Talk:Paleoclimatology
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[edit] Cryptozooic
What is this Cryptozooic business? What time system is this from? It's not GTS 89.
- (SEWilco 07:59, 12 Aug 2003 (UTC)) Cryptozoic is an obsolete term. Click on Cryptozoic and you'll find mention at the bottom of that page. (It was already on this page when I saw it...) This page needs a lot of cleaning. There is duplication with Earth's atmosphere which can be removed here, and instead put climate info. I think it would be better to build up all that timeline from research links, not start with a list.
- (User:Terrell Larson 2005/04/28)I know cryptozoic is obsolete. It can be changed. It was my opinion when I wrote the original artical that it needed an interoduction and since the study of climate is closely allied to the life forms it supports, I chose to start from there.
[edit] Life flourishes in Cambrian
The section "Life flourishes in the Cambrian" doesn't belong here. My impression is that it contains nothing that isn't already well-told now at other entries, i.e. Cambrian. I think the opening should explain instead how there is climate before there is life, but that life and climate have evolved in synchronicity since the first biotic free atmospheric oxygen. Then follow with the tools of paleoclimatology, for which there's already a stub. --Wetman (total amateur)
- (User:Terrell Larson 2005/04/28)This artical needs to be greatly expanded. I do not like the recent 2 million years in here. The reason is that this is more in the realm of contemporary climate change and that is being argued to death in the global warming and climate change areas. This artical should consern itself with the paleoclimate (which of course does include everything except perhaps the recent past.)
- The thing I am worring about is that if we allow much mention of the recent past then we run the risk of all the global warming folks hopping in here and destroying this artical. They have a very short focus. In fact, if we contrast the encyclodeadia Britannics to the time since say the early Cambrian then we find each of the 19 books will represent about 30 million years. On this scale a page represents about 30,000 years and a single line about 200 years. Thus our global warming folks are looking at about the last 5-10 lines of the last page of the last book. Everything that has gone on before is irrelevant to them.
- Tim Patteron from Carlton university has now published a report that the geological climate record does not show a correlation between CO2 levels and temperature changes. Specifically the ordovician atmosphere was 13x higher in CO2 than today and they went into an ice age. This shows any coupling between CO2 levels and global warming is weak. However when you try to tell this to the people who are writing the climate change artical - it falls on deaf ears. So I hope they stay away from here with their religeous wars.
- The point I am trying to make is that the paleoclimate can tell us a lot about how the present cliamte operates. OTOH the present climate will not tell us anything about the paleoclimate. This point is totally lost on most of our climatology and global warming folks. They think 50,000 years is a long time and that 2 million years is an incredibly long time. Most of their data is less than 20,000 years old. In fact, many are trying to forecast from data which is less than 100 years old. It is mind boggling to think that people will beleive that you can make meaningful predictions of the climate of a planet more than 4.5 billion years old from data collected over a few hundred years. They simply have no concept of the geological time scale. Since they ignore the evidence in the rocks and fossils their ideas are meaningless and not much different than the creationists who think God created the earth about 5,000 years ago. Well - maybe he did - and if so then he created 4.5 billion years of the earth's history at the same time!
[edit] Cyanobacteria and Archaea
If the Banded_iron_formation are the product of photosythetic oxygenic cyanobacteria and Archaea may be as old as 3.8Ga, the timeline at the end of the Paleoclimatology page should be updated to reflect this. Currently, only bacteria are listed at 3.45 Ga.
[edit] Phanerozoic Climate and cosmic ray flux?
How controversial is the following statement, which currently is in the article?:
"Qualitatively, the Earth's climate was varied between conditions that support large-scale continental glaciation and those which are extensively tropical and lack permanent ice caps even at the poles. The time scale for this variation is roughly 140 million years and may be related to Earth's motion into and out of galactic spiral arms (Veizer and Shaviv 2003)..."
Clicking on the first chart links to cites to the following:
- Shaviv, N. and Veizer, J. (2003) Celestial driver of Phanerozoic climate? GSA Today July 2003, volume 13, number 7, pages 4-10. <http://www.gsajournals.org/gsaonline/?request=get-document&issn=1052-5173&volume=013&issue=07&page=0004>
- Royer, Dana L. and Robert A. Berner, Isabel P. Montañez, Neil J. Tabor, David J. Beerling (2004) CO2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate GSA Today July 2004, volume 14, number 3, pages 4-10. <http://www.gsajournals.org/gsaonline/?request=get-document&issn=1052-5173&volume=014&issue=03&page=0004>
-- and the second article appears to contradict/refute, or at least substantially qualify, the first...
So, if the above quote from the article is controversial shouldn't this be indicated? Moreso than just the current "may be" qualifier... lots of folks feeling very passionate about "global warming" and "greenhouse gases", nowadays, maximum precision would seem to be a good idea...
I'll put both article cites & links into the bibliography, here.
--Kessler 20:53, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
