Greenhouse warming can get pretty extreme:
Scientists have found what might have been the ideal ancient vacation hot spot with a 74-degree Fahrenheit average temperature, alligator ancestors and palm trees. It’s smack in the middle of the Arctic.
First-of-its-kind core samples dug up from deep beneath the Arctic Ocean floor show that 55 million years ago an area near the North Pole was practically a subtropical paradise, three new studies show.
[…]”Imagine a world where there are dense sequoia trees and cypress trees like in Florida that ring the Arctic Ocean,” said Pagani, a member of the multinational Arctic Coring Expedition that conducted the research.Millions of years ago the Earth experienced an extended period of natural global warming. But around 55 million years ago there was a sudden supercharged spike of carbon dioxide that accelerated the greenhouse effect.
People who trumpet “natural cycles” will no doubt love this study. You have the Earth warming itself, relatively fast (if you call a few million years fast) and hitting peaks of CO2 that we today couldn’t imagine. There you have the upside anyway, although until we know why the CO2 spike happened comparing now with then will be a sucker’s game.
If we had to bet on a cause I would go with increased volcanoes, which kick amazing amounts of carbon into the air. Land plants don’t actually impact the atmospheric carbon levels that much, even if you burn them, since the world’s major sink of biological carbon lies in the ocean. Also marine carbon actually has a chance of being flushed out of the system forever (don’t tell a geologist that I said forever…) by mineralizing into calcite and getting buried in deep-sea sediment. The carbon fixed by land plants doesn’t actually weigh that much compared with marine algae and eventuall just washes into the sea anyway.
You could get a similar result if something acidified the oceans. Carbon minerals like calcite would dissolve before they reach the seafloor and circulate back into the atmosphere rather than get buried in sediment, but that sort of event would leave fingerprints all over the place. People have looked at enough seafloor sediment cores by now that I doubt that it happened.
The weirdest possibility takes a bit of mental gymnastics but it might stand an outside chance of being true. Like all stone silica-rich rocks break down into gravel, then sand and then their component ions in a process called weathering. Unlike other stone, silica weathering causesthe drawdown of CO2 from the atmosphere. Plant roots do a much faster job of weathering rocks than rain and wind alone, so if you burned off or extincted away the rooted plants from a significant part of the Earth’s surface you might slow down atmospheric carbon drawdown and over thousands to millions of years cause a major spike in CO2. The K-T boundary (dinosaur extinction) happened around 65 million years ago, 10 million years earlier than our CO2 spike, so it’s possible that a killer asteroid burned off a good fraction of one hemisphere’s land plants and the plants “left behind” weren’t nearly as good at breaking down silica. The difference would take time to manifest itself. Ten million years seems long, but not outside the realm of possibility.
One the downside, once CO2 gets into the atmosphere its effects can reach farther than we thought:
Many experts figured that while the rest of the world got really hot, the polar regions were still comfortably cooler, maybe about 52 degrees Fahrenheit.
But the new research found the polar average was closer to 74 degrees. So instead of Boston-like weather year-round, the Arctic was more like Miami North. Way north.
[…]What’s troubling is that this hints that future projections for warming, several degrees over the next century, may be on the low end, said study lead author Appy Sluijs of the Institute of Environmental Biology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.Also it shows that what happened 55 million years ago was proof that too much carbon dioxide — more than four times current levels — can cause global warming, said another co-author Henk Brinkhuis at Utrecht University.
It had not occurred to me that informed people still doubt that CO2 causes warming. Not counting those paid to doubt it, of course.
The Other Steve
None of this is real. By next year these guys are going to be warning us about an oncoming ice age, just you wait.
Punchy
Couple of points/questions:
While I cannot account/explain for the CO2 levels 55 million years ago, there’s been an alternate hypothesis as to why the Artic was once the tropics. It was borne out of the need for some researchers to explain how Mammoths were found frozen with undigested food in their stomachs (very quick deaths) and with their meals being animals not indigenous to the frozen tunda. It’s premise is that an Ice Age built up so much ice at the poles that, in a sense, the Earth’s crust became very top-heavy and literally shifted en masse 90 degrees. What had been at the equator was now at the poles, and vice-versa.
I’m not saying it’s correct, but it has been proffered as an explanation to why these “tropical” species are being found in Artic core samples.
jaime
But…the world is only…6,000 years…old. Can’t…engage in…debate…logic failing…rate of…typing…slowing.
Sstarr
Not to snark too much, but I believe Mammoths were herbavores.
Also, when people die they often have undigested food in their stomachs. If they’ve eaten recently. The whole digestion thing just sort of stops once your dead. Or so I gather from CSI.
Tim F.
Punchy, that idea makes my physics textbook break into tears. Besides basics like angular momentum, the geophysical aspects of flipping the Earth’s poles make about as much sense as Santa Claus beaming me to Pluto for a Chimay kegger.
The mammoths had foreign material in their guts because the world got warmer so foreign plants expanded their ranges northward. They died fast because the warming climate weakened ice dams holding back massive glacial lakes. When the dams burst the mammoths were buried in massive flows of cold water and mud.
HyperIon
evidently you have not heard that Santa was killed in a terrorist attack on 29 may.
i’m sure The Easter Bunny will be showing up here soon to remind you…
Punchy
Tim, Star:
Ok, ok, I was confused. It was plants, not animal remains, that they found in their stomachs. The plants were tropical in origin, yet the mammoths were found in Artic areas. That was the set-up for this Grand Tectonic theory
Let me reiterate here that I am not supporting nor making up this theory, but I very clearly remember seeing it on the Discovery Channel a few years back. They showed how the massive ice literally caused the Earth’s outer crust to slip/slide 90 degrees until the ice was melted at the equator (i.e., no more pull), thus putting tropical vegetation at the poles. I do understand the physics and general disruption of said move would have been beyond catastrophic…The stomach content aspect was brought up b/c the contents weren’t digested or physically broken down, thus implying that the mammoth was frozen very quickly, but considering that the meal the mammoth ate was from a tropical area…well…cold and tropics don’t co-exist, unless the plates moved very quickly…Again, not my theory, but one nonetheless.
Dammit, I wish I could google this presentation, but I have NO idea what it’d be called.
spoosmith
I simply do not understand the violent denials about global warming. Even assuming that all the pollutants we are pumping into the air are not causing an increase in temperature, you would think that even the densest moron would accept that as humans we need clean air, water and soil in order to live. Systematically poisoning all three necessities is mind-bogglingly stupid and short-sighted. At the very least, the global warming debate may make the air we breathe cleaner.
But then – I think that a lot of people expect Jesus to fix to problem after the rapture.
jaime
None of this is important. What’s important is Al Gore flies on planes and drives in a car. Why can’t he ride a bike across country? Hypocrite.
Tim F.
Punchy,
You’re killing me, man. Look, the last glacial maximum (LGM) was somewhere around 200,000 years ago. We have chains of islands, for example the Hawiian Islands, which track from oldest to youngest in a more or less straight line from east to west because the crust layer has slowly migrated over a fixed “hot spot” in the mantle.
If the crust has moved relative to the mantle at any time in the last 10 million years then Mount Kilauea would be erupting in the middle of the ocean floor somewhere, not smack in the middle of the big island of Hawaii. If the crust and the mantle moved together the force necessary would be pretty hard to imagine, and definitely a little ice relocation wouldn’t cut it. It wouldn’t come within six orders of magnitude. It just didn’t happen.
The Easter Bunny
Hyperlon – thanks for covering for me. I was going over some of the planning for Operation Scorched Moose.
Anyway, I’m sure Tim knew what he was doing here. Look at that headline: “Better Warn Santa.” It’s only been 5 days since the fat bastard exploded like a hamster in a microwave, and you’re making jokes about it? Real funny. Why don’t you move to Canuckistan, I’m sure they’d appreciate your sense of humor there.
Now, about this mythical “global warming.” Here’s a news flash for you lefty bedwetters: the Earth heats up and cools down over time. Trust me, I’ve been there, seen that. The Little Ice Age was a cold mofo. I spent most of the 16th century hiding from asshole humans who wanted to take my pelt.
How long do you think Al Gore would have lasted in that era, huh? If he had tried giving a long, boring-ass lecture on “global warming” back then, the Swiss would have chopped his ass up for firewood. So calm down, and for once try focusing on our real problems: gay marriage and Canuckofascism.
Remember 5/29, bitches!
TTT
The righty blogosphere is full of people clucking that because the Arctic was tropical 55,000,000 years ago, there isn’t global warming now.
They’re so dense and so ideologically repelled by science that they really do think environmental scientists were unaware of natural warming cycles. Kinda like the creationists who really do think evolution is a religious cult and so go around saying “Darwin changed his mind!” with the impression that it will make his “followers” reject him.
DougJ
you would think that even the densest moron would accept that as humans we need clean air, water and soil in order to live.
Sorry, moonbat, but all we need is freedom and a president who is willing to fight for it.
DougJ
Just thinking out loud here — is it possible that Hillary Clinton moved Santa’s body to Canada after he died?
Anderson
What puzzled me was how the scientists know that the sediments in question were at the north pole 55M years ago (& not, say, at the equator), what with plates moving around & all.
But I assume that somebody was thinking about that.
The Easter Bunny
I’m sure Hitlary is providing aid and comfort to the Canuckistanis, but think about it for a minute before you go flapping off into moonbat land. Santa was blown up. There’s still greasy, lard-encased chunks of him wedged in the cracks of his workshop. There were witnesses. Elrond can attest that Santa was working in his workshop just before the explosion. Take off the tinfoil hat and maybe you’ll realize that your kooky theory just doesn’t hold up.
Unless Elrond was in on it, and he and Hitlary murdered Santa in Central Park and later moved his body to the workshop, where it could be blown up by the Canuckistani bomb. And where’s Legolas in all this? Elrond claimed he was moved to an “undisclosed location.” Hmmm. Maybe he saw something he shouldn’t have, and the undisclosed location is the bottom of the Hackensack River. But how likely is that?
bud
It had not occurred to me that informed people still doubt that CO2 causes warming. Not counting those paid to doubt it, of course.
There was 4x CO2 and it was really warmer? That’s it, game over, go home.
A couple of minor questions, before we close all the coal mines, shut off all the oil and gas wells,and move back to the 16th century: What were the atmospheric levels of water vapor and methane? I’ve seen nothing in any of the reporting on this subject that mentions those “minor” details.
bud
BTW, nested blockquotes show up fine in the “preview” but get trashed when published.
Jon H
“Also marine carbon actually has a chance of being flushed out of the system forever (don’t tell a geologist that I said forever…) by mineralizing into calcite and getting buried in deep-sea sediment. ”
I’ve been thinking perhaps we should be working on developing a genetically engineered hardy and fast-growing species of coral.
Jon H
bud writes: “A couple of minor questions, before we close all the coal mines, shut off all the oil and gas wells,and move back to the 16th century:”
Spoken like a true climatological surrender monkey. There must be a Frenchman in your ancestry.
Jon H
Punchy writes: “Let me reiterate here that I am not supporting nor making up this theory, but I very clearly remember seeing it on the Discovery Channel a few years back. ”
Discovery channel is not actually a science channel. It’s the scientific equivalent of “truthiness”.
Tim F.
Coral is too shallow to do much good. You need a coccolithophore, which is a single-celled algae. If we can stimulate those suckers then climate could turn around in a jiff. Actually people are already on it – check out the IronEx project (Google) for more on that, although that particular project strikes me as a very bad idea.
Rex
I thought he meant coral that we could rebuild our coastal cities atop.
Tim F.
Meaningless throat-clearing. If a huge spike in CO2 leads to a catastrophic inferno then a moderate spike is highly unlikely to lead to nothing.
An excellent point. Did you know that both of those act as positive feedback loops for CO2-induced warming? We have millions of tons of methane locked up in shallow-water clathrates. It may not take much of a warming to shock them out of the clathrate phase and into the gas phase. Methane has modern climate experts, which you are obviously not, very concerned.
Mark Olson
And the current decade of global warming on Mars and the retreat of Saturnian rings is cause by … ??? Terrestrial levels of CO2?
Sstarr
I wondered about that too. According to the US geological service it wasn’t that much different 65 million years ago.
Do the wingnuts know that the US government endorses the idea that the earth is more than 5000 years old?
Steve
Where do people get this recurring talking point about global warming on Saturn?!
srv
Y’all just don’t get it. Sure, the earth is warming. But a few nukes here and there, and we’ll have a little winter again. You really think all this C02 and Iran stuff is a coincidence?
Off Colfax
Ye gods, one person actually comes up with the right answer to this question (Continental Drift. It’s a fact of life, just like death and taxes. Only continental drift takes thousands of years instead of either once or every year like clockwork.) (Thousands of years which, obviously, didn’t happen. And dinosaur fossils are actually God’s own practical joke.) and you folks ignore it to go hare-ing off into a weekend of ConspiracyLand rides.
Pun intended.
The Easter Bunny
Question: does anyone think Tim F might actually be in league with the Canuckistanis? He’s going to great lengths here to convince us that this “global warming” claptrap is real. What if his real purpose is to cover up the fact that the North Pole has warmed 14 degrees F in the last week, due to the Canucks using WMDs during the 5/29 attack?
For that matter, has anyone ever seen “Tim F” and the poster “Canuckistani” in the same place? I didn’t think so.
DougJ
I thought he meant coral that we could rebuild our coastal cities atop.
Great comment.
Jon H
Tim F says “Coral is too shallow to do much good. You need a coccolithophore, which is a single-celled algae. If we can stimulate those suckers then climate could turn around in a jiff. Actually people are already on it – check out the IronEx project (Google) for more on that, although that particular project strikes me as a very bad idea.”
Well, I was thinking that coral – as it is today – would not be very good. Among the problem you cite, it seems rather fragile, ecologically. It wouldn’t help much to rely on something already threatened by climate change as a way to fight climate change.
That’s why I suggested it be genetically engineered, to come up with a modified coral that would be significantly more useful. Coral that can grow faster, spread faster and wider, live deeper, tolerate higher water temperatures, and generate a denser carbonate mass. (Also, jump higher, run faster, and maybe have bionic vision.)
I’m sure such a critter wouldn’t be sufficient on its own, but surely every little bit would help. There’s always the possibility that they might exceed expectations. And it might help restore life to some of the dead or damaged coral reefs.
Jon H
Oh, also, we could try genetically engineering coccolithophores too. Doing so might help turn projects like IronEx from a tool something like a fairly dull axe into a tool something more like a CNC fabrication/milling/cutting machine.
ie, if you’re going to rely on stimulating an organism, it might not be a bad idea if you can tune the organism to be easily and specifically stimulated. That’d make the stimulation more efficient, and would make it easier to stop if things get out of hand. For example, instead of just using Fe, engineer them to require Fe and also the presence of some other substance or a condition in the environment which is uncommon in nature.
Jon H
Oh, also, one genuine advantage of doing coral, rather than just single-cell algae in the deep ocean, is that coral reefs are somewhat popular, and telegenic. It’d be nice if climate change fighters had something marketable, accessible, and beautiful they could point to as a means of fighting global warming.
(Even if the reef they’re pointing to is an old-fashioned natural one, given as an example of what they are working on creating.)
demimondian
Sorry, Off Colfax, but Continental Drift doesn’t explain the effect away. It’s too slow, and, due to the rotation of the Earth, is essentially East-West.
Keep lyin…err, I mean, trying. But, do try to keep in mind that “teaching the controversy” assumes that the scientific community hasn’t already examined the controversy, oh, say, twenty years ago.
Punchy
We need to bioengineer these algae to take in CO2, and spit out perfume molecules. Make the whole globe smell like one cheap strip club. We could kiss global warming goodbye, rid our rural friends (and Greeley, CO) of the horrible farm stench, and put air freshener companies out of buisness. Perhaps we can also get them to sing my alma mater’s fight song, too.
Tim F.
Engineering coral simply won’t work for the simple reason that coral is actually a symbiotic relationship between a sea anemone-like hydra and a single-celled algae called a dinoflagellate (in coral it’s called a zooxanthellae, read more here) which provides the color and photosynthesis.
Before you recommend diving in, so to speak, I recommend that you keep in mind that Dinoflagellate genetics remains in the f*cking dark ages. I have done significant research with dinos. They might be the last organisms on Earth for which we can honestly say that we have no idea how they replicate their DNA. It stays condensed like our DNA during cell division, except all the time. It never relaxes. So how to replicase enzymes get at it? We have no idea. They also have up to fifty times as much DNA as we do and their genomic architecture remains a complete mystery. Engineering a dino today is about as practical as making AIDS from scratch in the 1950s.
We could possibly engineer a coccolithophore but natural selection would most likely weed it out in two or three seasons. I strongly doubt that anything that we can build stands a chance of outgrowing the bugs already out there.
As I see it we have the option of either 1) reducing our carbon emissions, or 2) suffering. Iron seeding has an outside chance of not causing a greater disaster than it solves but other than that I’d say that pretty much covers it.
GOP4Me
Relax, Tim. Santa is dead, and global warming is a myth. This is nothing to get yourself worked up about.
Jon H
Tim,
Why do you hate polyps?
(Just kidding.)
I did not know all of that. Very interesting. Thanks!