“It’s the only plausible explanation” is NOT science
So they have ruled out gamma ray bursts, the effects of a weakened magnetic field, and the eruption of a supervolcano?
... aren't you forgetting someone???
Yeah, just like it’s official that CO2 emissions are causing “global warming”. This is BS. It’s far from ‘official’. It very likely was a combination of factors.
I think they formed a nanny state and banned themselves to death.
Ooo...settled science.
Non-beleivers will be hunted down and burned at the stake, using a smoke reclamation system, of course.
I still haven’t figured out how wooly mammoths were frozen with food in their mouths...
Until recently most scientists thought they knew what killed off the dinosaurs. A 10km-wide meteorite had smashed into the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, causing worldwide forest fires, tsunamis several kilometres high, and an 'impact winter' - in which dust blocked out the sun for months or years. It was thought that the dinosaurs were blasted, roasted and frozen to death, in that order. But now a small but vociferous group of scientists believes there is increasing evidence that this 'impact' theory could be wrong. That suggestion has generated one of the bitterest scientific rows of recent times. The impact theory For supporters of the impact theory, the KT boundary layers contained two crucial clues. In 1979 scientists discovered that there were high concentrations of a rare element called iridium, which they thought could only have come from an asteroid. Right underneath the iridium was a layer of 'spherules', tiny balls of rock which seemed to have been condensed from rock which had been vapourised by a massive impact. On the basis of the spherules and a range of other evidence, Dr Alan Hildebrand of the University of Calgary deduced that the impact must have happened in the Yucatan peninsula, at the site of a crater known as Chicxulub. Chemical analysis later confirmed that the spherules had indeed come from rocks within the crater. The impact theory seemed to provide the complete answer. In many locations around the world, the iridium layer (evidence of an asteroid impact) sits right on top of the spherule layer (evidence that the impact was at Chicxulub). So Hildebrand and other supporters of the impact theory argued that there was one massive impact 65 million years ago, and that it was at Chicxulub. This, they concluded, must have finished off the dinosaurs by a variety of mechanisms. Challenging the theory They concentrated on a series of rock formations in Mexico where the iridium layer was separated from the spherule layer by many metres of sandstone. That opinion sparked a massive row, as the supporters of the impact theory such as Prof Jan Smit of Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, rubbished Keller's ideas. Smit argued that the sandstone had been deposited by massive tsunami waves caused by the asteroid, and so did not undermine the idea of a single impact. But Keller's team found evidence - such as ancient worm burrows - that suggested that the deposition of the sandstone had been interrupted many times. They concluded that there was a gap of some 300,000 years between the deposition of the spherules (from the Chicxulub crater) and the iridium (from an asteroid). Therefore there must have been two impacts. The Chicxulub impact, they said, was too old to have finished off the dinosaurs, and there must have been another impact somewhere else which was to blame. That crater has not yet been found. More challenges Although still in the minority, Keller's work does now attract some support. And a range of scientists have begun to question other hypotheses connected with the impact theory. Claire Belcher of Royal Holloway, University of London, has found evidence which suggests that wildfires were not widespread in North America following the KT impact. Prof Dave Archibald of San Diego State University is convinced that the survival of creatures such as frogs disproves the idea that the dinosaurs perished amid acid rain as strong as battery acid, or that an 'impact winter' caused a massive and sustained drop in temperature. Dr Norman MacLeod of the Natural History Museum in London is among a large group of scientists who are convinced the dinosaurs were already being driven to extinction by climate change long before the arrival of the KT impact, or impacts. http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/dino_prog_summary.shtml |
BAKKER: "The final dino-die offs were also complicated. You see the beginning of the crash in North American diversity about 72 million years ago, in the Horseshoe Canyon Fauna. Only a very few big dinosaurs have large numbers. In the Lancian Fauna, 67 to 65.5 million years ago, we still have some dinosaurs but only two herbivores are common: Triceratops and Edmontosaurus. Then, at 65.4 million years ago, all the remaining big dinos go extinct.
These pulses of dino die-offs probably coincide with pulses of faunal interchange among the continents.
Conclusion: the Cretaceous dino extinctions were complicated in time and space. They did not happen suddenly all over the globe."
Does it really matter? Theories are interesting, as is the science and process, but in the end, they died. Does it really matter if they died from an asteroid impact, a comet fly-by, a volcano, starvation, cannibalism, wars, cars, global warming, global cooling, guns, or anything else? They’re dead, we’re here. Learn to deal with and adapt to the present with lessons learned from relevant past events of which we could have some control in the outcome, while hoping for a better future. The past is important, but nothing can be done to change it. If the same fate awaits us, what can be done to alter that fate? Nothing! Some of us know what will happen to us; as for the rest, only they can change their final fate through acceptance, grace and faith.
IPCC maintains that 2,000 is sufficient to form a consensus of scientists, now we see the bar lowered to 41 which also just happens to be close to the number of scientists engaged in monkeying with the data in our recent climategate debacle.
Agreeing on the unknown or the unknowable makes it no more true than before.
Settled science?