SeniorJunior

The World is Having an Extinction Event But We Live too Fast to See It. Permian Extinction - A quarter billion years ago.  75% of all Animal, 95% of all sea creatures and plants wiped out.  Took perhaps a two to three million years to happen.  The "big finish," the eruption of the Siberian Flats. [source] Even this  humongous catastrophe took maybe a million years to finish the kill off. Dinosaur Extinction - 66 million years ago.  All the dinos plus about half of plant life and sea creatures wiped out .  Took perhaps half a million years to happen.  The monster rock that hit Earth (Chicxulub Crater in the Gulf of Mexico), and some others, plus the Deccan Flats eruptions in India were the villains.                                                     [source]       [source] We Probably Wouldn't Have Noticed.  If there happened to be humans around (there weren't) in the middle of either of those giant extinctions, things would be chang

Why Do We Make Dangerous Decisions? (Like deciding climate change "isn't real") Fiddling while the Arctic Melts It amazes me that whole swaths of humanity ignore facts, refute the irrefutable and get all conspiracy-ish when issues arise that they don't like or that make them uncomfortable. Two unrelated (except they were both in the NY Times) columns offered nice, tight nuggets of insight into why some of us human beans lock our mental steering wheels and drive ourselves into major crashes. Here's an excerpt from an Op-Ed on our dismal climate fate, the author Thomas Homer-Dixon, a professor of global systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada. Climate policy is gridlocked, and there’s virtually no chance of a breakthrough. Many factors have conspired to produce this situation. Human beings are notoriously poor at responding to problems that develop incrementally. And most of us aren’t eager to change our lifestyles by sharpl

The Flat Ten Years of Climate Temperature Never mind the stolen climatologists' e-mails (aka Climate-gate), the biggie among climate change deniers is the fact that worldwide temperatures have been more or less flat for the last ten years or so. "SEE!?" they say, "NO WARMING!" Well, three things: (1.) The flat temperature where the thermometer is stuck is still warm enough to be melting the North Polar Cap and glaciers all over the world, i.e. "stuck on warm." (2.) A likely reason for the pause in warming is that the sun is in " the deepest solar minimum in almost 100 years " cutting its radiation to the Earth - a situation not likely to last very long. (3.) In the context of even a brief period of time - one century - this flat spot is just a normal wiggle in the temperature graph. See the flattening there? (top chart, right side) When the sun "wakes up," you can bet the line will start up again. Trends aren't smooth line