I can say is that we’re confident the cycles exist, and I cannot come up with any possible explanation that won’t turn out to be fascinating. There’s something going on in the fossil record, and we just don’t know what it is.”
33. Quietman at 08:09 AM on 3 March, 2009
    So the point is that it is cyclic, regardless of cppling or heating, there is a causitive agent that does not include mankind and cold is much worse than warm (evidenced by our own near extinction at H4 in the neandertal paper).
34. Quietman at 08:10 AM on 3 March, 2009
    Sorry for all the typos, I'm diabetic so my eyesight is blurry after eating.
35. David Horton at 11:01 AM on 3 March, 2009
    Oh dear Quietman, you can find any kind of pattern you like, looking back at any kind of record (just as you can see apparently meaningful figures in melted cheese on toast), but that doesn't mean they are real or have a single "cause". The mentions of "Nemesis" and "Planet X" and UFO believers should give you some inkling that this stuff is suspect. Of course there are all kinds of causes of extinctions of the tens of thousands of species that have become extinct since life evolved on the planet. Volcanic eruptions might have played a role in some times and places, impact of an asteroid is possible I suppose, but for the vast bulk of species variations in climate are undoubtedly the cause. And for most water-based life forms hot and dry is more of a challenge than cool and wet. Dinosaurs may be an exception, but I doubt it. And then there are all the ocean life forms that have become extinct - not much prospect of asteroids and volcanoes affecting them (changes in temperature and acidity yes). Please, forget about Neanderthals, they are a red herring. You seem to be searching for something, anything, rather than accept that (a) CO2 concentrations are rapidly (in paleontological scales) increasing; (b) we know the physics and chemistry that causes the changes this will bring; and (c) the changes, not in models, but in the real world of glaciers and ice caps, droughts, heat records, storms, changes in species distribution and behavior, are already evident and rapidly accelerating. Talk about "natural timetables deep inside the Earth" is just whistling in the dark.
36. Quietman at 02:08 AM on 4 March, 2009
    David The Nemesis hypothesis, while nothing more than that, has been proposed serveral times in the past. Just because the crazies have picked up on it and made a cult centered around the concept does not invalidate the idea. But it has been largely abandoned by the scientific community. The mention is in the article, not a peer reviewed paper, by the reporter because of it's popular appeal. I don't have access to their paper as I did for the first reference at PLos One. Regardless of knowing the cause of this cyclicity, it does appear to exist.
37. Quietman at 08:17 AM on 17 March, 2009
    UW-Milwaukee Study Could Realign Climate Change Theory Scientists Claim Earth Is Undergoing Natural Climate Shift but like the telegraph said "Nobody listens to the real climate change experts".
38. David Horton at 15:35 PM on 21 March, 2009
    Anyone still following this thread will be interested in http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/131143/Wham_Bam_Climate_Spam.html. Comment number 94 suggests that it is much too mild and gentle and what is needed is a full blown offensive against denialists.
39. Quietman at 03:00 AM on 25 March, 2009
    Sort of a witch hunt? That is how ignorance always reacts to real science.
40. David Horton at 09:10 AM on 26 March, 2009
    Nah, witch hunts were against people who were merely imagined to be causing the community harm.
41. Quietman at 04:34 AM on 27 March, 2009
    Then it is the skeptics that should have a witch hunt. Ok, everyone, lock and load. :)
42. David Horton at 13:38 PM on 27 March, 2009
    One man's sceptic is another man's denialist.
43. Quietman at 07:19 AM on 29 March, 2009
    That IS a truism. One man's alarmist is another man's fundamentalist as well. Sorry, I'm agnostic. I see the greens as deniers of nature. CO2 is mans sin, pray for penance from the God Algore.
44. David Horton at 20:19 PM on 29 March, 2009
    Ah, why oh why couldn't I see it before. Yes, I have been a denier of nature, of course I have. All that concern about increasing CO2 and the destruction of habitats all around the globe, and the extinction of species, and rising pollution levels in sea and air, all because I, um, deny nature. And those who are happy to see giant corporations wreaking havoc on the planet, and who have absolutely no concern for the consequences, indeed, can see none, other than to mindlessly chant about climate always changing (gee, who knew, what an eye opener it was when I discovered THAT!), they are the what? True conservationists? Humanists? Libertarians? Rhetorical questions, I'm afraid, I really don't want to know how you label the delusions you are working under. Just go away. Learn something about the real world. Come back.
45. Quietman at 09:35 AM on 1 April, 2009
    Well Dave, I have been around long enough to have experienced warm winters before. Growing up on Long Island we had snowball fights wearing no more than jeans and t-shirts. You can fool the kids but you can't fool us old timers, sorry.
46. Quietman at 09:37 AM on 1 April, 2009
    ps I am retired on a healthy pension, I think I know about the real world, but you still have much to learn. Read my comments and links in the volcanos thread.
47. Quietman at 08:23 AM on 8 May, 2009
    Patrick These maps show the progression of the 3rd Ice Age (Carboniferous-Permian) beginning before it's onset in the Devonian through the End of the Permian. Devonian Early Carboniferous Late Carboniferous Permian These two maps show the 4th Ice Age (current) and the modern world (current interglacial): Current Ice Agea> Current Interglacial I already posted the Eocene and Miocene in the "It's the Sun" thread so I wont repeat them here. Compare the Ice Age maps to the earlier Ice Age and you can see easily how different the earth was and how unlikely another glacation actually is at this point. Think about it. What do you think caused the long extreme cycles in the late part of the this age?
48. Quietman at 02:59 AM on 10 May, 2009
    The changes in climate from changes in the Earth are not immediately obvious unless you realize that ocean currents have a much stronger effect than air currents. This is because the atmosphere is not efficient as a buffer, ie. GHGs are not as efficient as the ocean (or any body of water) at storing energy including heat. What is key to understanding how oceans drive climate is the convection currents (upwelling and downwelling currents). We know that ocean temperatures are not globally uniform. Some bodies of water are warmer or cooler than others. But what is more important is that the depths are different temperatures and the colder water sinks while the hotter water rises. Simple. Next comes the more complex part.
49. Quietman at 03:14 AM on 10 May, 2009
    The temperature of the ocean floor is variable. The depths have a thinner crust in general so transfer more heat and the volcanic active areas transfer heat from the magma directly to the water. The proximate temps change rapidly simply because the the amount of cold water available to sink this heat. But just like applying heat to the bottom of a pot of water, convection currents are created in both up and down directions. Some of these are fairly constant coming from the ocean depths but some are highly variable where volcanic activity exists and this can be at any depth along the ridges. At times of eruptions or even just increased plate movement the heat released into the water increases and either creates a new current or strengthens the existing current. As explained in the volcano thread, the ENSO is a real time example of this very driver. The subduction of the pacific plate under the Andes slows and speeds up in an irregular cycle. It's irregular because of the continental crust being uneven densiity and shape and made of materials of various ores with different melting points.
50. Quietman at 03:19 AM on 10 May, 2009
    This is why we get a warning when El Nino is beginning by volcanic eruptions in Chile. It's not the volcano that causes El Nino, it's just a symptom of the tectonic activity and it's accompanying vulcanism. And I have to stop for now since my grandson is having a tamtrum and I can't think straight with the noise.

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