Free Republic

There have been times in our geological history when CO2 levels were 10X what they are today, yet warming was only slightly higher. Unlike what you often read in simplistic media accounts, there are a lot of variables in climate and weather and temperature. It takes a lot of things going wrong to turn Earth into Venus and we have never come close. At the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Sacramento, geochemists discussed one such period, but they say we just got lucky - a vast mountain range formed in the middle of the ancient supercontinent, Pangea.

Prof Christian Sidor and his colleagues headed by Dr Linda Tsuji, also from the University of Washington, created two ‘snapshots’ of four legged-animals about 5 million years before and again about 10 million years after the Earth’s largest mass extinction (about 252 million years ago). Prior to the extinction event, for example, the pig-sized Dicynodon was a dominant plant-eating species across southern Pangea. Pangea is the name given to the landmass when all the world’s continents were joined together. Southern Pangea was made up of what is today Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia and India. After the mass extinction at...

First… it’s important to understand that this is the most profound disagreement in all of science in a century and a half… and, even so, it is the tip of the iceberg, the ramifications of this disagreement will change everything we know in science, top to bottom. To begin with basic stuff. All science knows… The earth has two crusts. One…the mostly basalt lower crust or the oceanic crust which is 2 – 4 miles deeper down than the higher upper continental crust. This lower crust, essentially covers the Earth. It … this crust is being made daily at rift...