Melanocyrillium, 850-million year old "testate amoeba."
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.
Actually, there is physical evidence, as well. Tree rings. Ice cores.
Actually, there is physical evidence, as well. Tree rings. Ice cores.
Actually, there is physical evidence, as well. Tree rings. Ice cores.
But they all disappeared because of man and production of green house gases.
SUV=BAD
You display your absolute complete ignorance with this comment. The records of the "Medieval Warming Trend" are NOT from "Middle Age Records"--they are based on scientific measurements from ice cores, pollen samples from sediments, archealogical data (physical measurements on human remains from the period), and the like. These records are far more "science-based" (i.e. based on MEASUREMENTS) than the MODEL-BASED global warming theories.
"Your extrapolation to assume that warming will have positive consequences for the entire planet are oh so naive."
Oh, certain (probably small) areas of the planet will undoubtedly have some negative consequences. So did the Medieval Warm Period (droughts in the desert Southwest, for instance). But, for the most part, the scientific historical record says that the positive effects outweighed the negative effects in geographical extent.
"Sorry pal, you are placing a wager that is way to high for my blood."
So you support the establishment of a global socialist bureaucratic order to "prevent global warming"?? That is what it is really all about, you know.
The ideal scientist should have a passionate dispassion about the conculsions of his theories. It is what it is, nothing added or subtracted. As much attention, experimentation, and theory, press, and horn blowing, should be expended to prove life and species as having been spontaneous as has been exhausted on proving it's not.
Some suspect scientists, fair or not, of being members of a good ol boys club more interested in getting stroked by their peers, than rocking the boat by looking in unauthorized and unpopular directions, and certainly taking no risk of being toss'ed from membership in the club.
This leads, fair or not, to the perception that scientists, in limiting the scope and direction of their research out of haughtiness, has placed humankind in a postion of having been robbed of needed accurate information and their dollars being wasted on useless but popular pursutes that have been a circular route back to "we don't know", and, "there appears to have been a sudden spontaneous eruption of species".
Melanocyrillium, 850-million year old "testate amoeba."
I'm probably not old enough to remember when it went downhill, then. I'm only 53.
There's no such thing. Scientists are human too; they just tend to get excited by learning new things. I would say that insatiable curiosity and a keen sense of humor are why they become scientists in the first place.
But here's the proof that they're suppressing the truth like the lying materialist evo scum they are.
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