In the interest of fairness about climate change
POSTED BY: Niki2
UPDATED: Thursday, February 23, 2012 00:43
VIEWED: 2732
PAGE 3 of 3
Quote:
Originally posted by chrisisall:
Now if you want to haggle over the *CAUSE*, be my guest. I don't really care, since it isn't a thing that can be stopped, nature-caused, man-made, or some combination.
Stopped outright, of course not. The damage mitigated, now thats a different issue.
"Goram it kid, let's frak this thing and go home! Engage!"
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Well, if WE are the cause then WE can stop it, or at least reduce it. Not that it will help in the immediate future, but in the next 100 years... for our children's children, and theirs.
And whether we are the cause or not, we should certainly be looking into surviving it. Alas, we are doing neither of these.
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Quote:
"And whether we are the cause or not, we should certainly be looking into surviving it. Alas, we are doing neither of these."
Hello,
While I hesitate to find anything good about it, the War on Drugs has spurred considerable research and development into hydroponics. Clearly, that is a key technology to surviving climate change.
--Anthony
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"In every war, the state enacts a tax of freedom upon the citizenry. The unspoken promise is that the tax shall be revoked at war's end. Endless war holds no such promise. Hence, Eternal War is Eternal Slavery." --Admiral Robert J. Henner
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
Um... I added to my post (above), it's something I'm looking up. There was more than one basalt flood event, altho the Siberian Trappa (Traps) is the largest. One event was during the formation of the Deccan plateau, the other was during the breakup of Pangea. I don't think either of those other two events involved coal fields. Although ALL were related to extinction events, the extinction event from the Siberian Traps was unparalleled.
-----------Quote:
Subaerial continental flood basalt volcanism is distinguished from all other volcanic activity by the repeated effusion of huge batches of basaltic magma (~102–103 km3 per eruption) over short periods of geologic time (<1 Myr). Flood basalt provinces are constructed of thick stacks of extensive pahoehoe-dominated lava flow fields and are the products of hundreds of eruptions. Each huge eruption comes from a dyke-fed fissure tens to hundreds of kilometres long and lasts about a decade or more. Such spatial and temporal patterns of lava production do not occur at any other time in Earth history, and, during eruptions, gas fluxes of ~1 Gt per year of SO2 and CO2 over periods of a decade or more are possible. Importantly, the atmospheric cooling associated with aerosols generated from the SO2 emissions of just one flood basalt eruption is likely to have been severe and would have persisted for a decade or longer. By contrast, warming due to volcanogenic CO2 released during an eruption is estimated to have been insignificant because the mass of CO2 would have been small compared to that already present in the atmosphere.
gnews.wustl.edu/elements/e1_5/e1_5_art_self.pdf
Anyway, there's all kinds of interesting papers on the topic which show that many mass extinctions are associated with large basaltic floods. (A few extinction events are associated with meteor strikes). The Siberian flood was the only one (that I know of) which involved coal fields. There should be a paper out there which looks at the terrestrial die-off versus the oceanic die-off. I expect that the extinction with the highest marine die-offs would reflect the highest carbon dioxide output due to massive long-term ocean acidification, while the extinctions with the largest terrestrial impact would reflect the relatively short-term cooling impacts from sulfur emissions.
http://www.semp.us/publications/biot_reader.php?BiotID=681
Either way, what I "get" out of the information is that when you put a lot of shit into the atmosphere, you will wipe out a lot of species.
SignyM,
You are mostly right on the mark here, but it should be noted that both the PT and KT extinction events are associated both with vulcanism (PT, the Siberian Traps; KT, the Deccan Traps), and asteroid impacts - and geologists speculate that the impacts may have caused the vulcanism. The Chicxulub crater off the Yucatan is now well understood as associated with the KT event, and a few years ago, a crater off the NW coast of Australia was dated to the timing of the PT event. But in addition, both would have led to large-scale release of CO2 because of wildfires that would result from the release of enormous amounts of energy, probably as far as thousands of kilometers away. And, since the SO2 released would both lower temperatures and decrease transmission of sunlight, surviving plants would not be able to begin taking up much of the CO2 by photosynthesis for somewhere along the lines of 10-100 years.
perfessergee
ETA: I should have said "discovered and dated" with respect to the PT crater - it had been previously unknown.
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