Posted on 01/05/2007 11:52:48 AM PST by SmithL
Then there are danger times like today, when after thousands of years of relatively cold temperatures around the globe, planet Earth is warming measurably as greenhouse gases of the industrial age spur an ever-faster rise in worldwide thermometer readings.
A UC Davis scientist and other researchers examining the past for clues to the present are suggesting that global warming and cooling have run in cycles. They've uncovered evidence that some 300 million years ago a long-lasting ice age froze entire continents and then gave way 40 million years ago to a period of global warming that melted all the ice and left the Earth dry, dust-blown and covered only with sparse vegetation.
During those extreme temperature swings, said Isabel P. Montanez, a geochemist and geology professor at UC Davis, came shorter periods of warming and cooling.
It was a highly unstable period of climate change, marked by millions of years when temperatures yo-yoed up and down as the atmosphere's natural levels of carbon dioxide, the major heat-trapping greenhouse gas, rose and fell wildly, says Montanez.
Montanez led a team of researchers that gathered evidence of fluctuations in ancient carbon dioxide levels by analyzing fossil plant leaves and weathered rocks throughout the American Southwest, ice cores in Antarctica, Australian fossils, and coal formations in China.
By recording species changes in long-vanished, shallow-water creatures called brachiopods, the scientists calculated how sea levels rose during warming periods as glaciers and continental ice sheets disappeared.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Global Warming deniers must be burned at the stake!
Everybody is missing the point.
This study has a mission and that is to show that while global warming is a repeating and natural occurence that it is not a gradual and benign one but a catastrophic one.
The second goal is to convince us that the current warming is going to get much worse than what has already been feared and that only immediate steps to rid the atmosphere of the greenhouse pollutants will save future generations.
This approach stops the naysayers dead in their tracks when they point to small-scale changes like the Maunder Minimum and the greening of Greenland as showing that warming is self-regulating; what the authors of this study propose is that the reversals only come about after desolation and this is our only chance to save the planet from another round like the one they characerize.
They will use this to push ever harder for wholesale changes in our standard of living and way of life, I'd bet hard money in it.
Historically the world has been a much warmer place, without SUVs.
Most notably before there were any humans for the most part. And if there were humans, they were strictly hunter gatherers, not yet having invented "slash and burn" agriculture. IOW, native people in harmony with nature (and a life span of about 25 years).
I know it is a hoax when proponents are also advocating removing dams instead of finding ways to use extra water released by melting.
300 million years ago: Hoth.
40 million years ago: Tatooine
Our CO2 output will not make us into Tatooine (nor will our aerosols make us into Hoth).
New York
Saturday January 6th
Chance Rain
Hi 71°F
Sounds good to me.
Bttt.
If something's not done about globle warmin, it's gonna kilt every ara on the earth! Pay me!
Climate change must be man-made, because it's so unique to our planet's history.
And we'll prove how bad it can be with examples of when it happened in the past.
/sarcasm off
And yet the author does not tells us what the danger is. Is it longer growing seasons? Is it less use of fossil fueld for heating? What is it?
I sure would not bet against you.
While grain fields Greenland and frozen canals in Holland show recent mild changes and invalidate the hockey stick, there are arguments to stop this appeal to ancient changes to provoke a fear response.
My understanding is that ice ages are becoming longer and closer together over time and that is what should be worried about before global warming. One Russian research has predicted a strong cooling trend over the next 50 years or so, based on solar cycles (as I remember it). There's more than enough doubt to dump on this study too.
These guys haven't got a clue as to why these large and ancient climat changes occurred. It certainly wasn't C02 from burning vegetation that stopped the previous ice ages; there being precious little to burn on an Artic-like tundra.
At best, they've got an argument for more $$ for research. I just hope the Gramscian crowd hasn't fully coopted the research establishment, as there is something interesting going on in the very long term cycles that I'd like to know about.
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