TOP - June/July 2003 "ONLY 6 DEGREES", BELOW - June 2005 "EXPECT 6 - 8 DEGREES" ONLY 6 DEGREES The Permian was one of the most biologically diverse periods in the earth's history. Herbivorous reptiles the size of rhinos were hunted through forests of tree ferns and flowering trees by sabre-toothed predators. At sea, massive coral reefs accumulated, among which lived great sharks, fish of all kinds and hundreds of species of shell creatures. Then suddenly there is almost nothing. The fossil record very nearly stops dead. The reefs die instantly, and do not reappear on earth for 10 million years. All the large and medium-sized sharks disappear, most of the shell species, and even the great majority of the toughest and most numerous organisms in the sea, the plankton. Among many classes of marine animals, the only survivors were those adapted to the near-absence of oxygen. On land, the shift was even more severe. Plant life was almost eliminated from the earth's surface. The four-footed animals, the category to which humans belong, were nearly exterminated: so far only two fossil reptile species have been found anywhere on earth that survived the end of the Permian. The world's surface came to be dominated by just one of these, an animal a bit like a pig. It became ubiquitous because nothing else was left to compete with it or to prey upon it. Altogether, Benton shows, some 90% of the earth's species appear to have been wiped out: this represents by far the gravest of the mass extinctions. The world's "productivity" (the total mass of biological matter) collapsed. ... So how much warming took place? A sharp change in the ratio of the isotopes of oxygen permits us to reply with some precision: 6C. Benton does not make the obvious point, but another author, the climate change specialist Mark Lynas, does. Six degrees is the upper estimate produced by the UN's scientific body, the intergovernmental panel on climate change(IPCC), for global warming by 2100. A conference of some of the world's leading atmospheric scientists in Berlin last month concluded that the IPCC's model may have underestimated the problem: the upper limit, they now suggest, should range between 7 and 10 degrees. Neither model takes into account the possibility of a partial melting of the methane hydrate still present in vast quantities around the fringes of the polar seas. Extract from George Monbiot's June/July 2003 article in "The Guardian" - a UK broadsheet http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,988380,00.html --------------------------------------------------------------- EXPECT 6 - 8 DEGREES 3 June 2005 European Space Agency News Prof. Olav Orheim, director of the Norwegian Polar Institute. His priority is to study the Arctic Ocean, with its seasonal natural cycles and the consequences of human action. "We are now seeing a rapid change in the amount of snow and sea ice in the Arctic because of alterations in the climate. When the ground with less snow becomes darker, it absorbs more solar radiation, it warms and melts even more snow," explains Prof. Orheim. "Human activity, added to the greenhouse effect, can change the climate from short periods to longer periods between ice ages. In the future we may have temperatures 6-8 degrees centigrade higher than in the warmest periods on Earth for the last 20-30 million years." Copyright 2000 - 2005 © European Space Agency. All rights reserved http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMVET0DU8E_index_0.html ----------------------------------------- "Perceptions" note - Mar '06 in correspondence during past year have made repeated warnings and forecast that - as most of the phenomena associated with global warming are assisting each other - there will be much faster and greater warming than the experts think. The engineering / physics term applicable is "Thermal Runaway". ----------------------------------------- FURTHER REFERENCES GO - "search perceptions" - in SEARCH-ENGINE file-ID www.perceptions.couk.com/warmish.txt