Early Plants May Have Caused Massive Glaciation 174
sciencehabit writes with this excerpt from Science: "The first plants to colonize land didn't merely supply a dash of green to a drab landscape. They dramatically accelerated the natural breakdown of exposed rocks, according to a new study, drawing so much planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere that they sent Earth's climate spiraling into a major ice age."
Re:Easy solution (Score:5, Funny)
2) Global warming is simply a return to the previous state
3) If you're growing ganja, OK then.
More results (Score:4, Funny)
Re:not to mention... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, at the time there was a major debate about whether or not that would happen. A lot of proto-Earth's top scientist algae were certain that releasing so much oxygen would irreversibly alter the environment and seriously affect non-oxygen-respiring organisms, but there were many plants who maintained that the young planet had already seen worse [wikipedia.org], and yet life existed in the current day despite that. What the poor, innocent archaeans who bought into all of this didn't realise was that the smooth-talking photosynthesisers were more interested in the production and stockpile of carbohydrates than the well-being of the other clades, and had already convinced themselves that whether or not the planet could support infinite population and ecological growth was not their concern.
Conflict of interest: The author declares that she has no conflicts of interest and is clearly not trolling, nor taking a joke too far to farm karma.
So that means... (Score:2, Funny)
We need to ramp up our deforestation programs. We're in a race here, gentlemen! Either it's the plants, or us.
Re:not to mention... (Score:5, Funny)
Nothing but undeveloped, unevolved, barely conscious pond scum, totally convinced of their own superiority as they scurry about their short, pointless lives.