Hothouse Earth: "It's worse than we thought"

From	vallor <vallor@cultnix.org>
Newsgroups	alt.checkmate, talk.politics.guns, sci.physics
Subject	Hothouse Earth: "It's worse than we thought"
Date	2018-08-27 22:05 +0000
Message-ID	<fujataFbkd0U1@mid.individual.net> (permalink)

Cross-posted to 3 groups.

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I'll just come out and say it, to get it out of the way:
    IT'S WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/earths-scorching-hot-history/566762/

Obquote:
 _ _ _ _ _ _ _
But the most striking feature of this early age of mammals is
that it was almost unbelievably hot, so hot that around 50
million years ago there were crocodiles, palm trees, and sand
tiger sharks in the Arctic Circle. On the other side of the
blue-green orb, in waters that today would surround Antarctica,
sea-surface temperatures might have topped an unthinkable 86
degrees Fahrenheit, with near-tropical forests on Antarctica
itself. There were perhaps even sprawling, febrile dead zones
spanning the tropics, too hot even for animal or plant life of
any sort.

This is what you get in an ancient atmosphere with around 1,000
parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide. If this number sounds
familiar, 1,000 ppm of CO2 is around what humanity is on pace to
reach by the end of this century. That should be mildly
concerning.

“You put more CO2 in the atmosphere and you get more warming,
that’s just super-simple physics that we figured out in the
19th century,” says David Naafs, an organic geochemist at the
University of Bristol. “But exactly how much it will warm by
the end of the century, we don’t know. Based on our research
of these ancient climates, though, it’s probably more than we
thought.”

Last week, Naafs and colleagues released a study in Nature
Geoscience that reconstructs temperatures on land during this
ancient high-CO2 hothouse of the late Paleocene and early Eocene
epochs—the sweltering launch to the age of mammals. And the
temperatures they unearthed are unsurprisingly scorching.
 _ _ _ _ _ _ _


-- 
-v

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Hothouse Earth: "It's worse than we thought" vallor <vallor@cultnix.org> - 2018-08-27 22:05 +0000
  Re: Hothouse Earth: "It's worse than we thought" snipeco.2@gmail.com (Sn!pe) - 2018-08-27 23:21 +0100
    Re: Hothouse Earth: "It's worse than we thought" Checkmate <ricksabian1@gmail.com> - 2018-08-27 15:48 -0700

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