Mayhew agrees that focusing in on such transitions is the next step. "The time periods we're really interested in now," he says, "are decades and hundreds of years — at maximum 1,000 years."
"You can't get that kind of detail by looking into the deep past," he says. "If you want to know how temperature change is affecting things on that timescale, you're going to have to look at the more recent fossil record."
This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on September 3, 2012.
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13 Comments
Add CommentBad news for the short term, good news for the long term? Opinions?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis will not get much coverage unfortunately.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGood news for the long term? Nope, not this time. Previous cycles there were no modern humans to get in the way of diversification.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis seems kind of obvious. It looks more like coming up with an excuse for an article to keep adding to the claim that somehow today because of us evil humans it is all different. I guess there were too many articles recently with evidence that global warming is natural, so this one was created to get a warmist vision back in, basically somehow now is different and wont be reversible in the future plus somehow even though biodiversity increases with warming every other time and future warming will somehow be mass extinctions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy don't we all just agree that nobody is entirely sure what is going to happen in the future.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo what happened to the warmists who claim exactly the opposite. Where o where did their catastrophe go??
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps this will help reduce the amount of rhetoric being spewed. When actual data is examined the CAGW meme and the blaring klaxons are seen for what they are.
No actions should be contemplated until all data is in. Otherwise we may hurt ourselves. GK
I'm pretty sure biodiversity ranks pretty low on anyone's list of global warming concerns. More important are the unbearable heat, epic droughts, 100 year floods becoming 10 year floods, and sea level rise, to name a few. The data IS in on those things, and it shows that we need to act now.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is NOT in. There is NO evidence of increased extreme weather events, only the spin & manipulated data promotes this lie.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"More important are the unbearable heat, epic droughts, 100 year floods becoming 10 year floods, and sea level rise, to name a few. The data IS in on those things, and it shows that we need to act now."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf only there was some evidence of this outside your precious models.
Here is a paper, just published, which indicates this warm cycle is nothing unusual, nor the declining ice:
“Recent Antarctic Peninsula warming relative to Holocene climate and ice-shelf history” and authored by Robert Mulvaney and colleagues of the British Antarctic Survey (Nature, 2012, doi:10.1038/nature11391), reports two recent natural warming cycles, one around 1500 AD and another around 400 AD, measured from isotope (deuterium) concentrations in ice cores bored adjacent to recent breaks in the ice shelf in northeast Antarctica. GK
GK - Love reading your intelligent, informed comments. Thanks for giving balance to otherwise very biased responses.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCarlyle - The beer is still cold.LOL!
Problem with your logic: both wraming events are less than we've already gone, and are much slower. As I've told Your Obstinacy before, it's the speed of the change, not the amount.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou think that the guy who thinks that 800ppm of atmospheric CO2 is a good thing is intelligent? You worry me sometimes. I have told you before, and will tell you again, check the PETM.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFurthermore, the last time that CO2 went above 800ppm was the Smithian stage of the Triassic period, when the Earth's equatorial zones were literally too hot for animal life and ocean surface temperatures broke 40 degrees Celsius.
"""It is NOT in. There is NO evidence of increased extreme weather events, only the spin & manipulated data promotes this lie."""
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLIE. Have you seen the droughts sweeping much of the world, and the floods sweeping most of the rest? Just as an example, in my area (East coast), last year was the wettest on record. At my grandparents' house just across the Appalachians, it was one of the dryest.