Current Warming Moving 20X Faster Than PETM Catastrophe (55 MYA)

[hatrack]

WASHINGTON - It was one of the greatest calamities of all time: Something turned up Earth's thermostat, touching off a monstrous heat wave that killed many animals and drove others far from their homes to seek cooler climes.
This catastrophe occurred 55 million years ago, after the age of the dinosaurs and long before humans appeared. But scientists warn that today's global warming means that it could be happening again.

The ancient hot spell, which lasted 50,000 to 100,000 years, goes by the unwieldy name of Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). It was caused by a sudden -- in geological terms -- doubling or tripling of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Climate scientists say the result was an increase of 10 to 12 degrees Fahrenheit -- even higher near the poles -- above the prevailing temperature.

"In certain regards, the PETM is very similar to what is happening right now," said Gerald Dickens, an earth scientist at Rice University in Houston. "Just like now, a huge amount of carbon rapidly entered the ocean or atmosphere. The most notable difference is the rate. Things are happening much faster now than during the PETM." Most scientists attribute much of today's global warming to the burning of carbon-rich fossil fuels. If the trend continues, Dickens said, the world will add as much carbon to the atmosphere in 500 years -- from 1800 to 2300 -- as the PETM did over 10,000 years.

The long-ago heat wave "shows without a doubt that if you pump a bunch of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the planet warms," Matthew Huber, an earth scientist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., wrote in the June 1 edition of the journal Nature.

EDIT

http://www.startribune.com/484/story/636813.html

[nam78_two]

1. k&r/nt

[nam78_two]

2. This should be making the greatest page

It should be on GD

[NNadir]

3. I agree.

[hatrack]

4. If only I could recommend my own thread . . .

But alas, that's not an option! Thanks for reading, though - this caught my eye as a fairly important story, y'know?

:beer:

[dipsydoodle]

7. No need

just did it for you. :)

[ramapo]

5. It should get more than just the Greatest...

It should get as much (ok, half as much) media attention as the latest Benet absurdity.

[NNadir]

6. It's pretty sick the way we select attention.

[whatelseisnew]

8. k&r

I hope it is not too late

[YankeyMCC]

9. k & r

I don't know how many times and ways I can say it. The climate crisis trumps all other subjects in importance, it's a bit (to say the least) disheartening to see posts dealing with it only occasionally and briefly making the greatest page.

[Control-Z]

12. I agree with you 100%

When are people going to wake up?

[Gregorian]

10. Here's why I don't see any hope.

The carbon dioxide that is above and beyond that in a normal equilibrium state (if that's the proper way to phrase it), has a lifespan of over a century. That means that even if we did alter our lifestyles, even if we completely stopped the artificial release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it would still be there for over a century. Of course it is a curve. It gradually dissipates. But whatever troubles we have created, no matter what we do now, are still going to affect the planet for nearly another century.

And even if we tried to alter our lifestyles, there are only small fractions of change we can make at best, unless we divorce ourselves from our present modern existence. But that's another topic altogether.

[truedelphi]

13. I guess we have to treasure every moment

There were two researchrs back in the eighties who just as a project,
took on the "idea" of global warming.

Their conclusion was once the ocean currents started to alter due to
this climate shift, sooner or later the currents would stagnate. And once they
stagnated, the planet was doomed. Weather would bascially cease - I
guess I should say changes in weather. So if it was winter in Chicago
on the day the currents were all stagnant, it would stay winter. Etc.

Viruses explode in this model - the moment that the air circulation ceases
globally. Fresh air is one of the things that keeps sickness at bay
(for instance, you don't get sick in the winter because of the cold so much
as you get sick because the air you are in is usually all inside air and it
fills up with germs pretty fast once windows are not open)

People animals and plants die off. Pretty soon you have a planet with
stagnant foul waters and an Earht devoid of most of what we now see as life.

[lvx35]

18. Shit.

So basically our only hope is to come up with cars that suck CO2 out of the atmosphere or go back to the stone age?

[donkeyotay]

19. Oh what the hell, I'll be the optimist

On DW-TV there was a show about a German research lab that has developed a process for carbon sequestration. This could be used to help us overcome the deep hole we've dug. If we survive our completely dismal president and do not turn the earth into a political dung heap unfit to live on, we could have - out of necessity - discovered a way to even out the natural fluctuations in climate for future generations.

[Delphinus]

22. I think Tim Flannery,

of "The Weather Makers" talked about carbon sequestration.

[NNadir]

23. Germany doesn't need a process to sequester carbon dioxide.

They have the perfect solution to problems with carbon dioxide.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=115&topic_id=58669

As a practical consideration, believing that the world can sequester billions of tons of carbon dioxide per year is a tad optimistic.

[Gregorian]

27. I like this, and the post above.

Maybe we will find a way to reduce the co2 concentration.

Even so, I don't see a solution to the actual problem. For example, around one fifth of the carbon dioxide that is released by man into the atmosphere is due to logging. We are cutting trees so people can have lumber, and paper. The problem cannot be solved without including population as a factor. And since absolutely nothing can be done about that in a short amount of time, it looks ugly. If we start talking population control, we can at best stabilize world population in fifty years.

But then my pessimistic (actually, real world observation) kicks in and says that once we get back to normal, people will just continue what they were doing. Ie, increasing the world population, until another crisis hits.

But aside from that, I love the idea that we can solve the problem. I tend to miss that in all of this. But one must admit, a solution is highly unlikely. After all, how would we sequester greenhouse gasses? What I'm getting at is, everything we do takes energy. And right now, that translates to petroleum. I think the human race had it's party. The acceleration of population is what has done in the planet. Equilibrium just cannot keep up with that kind of an impact.

[file83]

30. Carl Sagan said (I paraphrase) that if scientific technologies are the

cause of a problem, then scientific technologies should be able to solve the problem.

I believe that the "technologies" to solve the problem will be developed, but not directly by humans. My hope is that humans will develop quantum supercomputers (yet to be functionally developed) that will result in evolving artificial intelligence to emerge. These god-like universal simulators will quickly find solutions to our immediate global problems, I hope.

That's my hope, because I have lost faith in humanity's ability to solve this problem.

[Gregorian]

32. The problem is that this planet is finite.

And people just don't want to limit themselves.

There IS such a thing as too many people. Let's just drop back to the logical situation where we ARE living in harmony with the earth. Can you imagine what the morning commute would look like on horses? What a mess!

And it's not just cleaning up the mess this last few generations made, but it's how to serve us all with water, as just one example.

And then there is just the aesthetic side of it. I personally really really want more privacy. I'm sick of this. I just spent the last fifteen years moving from property to property. Each place gets shit on by either subdivisions or logging companies coming in to deforest to satisfy our thirst for lumber. And the more one delves into real estate, the more they uncover the horror stories that overpopulation have produced.

Sagan may have been bright, but I don't see many people who have the unfortunate ability to see accurately what is happening. I don't think technology is going to pull us out of this. We are going to begin living a less than happy life on a less than beautiful planet. A hotter, drier, less dignified place.

[Dems Will Win]

33. Actually the leading atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen

figured out a way to cool the Earth with sulfur aerosols shot into the stratosphere.

So we have a fighting chance if we do that.

[Control-Z]

11. K&R

If we don't start paying attention just how important will anything else be?

[hunter]

14. Human brains: evolutionary asset or liability?

I think very soon now we find out.

[NNadir]

15. Stephen Hawking speculates that one possibility for why we don't

see signs of "intelligent" life elsewhere in the universe is that by definition "intelligent" life is self destructive.

What are the chances that we will encounter some alien form of life, as we explore the galaxy. If the argument about the time scale for the appearance of life on Earth is correct, there ought to be many other stars, whose planets have life on them. Some of these stellar systems could have formed 5 billion years before the Earth. So why is the galaxy not crawling with self designing mechanical or biological life forms? Why hasn't the Earth been visited, and even colonised. I discount suggestions that UFO's contain beings from outer space. I think any visits by aliens, would be much more obvious, and probably also, much more unpleasant.

What is the explanation of why we have not been visited? One possibility is that the argument, about the appearance of life on Earth, is wrong. Maybe the probability of life spontaneously appearing is so low, that Earth is the only planet in the galaxy, or in the observable universe, in which it happened...

...A third possibility is that there is a reasonable probability for life to form, and to evolve to intelligent beings, in the external transmission phase. But at that point, the system becomes unstable, and the intelligent life destroys itself. This would be a very pessimistic conclusion. I very much hope it isn't true...

http://www.hawking.org.uk/lectures/lindex.html

He isn't fond of the "third possibility" but his discomfort in no way implies that the hypothesis is incorrect.

I'm not so sure we have a good shot at lasting long.

[Hokie]

20. I think Hawking is 3rd explanation is correct.

The destruction begins with the onset of conservatism and fundamentalism.

[file83]

31. But conservatism and fundamentalism are only possible if you have

populations of humans that act like sheep puppets for the power hungry megalomanics that are the architects of conservatism and fundamentalism (and, may I add, capitalism and ism's in general).

I argue that the reason humans are in peril is because we are not a truly "intelligent" animal yet. There is a segment of the population that is fairly intelligent, but even then, they have many weaknesses that counteract those positive attributes in both their individual lives and public lives.

End result: the situation we are currently in and moving towards.

[Boomer]

28. Most probably a liability

If highly-developed abstract intelligence was a viable survival strategy, more species would use it.

When you look around and see nobody else is doing it your way, chances are there's a good reason for that....

[grizmaster]

16. Is it just me, or is it getting hot in here?

Hope it's not too late for folks to wake up. We need the Kyoto protocol, AT LEAST, to be implimented quickly.

[lvx35]

17. Where did the carbon come from back then?

Was it just a biproduct of the ecosystem at that time, or were there volcanos or fires or something?

[NMDemDist2]

21. according to Wikipedia

What unleashed the PETM is unclear. Most evidence points to volcanic eruptions that disgorged gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, or coastal reservoirs of methane gas, sealed by icy soil, that were breached by warmer temperatures or receding seas.

[lvx35]

25. Amazing

Its always awesome to remember how powerful nature is compared to man. I was shocked to hear that some volcano exploded with the force of like 50,000 atom bombs. Still though, sounds like it took nature a lot longer to work here than we are working now!

[NNadir]

29. We release gigatons of carbon dioxide annually.

We have exceeded 27 gigatons per year:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tableh1co2.xls

[many a good man]

24. That's pretty dramatic

Looks like we're really starting to take off.

(from another site)

[mom cat]

26. More from the article:

"The evidence for dramatic warming during the event is overwhelming," Dickens said. "It is witnessed in all the oceans and continents."

For example, digging in Wyoming's Bighorn Basin, Scott Wing, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, found fossilized leaves from ancient bean plants that he said had migrated 1,000 miles north from the latitude of Louisiana to escape the heat.

Many species of mammals arose during the PETM and spread to new areas of the world, altering the course of evolution.

But the unusual warmth also caused the loss of many deep-sea species. "It was the most severe extinction in the last 90 million years," said Gabriel Bowen, another Purdue geologist.