Posted on 10/30/2003 5:04:39 PM PST by Dales
LIVERMORE, Calif. -- A trio of scientists including a researcher from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has found that humans may owe the relatively mild climate in which their ancestors evolved to tiny marine organisms with shells and skeletons made out of calcium carbonate.
In a paper titled "Carbonate Deposition, Climate Stability and Neoproterozoic Ice Ages" in the Oct. 31 edition of Science, UC Riverside researchers Andy Ridgwell and Martin Kennedy along with LLNL climate scientist Ken Caldeira, discovered that the increased stability in modern climate may be due in part to the evolution of marine plankton living in the open ocean with shells and skeletal material made out of calcium carbonate. They conclude that these marine organisms helped prevent the ice ages of the past few hundred thousand years from turning into a severe global deep freeze.
"The most recent ice ages were mild enough to allow and possibly even promote the evolution of modern humans," Caldeira said. "Without these tiny marine organisms, the ice sheets may have grown to cover the earth, like in the snowball glaciations of the ancient past, and our ancestors might not have survived."
The researchers used a computer model describing the ocean, atmosphere and land surface to look at how atmospheric carbon dioxide would change as a result of glacier growth. They found that, in the distant past, as glaciers started to grow, the oceans would suck the greenhouse gas -- carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere -- making the Earth colder, promoting an even deeper ice age. When marine plankton with carbonate shells and skeletons are added to the model, ocean chemistry is buffered and glacial growth does not cause the ocean to absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
But in Precambrian times (which lasted up until 544 million years ago), marine organisms in the open ocean did not produce carbonate skeletons -- and ancient rocks from the end of the Precambrian geological age indicate that huge glaciers deposited layers of crushed rock debris thousands of meters thick near the equator. If the land was frozen near the equator, then most of the surface of the planet was likely covered in ice, making Earth look like a giant snowball, the researchers said.
Around 200 million years ago, calcium carbonate organisms became critical to helping prevent the earth from freezing over. When the organisms die, their carbonate shells and skeletons settle to the ocean floor, where some dissolve and some are buried in sediments. These deposits help regulate the chemistry of the ocean and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. However, in a related study published in Nature on Sept. 25, 2003, Caldeira and LLNL physicist Michael Wickett found that unrestrained release of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide to the atmosphere could threaten extinction for these climate-stabilizing marine organisms.
Because...?
There are over 40 phyla that arose during the Cambrian -
Really? Please name them, and provide a citation to your source.
none, zero, nada after it.
Oh really? Then you shouldn't have trouble producing a reference to a Cambrian appearance of any of the following phyla: Ctenophora, Platyhelminthes, Aschelminthes, or Bryozoa. And those are just the animals. After you've answered that, we can move on to the plant phyla you claim first appeared somewhere during the Cambrian.
Just because someone has a website does not mean that whatever he writes is evidence of anything.
Or posters to online political forums.
But that's why he includes citations to a few dozens primary sources which support his information. Go look them up if you don't believe Morton himself.
The evidence comes from fossils and the fossils are all in the Cambrian.
Is it truly your contention that there are no preCambrian or postCambrian fossils?
Show me a Cambrian Bryozoan, please.
Further, the evidence keeps piling on against evolution in this regard, a couple of years ago fish with vertebras and eyes were found in the Cambrian.
Yes, so?
Knowing what we know nowadays about genetics it is absolutely impossible for in the short period covered by the Cambrian for all these phyla to have arisen from totally unrelated phyla.
Who claims that they did?
This has not been seen in the entire period after the Cambrian, not a single new phyla has arisen since.
None, eh? Would you like to stick by that, or shall I refute it?
To ask us to believe that in 5-10 million years all these evolved from each other is asking for too much gullibility.
Yes, which is why science does not assert such a thing.
Not that I've seen. But feel free to provide actually support for your claim. Be sure to actually quote him instead of "paraphrase" him, and provide a citation to the original source(s).
Fact is though that he fought against Darwinists most of his life
No he didn't, but I look forward to your attempt to support this.
and he insisted that the Cambrian species could not be explained by gradual evolution.
Define "gradual". And quote him on that too, please.
As to his theory, it is just an excuse for lack of evidence and part of the totally unscientific credo of evolutionists that 'lack of evidence is not evidence of lack'.
We've given plenty of actual evidence.
Such may be okay in the Art Bell show, but it is not science, never was, never will be.
Which is why evolutionary science does not proceed in the manner you describe.
Why not?
Youre getting into questions of authority. The creator has delegated authority to certain other parties before certain choices were made which constitute treason against Him. Lucifer had authority as the primary archangel before inquity was found in him, and a war of rebellion ensued. He was not satisfied with being second under his Creator. After his removal from the presence of God, he was confined to this plane of existence which we now occupy.
So the question follows, if God is omniscient, and He knew of this rebellion before the first Word was ever spoken, why did he do it? Because He didnt want to be the only One. He found it good to create others like Himself.
Adam was the first of a new creation, a race of beings created in His very image.(The angels were not.) So, again, He gave authority over the earth, or this dimension, or this plane of existence, to Adam. Again, treason, so the authority fell by default to Lucifer, previously second in command under Adam. (Adam was specifically commisioned by God to guard against Lucifer.)
Jesus Christ showed up and restored authority back to God (which He is) and man (which He also is).
So now believers, under His authority, have the supreme authority in the earth. Unfortunately, we are born as natural beings, and we have to go through a process of learning to live as supernatural beings after our conversion. So the world is better, but still not perfect. But at least theres hope. So God is not the author of evil, and yes, Satan, or Lucifer, is indeed the god of this present age. But so are Christians, and there have been a number of us throughout history who really knew it and walked in it.
So, thats the big picture of theology. I didnt include scripture references for brevitys sake. (And my apostrophe key is broken, just so you spelling fascists know.)
Do you mean "the plankton absorb excess which keeps the active amount in the atmosphere more nearly steady"?
The sentence as originally constructed suggests that absorbing the CO2 is somehow a function of the plankton, rather than a marvellous coincidence.
Reason I am asking is that some people believe in the Gaia Hypothesis, that various interworkings of things like plankton, seawater and CO2 operate on some kind of feedback system.
It was a pretty good question but asking it so many times was due to a glitch. Still, no reply, which is a pity . . . .
Are we going to burn into a cinder or are we going to freeze into a single block of ice?
Apparently we walk a fine line between being and nothingness and the smallest component of this elaborate house of cards can be our undoing.
All of us deserve a gold star on our forehead for having the shear determination and courage to wake up each morning and face the grim uncertainty of existence.
Think I'll buy a bagel and contemplate my navel.
We can go even further back than that. If God created life the evolutionist assumption that all change is due solely to materialistic forces cannot be sustained.
I read that garbage and my objection to it has not been refuted - life could not exist in the oceans for hundreds of millions of years if they were covered with ice. The article is therefore nonsense.
As to models, they cannot prove what we do not know because they cannot be tested and cannot take account of influencess which are unknown. Models are only useful as shortcuts for what we already know. Even then they need to be tested in real life.
Bacteria live under the ice in the Antarctic. You know that, right?
Not photosynthetic bacteria which we know existed throughout the hundreds of millions of years in question. You need light for photosynthesis. The article is garbage. SciAm has turned into a totally valueless source.
Safety?? And what might constitute "safety"??? There is a great deal of evidence that a warmer earth will actually be SAFER (i.e more benign for life) than the current state. See the "Medieval Warm Period", which was significantly warmer than today, and in which the conditions were much more conducive to living things.
The so-called "negative consequences" of global warming are ASSUMPTIONS not backed by evidence.
I tend to worry one heck of a lot more about the "quick switch" into the next (and overdue) Ice Age than about "global warming".
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