Re: Snowball Earth


"Alastair McDonald" <alastair@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> skrev
i en meddelelse news:dtvki0$kh1$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"Carsten Troelsgaard" <carstenNOSPAM.troelsgaard@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:44032b08$0$47077$edfadb0f@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Thank you for the articles. If anything has made me move my opinion on
global changes, it's another branch of environmental science: The
population
of East-Greenland are the ones that suffers most (has acumulated the
highest
amounts) from the spread of PCB and the rest of "The dirty dozen". It's
staggering how the stuff concentrates in the most unlikely places.
http://www.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2001/87-7944-977-8/html/kap09_eng.htm

You know my take as a geologist on global climate changes - it happens
through time. ...

And so do mass extinctions!

We do a pretty good job at that allready, so if climate returned to 'normal'
even now, we can be sure to have left our 'extinction-event' in the annals

Admittedly no climate changes in the past, and
no mass extinctions have been cause by man, but that is simple to explain.
Man wasn't there at the time.

The Snowball Earths, first in the Achaean and then later in the
Neoproterozoic, were almost certainly caused by biota reducing the
amount of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere.
The Sun is now 30% stronger than it was when in the Hadean and we are
INCREASING the amount of greenhouse gases. We are also biota, and we
could also trigger a climatic catastrophe.

The warming from increased
carbon dioxide could well cause a release of methane hydrates such as
happened during the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.

Have you got a source for the methane hydrate thing?
I've had a look at a giant landslide 'Storeggan', taking off on the
Norwegian shelf and slushing up on the shores of the British Isls. It's
thought to have come by a methane hydrate release. The only way I can figure
out how, is as a result of pressure-release from overburden water
disappearing onto the continent as ice (low sealevel) and perhaps
lithospheric lifinng as a peripheral bulge. And I always looked at it as a
possible reason for an abrupt end to an ice-age ... not a consequence of a
warm climate.

As a geologist, no doubt you were educated in the gradualist tradition
of Uniformitarianism.

Naa, I started out with Velicovsky

But that sort of thinking belongs to the
Victorian Age of the nineteenth century. We now know that ice ages
happened and meteorites struck the Earth from outer space. The land,
covered with green vegetation, tends to hide the scars that can be
clearly seen in desert regions and testify to the violent history
of the Earth!

... I can't help smiling by the thought of raising my voice
toward US, China and who know where and how many billions of educated or
uneducated people ... the wheels are rolling and we just love it.
As a measure of precaution we should be careful, sure ... ;o)

Pride comes before a fall, and the peak is just before the crash.

I've had a couple of takes on converting some to switch a belief in a
6000
year old to a 4.5 bill y old earth - - - as if it wasn't reasonably
clear
compared to climate evolution - - it doesn't encourage me to anything,
except perhaps to invest in rubber-boots.
In my neighbourhood it's sort of partly been taken care of due to
pricing-politics - for a long time there's been a lot of money to be made
by
reducing consumption of energy.

Never mind trying to convert the few creationists. The real problem is
the hosts of intelligent people who are being told that GW is a problem
for the next millennium, or perhaps for their grandchildren to solve. The
world is not going to rapidly cool because of global warming. We can
expect a rapid and sudden warming which will destroy agriculture. Welly
boots will not save you from that. They are not edible.

Sorry Alastair, there's something you've got wrong. The ice-cores shows an
abrubt end to ice-ages. You tend to forget that we'r not currently in an
ice-age, so whatever the feed-back of a quick ice-melt as it's seen in the
cores, it's not working now. Or would you prefer that I write probably not
working now. The loss of sea-ice has an influence on albedo .. I wonder
weather anyone has been calculating on this part.
But it looks like a wake-up call for a reality of the climate-problem.

Carsten


.

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