On 8 Jan, 19:05, Tom Gardner wrote:
On Jan 8, 5:58*pm, delboy wrote:





On 8 Jan, 16:25, Tom Gardner wrote:
.

Um, which planet earth do you live on? There have
been multiple "extinction events" which take all of 5
seconds to find on wackypedia.

In particular, the "clathrate gun hypothesis" is particularly
relevant.

A snippet to whet your appetite...

* The clathrate gun hypothesis is the popular name given
* to the hypothesis that rises in sea temperatures (and/or
* falls in sea level) can trigger the sudden release of
* methane from methane clathrate compounds buried in
* seabeds and permafrost which, because the methane
* itself is a powerful greenhouse gas, leads to further
* temperature rise and further methane clathrate
* destabilization – in effect initiating a runaway process,
* as irreversible once started as the firing of a gun
* ...
* However there is stronger evidence that runaway methane
* clathrate breakdown may have caused drastic alteration of
* the ocean environment and the atmosphere of earth on a
* number of occasions in the past, over timescales of tens
* of thousands of years; most notably in connection with the
* Permian extinction event, when 96% of all marine species
* became extinct 251 million years ago.

Sounds pretty drastic to me!

Er! Did I say there hadn't been any mass extinctions?

You said close to that in your last sentence (see below) - to
within 4%, to be more "precise"

I included what you said - since you omitted it, here it is again.

On Jan 8, 12:42 pm, delboy wrote:
As the Earth has maintained reasonably stable temperatures (with
relatively minor variations) for billions of years, it must have
pretty good natural control and feedback mechanisms. Otherwise life on
it would have already died out.

------

There have been
lots of them, including the large dinosaurs (large meteorite strike?),
woolly mammoths (hunting, loss of habitat), dodos (stupid birds) and
even our near relatives the neanderthals (climate change - the last
ice age, probably nothing to do with CO2 emissions or methane
clathrates).

Straw man arguments - you are discussing points with yourself,
because I didn't make any such points.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

I meant that all life forms on Earth would have been wiped out by a
really significant change in temperature, particularly on the hot
side! Some organisms and small creatures can survive being frozen for
a period. You brought up the multiple extinctions events.

Derek Copeland