you can't make people beleive what they don't want too. The co2 deadline

[ott]

More options Oct 18 2008, 2:37 am

From: ott <brown...@aol.com>
Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2008 00:37:56 -0700 (PDT)
Local: Sat, Oct 18 2008 2:37 am
Subject: The Great Dying. co2 deadline
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McClatchy Washington Bureau | 08/27/2008 | Scientists close in on
mass killer of life on earth
((end of the next century, the CO2 level could approach what it was
during the P-T period.))

Scientists close in on mass killer of life on earth
WASHINGTON — It was the greatest mass murder of all time — poison
everywhere!
billions slain! — but the killer or killers have never been
positively
identified.
An estimated 95 percent of all marine species and up to 85 percent of
land
creatures perished, according to Peter Ward, a paleobiologist at the
University
of Washington in Seattle.
Scientists call it "The Great Dying." Life took millions of years to
recover.
Scientific sleuths, however, now think they're making progress toward
pinning
down what caused the extinction of most plants and animals on Earth
some 251
million years ago.
The perpetrator wasn't an asteroid or comet, like the impact that
wiped out the
dinosaurs 65 million years ago and inspired movies such as "Deep
Impact" and
"Armageddon."
Instead, it was a cascade of events that began with a monstrous
outpouring of
hot, reeking lava in Siberia. Repeated floods of lava released
massive amounts
of carbon dioxide, which produced a runaway greenhouse effect,
oxygen-
starved
oceans and a poisoned atmosphere.
The slaughter is formally known as the Permian-Triassic Mass
Extinction because
it marked the end of a multi-million year geologic period, the
Permian, and the
beginning of another, the Triassic.
To further unravel the mystery, the National Science Foundation has
launched an
international project to study the Siberian lava, led by Linda
Elkins-
Tanton, a
geologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"We have 28 scientists from seven countries and five years' worth of
funding,"
Elkins-Tanton said. "I'm very excited about it!"
Besides being a puzzling detective story, the P-T extinction is also
a
cautionary tale for our time.
"The end-Permian catastrophe is an extreme version of the
consequences of global
warming, said Lee Kump, a geoscientist at The Pennsylvania State
University. "It
reminds us that there are unexpected consequences of CO2 buildup, and
these can
be quite dire, indeed."
The lessons of the P-T massacre are "directly applicable to the
present," said
John Isbell, a geoscientist at the University of Wisconsin in
Milwaukee. He said
the world today is in danger of exceeding a CO2 "threshold" that
could set off
an environmental upheaval as great as the one 251 million years ago.
Isbell said CO2 levels in the atmosphere at the time of the P-T
catastrophe
reached 1,000 to 1,500 parts per million (ppm), far higher than
today's level of
385 ppm. (That means there are 385 carbon dioxide molecules for every
1 million
total molecules in the atmosphere.)
CO2 levels are now rising by 2 ppm a year, and that's expected to
accelerate to
3 ppm a year. If carbon emissions aren't reduced, some researchers
fear that by
the end of the next century, the CO2 level could approach what it was
during the
P-T period.
Exactly what caused the ancient mass extinction is still unclear, but
here's how
many researchers think it may have unfolded:
Over a period of about a million years, an enormous quantity of lava
from deep
in the Earth's interior oozed up through giant cracks in Siberia's
crust. The
molten mass "froze" into step-like slabs of flood basalts, volcanic
rocks known
as the Siberian Traps.
Enough lava gushed out to cover an area almost as large as the
continental U.S.
At a conference of geologists in Vienna last April, Russian
geoscientist Alexei
Ivanov estimated the lava flow at 2.8 million square miles and the
volume of the
basalt at 960,000 cubic miles, enough to slather the entire Earth
with a layer
10 or more feet thick. (In comparison, the 1980 eruption of Mount St.
Helens
unleashed about a quarter of a cubic mile of lava.)
The lava from the Siberian Traps sent huge quantities of carbon
dioxide and
methane (natural gas) into the atmosphere. These greenhouse gases
caused an epic
spell of global warming. Toxic acid rain drizzled from the sky, and
the ozone
shield in the atmosphere thinned, letting deadly ultra-violet
radiation pass
through.
As is happening now, the Earth warmed more near the poles than it did
at the
Equator. The smaller temperature difference slowed the great ocean
currents that
keep the waters circulating. The oceans stagnated and lost most of
their oxygen.
Marine plants and animals suffocated.
What happened to snuff out life on land is still debated. Some
researchers
believe that bacteria in the ocean, living on sulfur instead of
oxygen, churned
out vast quantities of hydrogen sulfide (H2S), a lethal gas with a
rotten-egg
smell. As the hydrogen sulfide gas emerged from the sea, it choked
half of all
land creatures.
While the evidence points to natural processes on Earth as the
culprits in the
P-T mass extinction, scientists warn that humans may now be
contributing to a
repeat.
"In the late Permian, Earth itself was the villain, but today we've
stepped in
as the villain," Kump
said. ......................
..............Censored news s.


3. World Oceans in Extreme Danger
Oceanic problems once found on a local scale are now
pandemic. Data
from oceanography, marine biology, meteorology, fishery
science and
glaciology reveal that the seas are changing in ominous
ways. A
vortex of cause and effect wrought by global
environmental dilemmas
is changing the ocean from a watery horizon with assorted
regional
troubles to a global system in alarming distress.
The oceans are one, say oceanographers, with currents
linking the
seas and regulating climate. Sea temperature and
chemistry changes,
along with contamination and reckless fishing practices,
intertwine
to imperil the world's largest communal life source.
In 2005, researchers from the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography
and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found
clear evidence
that the ocean is quickly warming. They discovered that
the top
half-mile of the ocean has warmed dramatically in the
past 40 years
as a result of human-induced greenhouse gases.
One manifestation of this warming is the melting of the
Arctic. A
shrinking ratio of ice to water has set off a feedback
loop,
accelerating the increase in water surfaces that promote
further
warming and melting. With polar waters growing fresher
and tropical
seas saltier, the cycle of evaporation and precipitation
has
quickened, further invigorating the greenhouse effect.
The ocean's
currents are reacting to this freshening, causing a
critical
conveyor that carries warm upper waters into Europe's
northern
latitudes to slow by one-third since 1957, bolstering
fears of a
shut down and cataclysmic climate change. This
accelerating cycle of
cause and effect will be difficult, if not impossible, to
reverse.
Atmospheric litter is also altering sea chemistry, as
thousands of
toxic compounds poison marine creatures and devastate
propagation.
The ocean has absorbed 118 billion metric tons of carbon
dioxide
since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, with 20 to
25 tons
being added to the atmosphere daily. Increasing acidity
from rising
levels of CO2 is changing the ocean's pH balance. Studies
indicate
that the shells and skeletons possessed by everything
from
reef-building corals to mollusks and plankton begin to
dissolve
within 48 hours of exposure to the acidity expected in
the ocean by
2050. Coral reefs will almost certainly disappear and,
even more
worrisome, so will plankton. Phytoplankton absorb
greenhouse gases,
manufacture oxygen and are the primary producers of the
marine food
web.