As Woody Allen once said: “More than any other time in
history, mankind
faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter
hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to
choose correctly.”
New York Times columnist Carl Zimmer
recently wrote a piece averring that mankind is sowing the seeds of its own
(and nearly every other species’) mass
extinction via global warming. He compares where we are now to the
time leading up to the worst mass extinction in the planet’s history, a mere
252 million years ago, when, he asserts, the “Earth almost died.” Zimmer notes
that 96% of all ocean species became extinct due to this event at the end of
the Permian Period. Not “roughly 95%” or 97%, but precisely 96%. Given that we
don’t know how many species are alive today, nor how many may have ceased to be
over the Millenia, I believe there is at least a 96% chance that figure is
incorrect.
Scientists
believe the Permian-Triassic die-off was due to a series of volcanoes-- in what
is now Siberia-- erupting on a massive scale. They claim the staggering amounts
of magma and lava they emitted injected similarly massive amounts of carbon
dioxide into the atmosphere, trapping heat and leading to rapid, cataclysmic
warming of land and sea.
I
thought volcano eruptions led to cooling
of the Earth due to blocking of the sun’s rays. At least that’s what experts
were worried about when Mount St. Helens blew her top back in 1980. And when Mount
Pinatubo erupted in 1991, which cooled the Earth by 0.5 degrees
Celsius. It’s odd, the sun doesn’t get credit for warming anymore. It’s all due
to cow farts, lawn mowers, and coal plants.
Anyway,
the warmer the water, the less oxygen it holds. Voila, everything’s dead. Researchers
estimate, according to Zimmer, “that the surface of the ocean warmed by about
18 degrees Fahrenheit.” Meteorologists can’t accurately estimate what the
temperature will be in my yard at 6
p.m. next Thursday. Nevertheless, we are
“repeating the process, the scientists warn.”
Curtis
Deutsch, an earth scientist at the University of Washington, and Justin Penn, a
graduate student, are co-authors of a new study, published in the journal
Science, purporting to show that we may be paralleling that climate change
today. Due, of course, to man’s profligate use of fossil fuels to make and
deliver pointless goods and services such as food, clothing, shelter, and
medical care.
Fortunately,
to test their hypothesis, Dr. Deutsch and Penn “recreated the world at the end of the Permian Period with a
large-scale computer simulation, complete with a heat-trapping atmosphere and a
circulating ocean. “Recreated the world?” Did they do it in six days or less,
beating our original Creator? I’m
sure they didn’t overlook a single factor contributing to the planetary
environment of 252 million years ago, nor how each and every possible variable
interacted with all the others. Amazing!
As previously mentioned, the experts claim that the warmer the water, the less
oxygen it can hold. That may well be true, but they go on to say that, on the
ocean’s surface, photosynthetic algae produced oxygen, whereas the ocean depths
were deprived of oxygen. So, the algae didn’t die where it was warmest?
Moreover, they say, as the ocean warmed, the circulatory currents also slowed,
letting oxygen-poor water settle to the bottom.
Cold
water is significantly denser than warm water. Warm water stays on the surface,
buoyed and supported by the denser cold water underneath, until the warm
surface water is dramatically cooled, gets heavier, and then sinks to the
bottom. This is what is responsible for lakes “turning over” in the fall. Water
doesn’t automatically sink because currents slow or its oxygen content is
reduced.
Deutsch
and Penn teamed up with paleontologists at Stanford University, digging into “a
huge online database of fossils to chart the risks of extinction at different
latitudes during the catastrophe.” They compared this analysis to their
computer model’s prediction. They matched, leading Dr. Deutsch to exclaim,
“This was the most exciting moment of my life.” I hope Dr. Deutsch doesn’t have
a wife. Or kids.
The
penultimate sentence in Zimmer’s piece solemnly states: “Just how much warmer
the planet will get is up to us. It will take a tremendous international effort
to keep the increase below about 4 degrees Fahrenheit.” No, it is not simply “up
to us,” as we know for certain, since arguably the fastest and most massive
global warming in Earth’s history took place roughly 252 million years before mankind
had any effect whatsoever on greenhouse gases… according to the study’s own
authors. Homo Sapiens was not one of the species killed off in the “Great
Elimination”…because we weren’t yet around.
Zimmer’s
primer concludes by sniffing: “If we proceed to use up all the fossil fuels on
Earth, it could warm by as much as 17 degrees Fahrenheit by 2300.”
Just 1 degree less than it did on
its own…… 252 million years ago.
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