Monday, August 5, 2013

Global Warming is real!

This article in Popular Science confirms it, global warming is real...
Anaptomorphus homunculus didn't make it...
It happened about 50 million years ago...
During the Eocene, lasting from 56 to 33.9 million years ago, the planet warmed to an incredible degree. We've found evidence of palm trees in Alaska from that era. The entire planet, besides the very tips of the Arctic and Antarctic, was probably covered in rainforests, much of it tropical. 
But like all good things, it did not last...
Then the planet began to cool, and cool quickly. Forests died out. The poles covered with ice. Many of the flora and fauna that had populated the planet during the Eocene just couldn't survive in the new, colder world. This event is called the Grande Coupure--occurring about 33.9 million years ago, it was a mass extinction of animals, in which most of the world's creatures (aside from a precious few, like the Virginia opossum and the dormouse) were unable to adapt to the new climate and perished. It hit the primate family especially hard. In the New World, the primate population shrunk significantly. Any primate living in, say, the Great Lakes region simply went extinct, unable to cope with the new Wisconsin winters.
And we have had fluctuations of glaciers and ice ages ever since.  Who knew monkeys were burning fossil fuels?  

But hey, it is all our fault anyway (it always is)...
The unstable nature of the Earth's climate history suggests that it may be liable to change suddenly in the future. By putting large quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, humans are exerting pressure on the climate system which might produce a drastic change without much prior warning. As the geologist W.S. Broecker has said, "Climate is an angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks".
Damn.  I really wanted to blame those early North American monkeys in their monkey boats.   

2 comments:

  1. So the Lefties are 40 million years off.

    Big whoop.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I guess better late than never? Al Gore came to do good, and did very well! Pass the coconut oil.

      Delete

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