Earth is Missing a Huge Part of Its Crust. Now We May Know Why. (nationalgeographic.com) 163
A fifth of Earth's geologic history might have vanished because planet-wide glaciers buried the evidence. From a report: The Grand Canyon is a gigantic geological library, with rocky layers that tell much of the story of Earth's history. Curiously though, a sizeable layer representing anywhere from 250 million years to 1.2 billion years is missing. Known as the Great Unconformity, this massive temporal gap can be found not just in this famous crevasse, but in places all over the world. In one layer, you have the Cambrian period, which started roughly 540 million years ago and left behind sedimentary rocks packed with the fossils of complex, multicellular life. Directly below, you have fossil-free crystalline basement rock, which formed about a billion or more years ago.
So where did all the rock that belongs in between these time periods go? Using multiple lines of evidence, an international team of geoscientists reckons that the thief was Snowball Earth, a hypothesized time when much, if not all, of the planet was covered in ice. According to the team, at intervals within those billion or so years, up to a third of Earth's crust was sawn off by Snowball Earth's roaming glaciers and their erosive capabilities. The resulting sediment was dumped into the slush-covered oceans, where it was then sucked into the mantle by subducting tectonic plates.
Effectively, in many locations, Earth buried the evidence of about a fifth of its geological history, the team argued this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The notion is elegant but provocative, and the authors themselves predict that some geoscientists will express skepticism. "I think, though, we have extraordinary evidence to support that extraordinary claim," says study leader C. Brenhin Keller, a postdoctoral fellow at the Berkeley Geochronology Center.
So where did all the rock that belongs in between these time periods go? Using multiple lines of evidence, an international team of geoscientists reckons that the thief was Snowball Earth, a hypothesized time when much, if not all, of the planet was covered in ice. According to the team, at intervals within those billion or so years, up to a third of Earth's crust was sawn off by Snowball Earth's roaming glaciers and their erosive capabilities. The resulting sediment was dumped into the slush-covered oceans, where it was then sucked into the mantle by subducting tectonic plates.
Effectively, in many locations, Earth buried the evidence of about a fifth of its geological history, the team argued this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The notion is elegant but provocative, and the authors themselves predict that some geoscientists will express skepticism. "I think, though, we have extraordinary evidence to support that extraordinary claim," says study leader C. Brenhin Keller, a postdoctoral fellow at the Berkeley Geochronology Center.
It orbits us (Score:1)
I thought this was already known (Score:1)
Certainly that's what I was taught in my midwest high school surrounded by lots of plains and "flatland", made so by the glaciers that came before us.
Re:I thought this was already known (Score:5, Informative)
> because glaciers don't "move"
They certainly do. Or at least they can...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And they're pretty effective at scrubbing the underlying terrain.
=Smidge=
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Re:I thought this was already known (Score:5, Informative)
> they don't act like bulldozers.
Yes they do. Glaciers can slide for miles, picking up chunks of rock and dragging them along the underlying surface literally scouring the underlying earth like a river of sandpaper. They can dig out valleys, transport the material miles away and dump it. A few million tons of ice sliding around will easily act like a bulldozer. Glacially formed striation and moraines are all over the place.
They are literal rivers of ice; they flow, not just shift.
=Smidge=
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I like that.
Also, GP is an imbecile.
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Jakobshavn Glacier is the world's fastest glacier and moves 66-150 feet per DAY! Glaciers typically only move about 3 feet per day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Crazy.
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But but but ... if you want a flow, you need a downhill. Surely not EVERYPLACE a glacier existed was downhill! Where's the bottom?
Oh ... yeah ... those subducting tectonic plates :-(
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You don't need a downhill necessarily. A glass of water poured onto a flat and level surface will still flow and spread out.
=Smidge=
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"Pedantic much?"
You must be new here. All this site is, is a race to the bottom for who can "well, actually" more microscopically than anyone else.
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You should start a glacier pressure channel on youtube.
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I thought this was already known ... Except the glaciers didn't "saw" off the crust (because glaciers don't "move") but pulverized it under their weight as the ice and snow built up and with annual run-off draining the sediment away.
It was previously suspected, not known, that the basement rock was crystallized under the weight of the 2 kilometer thick ice sheets, but there was little evidence this part of the hypothesis was correct, it was just the best fitting piece of the puzzle so far.
The authors of this new puzzle piece both claim it's a better fitting piece and that they have evidence.
If that evidence turns out to be true that would give this explanation a pretty huge leg up over the old guess.
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When was that? 1750?
Shows we worry about the wrong things (Score:2)
up to a third of Earth's crust was sawn off by Snowball Earth's roaming glaciers and their erosive capabilities.
Let's see, we could worry about the Earth maybe getting a few degrees warmer and having to back away from the ocean a bit.
Or we could worry about ENTIRE CONTINENTS being "sawed off the earth" by glaciers as the rest of us starved because there was nowhere on earth you could grown more than a handful of crops in the icy cold.
Way better in my mind to engineer how to deal with warming - and keep it p
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Look, everybody, it's LynnwoodRooster, offering yet more evidence that eating paint chips does not increase your IQ.
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It's like you looked up a list of common logical fallacies and mistook them for virtues.
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Glacial period, not Ice Age.
The current age is an ice age(The entire Quaternary period is an ice age, as can be seen by year-round polar ice-caps, those ice-caps did not exist for a majority of the history of life on earth).
It would be great for biodiversity if we moved away from being too cold for plants for much of the year for large parts of the planet. A warmer climate leads to more prolific and productive plants which in turn lead to more energy available for other forms of life.
Sure change sucks for
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But there's no evidence an ice-age is coming. The big problem with man-made global warming is that it's happening relatively fast, not giving Earth life nor human populations enough time to adapt. IF a natural ice-age were coming up, most likely it would occur rather gradual.
As far as what is the "ideal" temperature for the Earth is per farming etc., that's certainly an interesting question. I suspect too much heat will lead to too many deserts, r
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We are a technological society, what ever the climate our cities were estblished in, is the climate we want to maintain. Only a idiot could accept the majority of the worlds coastal cities wiped out by widespread flooding. You do have some understanding that sea levels were a couple of hundred metres lower in the last ice age, only a psychopath would accept that chaos as reasonable or claim some idiots benefit.
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An Earth 2C or even 4C warmer or cooler isn't inherently more or less hospitable to humans. What is inhospitable to our economy and the vulnerable people in it is any kind of change that is too fast for them to cope with. If over the course of a thousand years the southern Great Plains becomes a desert, nobody would even notice. If it happens in a hundred years, you will be looking at a series of refugee crises.
Insofar as any disruptive change is the result of our actions, we should worry about it. Rap
Re: Shows we worry about the wrong things (Score:2)
Look up AMOC slowdowns. "Decades" is the timeline in which we expect an ice age to arrive.
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The IPCC models do not predict a catastrophic change there, although of course they could be wrong.
Re: Shows we worry about the wrong things (Score:2)
You mean they could be wrong again? The IPCC models in the 90s predicted exactly that. So, put whatever stock you feel is appropriate in science that does not present any experimental evidence and is based solely the ability of software to model complex systems.
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I don't know where you get your information. The IPCC predicted some slowdown but of a magnitude that would be offset by general warming.
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and having to back away from the ocean a bit.
Yeah it's so easy we can just just just move 10%+ of the world's population and flood 2/3rds of the worlds largest (+5 million people) cities [npr.org] it'll be fine!
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You act like that is hard but over a hundred years, that is not hard. Nor is it even a lot of people affected compared to the bitter reality of a colder climate truly getting a grip on the world.
Re: Shows we worry about the wrong things (Score:2)
You act like it's easier than just *burning less of our finite supply of fossil fuel*.
Plus if the earth starts to cool like that we will have centuries to come up with a solution, perhaps burning that fossil fuel we kept in reserve..?
Bad approach (Score:2)
Plus if the earth starts to cool like that we will have centuries to come up with a solution, perhaps burning that fossil fuel we kept in reserve..?
You are not thinking about all this in terms of momentum - way easier to keep the Earth from sinking into a decline, than it is to stop a decline in progress (especially given how long it would take us all to agree the danger is real).
We have lucked out into warming the climate by about the right amount before we switch to mostly alternative energy sources.
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Even if we switch to 100% carbon-neutral energy overnight (and fix all the other sources like construction and agriculture) - what makes you think the warming we've started will stop at "the right amount"? The carbon we've already released will continue warming us for decades and centuries to come, the seas will keep rising, and the ocean will keep acidifying. We'll be lucky if glaciers exist anywhere by the time it eventually stabilises.
It's ridiculous to worry about potential future glaciation when we've
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Even if we switch to 100% carbon-neutral energy overnight (and fix all the other sources like construction and agriculture) - what makes you think the warming we've started will stop at "the right amount"?
Because even the IPCC thinks we are hitting the 2C or so mark, and between 2C-4C is fine. Basically anything that is not runaway warming (remember, the thing that was supposed to scare us originally, now not in the cards in any forecast) can be dealt with.
The carbon we've already released will continue w
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between 2C-4C is fine
Lol, if you say so. Yes we can "deal with it" - at the cost of hundreds of billions [wri.org] annually in adaption costs, not to mention [www.ipcc.ch] displacing billions from coastal areas, threatened sea ecologies from CO2 acidification, famines from shifting agriculture in undeveloped nations, etc etc. Better to avoid those costs wherever possible, don't you think?
If you want to believe that fine
I believe the research [uliege.be]. Linear kinetics models suggest an atmospheric lifetime of 30-95 years. Equilibrium models tell us that even after equilibrium is reached once
I'll bet the 6000 year old earthers can tell (Score:5, Funny)
you exactly where the crust went, and when, and why.
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That's an old meme and its a very very small minority of kooky off shoot heretic protestants that believe that. The mainstream christian rites like Catholicism don't believe that at all.
It's an old meme sir (Score:2)
Jokes aside, approx 38 % of Americans [wikipedia.org] believe in "Young Earth" creationism and 24% believe everything in the bible is the literal word of God ("literal" here means that nothing is a parable).
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There are lots of revisions and different versions of the Bible. Most mainstream bibles such as the King James and Douay-Rheims do not state the age of the earth in them. Which are used my mainstream protestants and Catholics.
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There is also a divide amongst literalists; those that accept some old monk's 6000 year suggestion and those that accept that a "day" of creation need not be 24 hours.
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Oh that's easy. I've seen enough Young Earth Creationist mumbojumbo that even I can explain that.
The gap is where the water was hidden before the great flood. There's no rock layer because that layer was water, not rock! During the great flood, the water rose up and the crust sank, becoming temporarily submerged. As the waters receded and flowed into what is today's oceans, finding its new level, it carved the Grand Canyon and other geological features that "scientists" insist are the result of millions of
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If you believe the Earth is only 6000 years old, you'd argue there is no missing crust.
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you exactly where the crust went, and when, and why.
Well, it's perfectly obvious to me . . . someone ate the crust . . . just like that last piece of pizza in the box that mysteriously disappears.
Keep your eyes out for folks with Earth Crust Crumbs on their chins!
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you exactly where the crust went, and when, and why.
Because "Snowball Earth" is a better explanation? It sounds like an L. Ron Hubbard novel.
You (collectively) are literally just making stuff up because your version of how things came to be must (in your mind) be true. You are doing that every bit as much as your targets of derision (in your estimation) are doing so.
Since your version of things must be true, therefore, er, something or other must have happened to that whole missing geological layer ...
In other words, you're hardly in any position to snark
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An explanation based on stitching together related, objectively verifiable facts, and a willingness to change the explanation when new objectively verifiable facts come to light is completely different from the other type of explanation.
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You do know that without any greenhouse gases, the average temperature of the Earth would be about -20C currently and in the past the Sun was cooler?
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you exactly where the crust went, and when, and why.
Damn cat! I told it not to stand on top of the earth and push that crust onto the turtles. The little bastard likes to watch the look on my face as it slowly pushes the crust off the edge of the earth.
Awfully uniform (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem they might encounter with the skeptics is explaining why the missing rock seems to be so uniform all over the globe. Surely the glaciers would be thinner at the equator? The missing rock should not go as far back at the equator as the topical zones, I would think.
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You seem to be a little unclear on the scale of this whole thing.
* Are you aware what "snowball earth" means? Do you have an understanding of how much glaciation there was?
* Do you understand that a half billion years is a very, very long time, even in geologic terms?
* Do you have a concept for what plate tectonics might look like on the scale of a half billion years?
* Do you know where the continents were during this period? Or even what they were? Or if they were?
Seriously, your comment reads like a 12 ye
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Seriously, your comment reads like a 12 year old trying to sound smart, and failing really, really badly.
It's funny that you say that, since it appears the OP may be correct about thinner glaciers at the equator. From the Snowball Earth Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org]:
Given those statements, it would be reasonable to posit that the glacial
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Thing is... the earth might have not always rotated the same way ?
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No, you've got the same problem OP has. Thanks for trying to shame me, however. Feel free to read through what I wrote and answer those questions for yourself. You've got the aptitude for learning if you took the baby step of looking up the Snowball Earth, so I have hope for you.
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WOW... Seriously, fuck you. You have just invalidated everything you ever say.
I didn't come across as more knowledgeable than anyone else, I merely posited a thought that was reasonable.
It's still reasonable, because you haven't said anything to actually counter it, you just came across as a pompous dickwad with rude assumptions that didn't negate a thing I said.
Regardless of how continents and plates move or how long the period was, the equator is always subjected to more sunlight. Glaciation will never b
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Still wrong, and entirely missing the big picture.
I've been coming to /. for a long time for intelligent discussion, and I get a little irritated when stupid, ignorant shit gets modded up. Not knowing the first thing you're talking about doesn't entitle you to a polite education from me or anyone else.
You've thrown a little temper-tantrum because I didn't treat your ignorance with respect. Sorry kid, but it doesn't deserve respect. I gave you some really good starting points for you to correct your deep cha
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"..kid" Oh, That's funny. You pull assumptions out of your behind like there's no tomorrow.
If you check my id, you'll see I've been coming to slashdot for a long time too, and I started when I was older, and I get irritated when some pompous, supercilious blowhard feels they have the right to belittle another user for unmaliciously positing an assumption or question on a subject they find interesting. I never passed myself off as a geologist. It's also not my fault that my post got modded up, so sorry
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where is the proof that each and every landmass during the precambrian/cyrogenian period moved and distributed themselves equally between temperate and tropical zones, ensuring the same degree of solar exposure?
The good news is that you're at least getting closer to understanding why your question about about glaciation all the way to the equator is a stupid question. The bad news is that this is a dumber question, and shows a remarkable lack of understanding of the topic at hand. One step forward and two back, it seems.
But you're welcome to continue on with your little rant about how arrogant and dumb I am rather than reading and learning enough to understand.
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The distribution of land was very different then - what's at the equator now wasn't at the equator then. So, first, locate the landmass that was under the equator then and check it's layers - assuming they survived.
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Thanks, that helps. So let's assume the continents moved around enough that basically everywhere got roughly equal exposure near the equator as the poles, and so glaciation was more or less uniform (I'm still not entirely sold on that but maybe it's not necessary); glaciers scrubbed off all the softer sedimentary at the time leaving only the igneous basement behind, resetting the fossil record so to speak, until the Cambrian started building it back up to the modern day.
However, they believe that "up to a
Earth was jealous (Score:2)
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Previous civilizations (Score:1)
Artifacts of human or other industrial civilizations are unlikely to be found on a planet's surface after about 4 million years, said Frank and study co-author Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. For instance, they noted that urban areas currently take up less than 1 percent of Earth's surface, and that complex items, even from early human technology, are very rarely found. A machine as complex as the Antikythera mechanism
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there is zero reason to believe any advanced ancient civilizations exist, especially since there are nonliving artifacts not needing any fossilization that *would* endure.
Would you care to hazard a guess how long these things would last:
a silicon based integrated circuit in a ceramic package
a fiber optic cable
a gold tooth or a porcelain crown
The windshield of a car
titanium alloy aircraft and rocket bodies
aluminum engine blocks
corpses preserved with formaldehyde
this stuff is all o
/. and out of tech topics (Score:2)
We should have a reward here for the most misleading topic.
The very linked article itself, and further research about "Great Unconformity" clearly state that this particular unconformity is limited to the Great Canyon GRAND CANYON - THE GREAT UNCONFORMITY [usra.edu] and from wikipedia Great Unconformity [wikipedia.org] one can further learn about this "annomaly" together with it's explanation:
Unconformities in general tend to reflect long-term changes in the pattern of the accumulation of sedimentary or igneous strata in low-lying areas (often ocean basins, such as the Gulf of Mexico or the North Sea, but also Bangladesh and much of Brazil), then being uplifted and eroded (such as the ongoing Himalayan orogeny, the older Laramide orogeny of the Rocky Mountains, or much older Appalachian (Alleghanian) and Ouachita orogenies), then subsequently subsiding, eventually to be buried under younger sediments.
We could've avoid all the wide speculations if only the topic was reflecting the content, as "Hi, look what interesting about geology I found -
We live on half an earth, more probable... (Score:2)
I watched this video on YouTube just a little while ago. I've not really looked into the science of it nor modeled the impacts he's talking about but it might be possible that our earth is a remnant from a not-that-long-ago clash with an itinerant planet's moon. We live on the half of a then larger planet that was smashed by that moon, the rest became an asteroid belt and probably our moon. I think this is a more likely explanation for why a huge part of the crust might be missing than it having been scr
Obvious Answer (Score:2)
Aliens had a quarry here for a billion years or so before moving operations elsewhere...
Anyway what would really blow some people's minds and start some speculation would be if in exploring other planets such as mars, we find the same discrepancy during the same time period... Some destructive stellar event perhaps?
Also one of the big detractors of a past advanced civilization is the lack of any evidence surviving at all. However if about a billion years of geological data is missing, that's a pretty big ga
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The poor sods who wrote this paper will be crushed by the Global Warming maniacs.
Not at all. This aligns perfectly with our existing understanding of Earth. Climate changes slowly over periods hundreds of thousands and millions of years.
The problem with global warming is that the climate is changing in a periods of decades. This is a problem because this does not provide the time required for fauna/flora to evolve. As a result of this decreased period, many species are facing extinction.
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Current change is within the range of natural variation.
Assuming your assertion is true, it's not going to stay in that range much longer. On our current path parts of the planet will become so hot that they will uninhabitable to humans. That's totally out of wack.
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Well, no. It never has over geological history, has it.
Yeah, I'm not talking about geological timescales, I'm talking about human timescales. By 2100 it's going to be 7*F hotter globally and that's a conservative estimate. That's a HUGE shift which is unprecedented. After that it's only going to get hotter until we do something about. You would have to be stupid or insane to think this is normal.
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Good grief. Do you really believe that? It's complete and utter nonsense.
Perhaps you should tell that to the Trump administration because that's what they reported. [washingtonpost.com]
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They've all been captured by this nonsense.
What's more likely, that climate scientists who have studies the Earth for decades are correct or some fool on Slashdot knows better despite never actually studying the climate? Occam's razor does not favor you.
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Wow, you look at scientists and scientific evidence and decide it's all politics. You have brilliantly deluded yourself, sir.
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Right. You know, all a researcher has to do is be a "climate skeptic" and they get funded by any number of oil companies, they don't even have to be a climatologist. Have you considered that fact?
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Let's put it this way: the evidence for warming from CO2 is good. The sensitivity is nothing like the scenarios you suggest. The evidence for all the feedbacks needed to generate "runaway warming" is flimsy to non-existent.
Nobody claimed it was a runaway effect. The estimate is based on past, present and projected pollution. The report [nhtsa.gov] has 500 pages explaining this or you could have simply read the article. [washingtonpost.com]
There's been a 14% greening of the planet over the last 33 years as a result of the extra CO2 in the atmosphere (from satellite studies). This remarkable fact has been almost invisible to the mainstream media, NGOs and other activist scientists involved in perpetuating the paradigm.
I'm aware that the planet is getting greener as a result of CO2 and climate change. It's understood that flora will flourish in some regions while dying in others. The issue with climate change has always been about the death of fauna and the migration of arable regions of land. It's when the weather becomes erratic t
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Haha, don't be daft. The 7C mentioned earlier is absurd based on the physics. Almost all of that increase is "runaway effect" (positive feedback).
7C? Who's the daft one now? Both I and the article clearly state it's 7F. The only runaway is effect being calculated is our use of polluting fuels in addition to the damage already done (which yet to come to full fruition).
The models using this clearly diverge from actual reality, which is why they have to be "tuned" to past data periodically. It's an exercise in curve fitting. People like you seem to think they're making some kind of super-robust prediction. Nothing could be further from the truth.
You're right that it's perfectly accurate but the "tuning" is not arbitrary, it's identifying previously unknown factors and correcting data from previously unidentified ill-calibrated sensors. For every time it's been "tuned" it's always turned out our previous estimate was too opti
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Wrong. It includes things like water vapour increase with temperature increase.
Those are feedback effects but they are far from being runaway effects. Perhaps you define it differently but to me if it's a runaway effect that means it's self-sustaining.
There's no evidence this is net increase or decrease as increased water vapour implies increased cloud cover, which itself reflects sunlight.
Wow, you are arrogant to think you are the only person that has even consider this. Understanding hydrology is the cornerstone of weather prediction.
The tuning is against past data so the model looks like it's accurate. You show the graph without any divergence today because you fitted it to past data, so it looks "accurate". The prediction of future warming is way too hot because the feedback assumptions in the model are wrong
The problem with this idea is that the models have been overly optimistic and it's hotter now than it we previously predicted. Assuming they are just data fitting then it's going to be eve
Re:poor sods (Score:4, Informative)
You must have head of the Roman Optimum and the Medieval Warm Period - and the many other examples of this. Even the Little Ice Age.
1. The Medieval Warm Period was localized to the north Atlantic region, with the pacific region getting colder [newscientist.com]. Current warming is increasing average temperatures across the globe.
2. The cause of the Medieval Warm Period (as per the link) is believed to have been solved.
3. Atmospheric CO2 has increased from ~300 to ~400 PPM since the 60s [climatecentral.org], in line with increased fossil fuel emissions.
4. The cause of the current warming is believed (by 90+% of the scientists investigating it) to have been solved. Spoiler alert it's the increasing atmospheric CO2.
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99.9% of all the species ever to exist are extinct. I am pretty sure that every species is "facing extinction."
Sure... but this is the difference between dying of natural causes and being brutally murdered. But hey, keep up the semantics, asshole. ;)
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Generally not all at the same time though, we tend to call those mass extinctions.
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Why couldn't they get soil from Mars instead? Then again, maybe they did both, and that's why Mars is so puny.
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9 by 4 by 1.
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It seems like we're worried about climate change, and willing to spend trillions of dollars (or some politicians are trying to get us to spend that much, that is)
Actually politicians are giving trillions of dollars to the fossil fuel industry in subsidies to help make climate change happen [wikipedia.org].
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From the same Wikipedia article - "The externalities accounted for are broad enough that oil companies not paying for automobile accidents is considered a subsidy."
Re: Long-term history... (Score:2)
Even the vox article that picks the highest figure apart agrees the figure is in the trillions.