Rapid Paleocene Global Warming Caused Diversity Explosion

Submitted by Doug L. Hoffman on Sun, 11/14/2010 - 16:36

One of the scary predictions made about the impact of global warming is the extinction of many current species leading to a crisis in biological diversity. Like most of the speculative effects of global warming, this prediction is not only without scientific basis, it is precisely backward. A new paper in the journal Science, studying the impact of rapid global warming at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary, show that rapid tropical forest diversification occurred without plant extinction. Moreover, diversity seemed to increase at higher temperatures, contradicting previous assumptions that tropical flora will succumb if temperatures become excessive. The tropical rainforest was able to flourish under elevated temperatures and high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, in contrast to speculation that tropical ecosystems were severely harmed by the heat.

The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) 56.3 million years ago was a unique episode of rapid global warming (~5°C). It is often used as an ancient analog for future global climate by those hyping catastrophic climate change. Though there is little chance that human CO2 emission could cause such and event, that has not prevented the global warming gloom and doom crowd from holding up the threat of a possible second PETM event to bolster their socioeconomic agenda for the world. Supposedly, a PETM replay would bring with it all sorts of calamitous environmental consequences.

Now, a number of those dire, nature ravaging predictions made by global warming scaremongers have been revealed as the crap-science propaganda that they are. In a new journal paper, “Effects of Rapid Global Warming at the Paleocene-Eocene Boundary on Neotropical Vegetation,” Carlos Jaramillo et al. present their analysis of the effects of rapid global warming during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) 56.3 million years ago. Here is how they introduced their work in the paper's abstract:

We investigated the tropical forest response to this rapid warming by evaluating the palynological record of three stratigraphic sections in eastern Colombia and western Venezuela. We observed a rapid and distinct increase in plant diversity and origination rates, with a set of new taxa, mostly angiosperms, added to the existing stock of low-diversity Paleocene flora. There is no evidence for enhanced aridity in the northern Neotropics. The tropical rainforest was able to persist under elevated temperatures and high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, in contrast to speculations that tropical ecosystems were severely compromised by heat stress.

Promoters of catastrophic climate change have often warned that rising global temperatures would decimate the natural world, striking down species right and left, leaving world biological diversity dangerously depleted. The most vulnerable of habitats were taken to be the world's rainforests, those hot, humid bastions of teaming jungle life. Rains would fail and the nurturing forests would die, taking the indigenous animal life with them. Now we know this to be yet another warmist fairy tail.


The world's rainforests are reservoirs of diversity.

“Efforts to understand the impact of climate change on terrestrial environments have focused on mid- to high-latitude localities, but little is known of tropical ecosystems during the PETM,” state the authors. “Tropical temperature change is poorly constrained, but, given the magnitude of temperature change elsewhere, tropical ecosystems are thought to have suffered extensively because mean temperatures are surmised to have exceeded the ecosystems’ heat tolerance.” But, as the study details, this was most certainly not the case.

The researchers examined data from three tropical terrestrial PETM sites from Colombia and Venezuela. The map below shows the Late Paleocene location of the studied sections (map after C. R. Scotese). Note that the northern Andes had not yet been uplifted and most of Central America was still underwater.


Geographical location of the studied sections.

At two of the sites, labeled Mar 2X and Riecito Mache, plant diversity was inferred from ancient pollen. These data show relatively low diversity during the Late Paleocene, followed by a significant increase during the PETM. Low-diversity Paleocene floras followed an increase in Early Eocene diversity had been previously observed in tropical South America, but the timing of the diversity changes was not accurately established.

While species continued to go extinct during the PETM—as they have since the beginning of life on Earth—there was nothing out of the ordinary about the extinction rate when compared with surrounding time periods. And while the extinction rate remained fairly constant the addition of new specie, called the origination rate, spiked during the sudden warmth of the PETM. The extinction and origination rates are shown in the figure below, taken from the report.


Extinction and origination rates.

This definitely flies in the face of common climate science wisdom. The authors note: “Many have argued that tropical communities live near their climatic optimum and that higher temperatures could be deleterious to the health of tropical ecosystems. Indeed, tropical warming during the PETM is surmised to have produced intolerable conditions for tropical ecosystems, although 31° to 34°C is still within the maximum tolerance of leaf temperature of some tropical plants.”

Those widely held beliefs have now been debunked. Of course, this news comes as no surprise to many scientists, particularly those who actually study the effects of temperature and carbon dioxide on plants. Jon Lloyd and Graham D Farquhar noted in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, “we find no evidence for tropical forests currently existing ‘dangerously close’ to their optimum temperature range.”

“Greenhouse experiments have shown that high levels of CO2 together with high levels of soil moisture improve the performance of plants under high temperatures, and it is possible that higher Paleogene CO2 levels contributed to their success,” note Jaramillo et al. This echos what several authorities have pointed out in the past: CO2 is plant food. As long as there is sufficient precipitation, and the study found that rainfall did not diminish, plants can do very well with elevated carbon dioxide levels.

This conclusion is not surprising, since lead author Jarmillo, writing with Milton J. Rueda and Germán Mora, had previously reported that “A good correlation between diversity fluctuations and changes in global temperature was found, suggesting that tropical climate change may be directly driving the observed diversity pattern.” This correlation has been known by paleobiologists for some time (see “Cenozoic Plant Diversity in the Neotropics” in the March 31, 2006, issue of Science). Of course, with fluctuating temperatures come fluctuating CO2 levels.


The PETM warmth helped orchids to flourish.

“Overall diversity and composition analysis suggest that the onset of the PETM is concomitant with an increase in diversity produced by the addition of many taxa (with some representing new families) to the stock of preexisting Paleocene taxa,” the new study concludes. What's more, “this change in diversity was permanent and not transient, as documented for temperate North America.” Not just a flash in the pan, the sudden increase in temperatures during the PETM actually caused a lasting increase in diversity.

As usual, the climate alarmist party line is not only wrong but dead wrong. Higher global temperatures and elevated CO2 levels were good for nature 50 million years ago and certainly won't harm nature today. In fact, one of the observed impacts of the PETM warming was the spread of orchids. Perhaps the IPCC secretly hates flowers. Regardless, the myth that higher levels of CO2 and higher temperatures will destroy the tropical rainforests has been shown to be climate alarmist disinformation.

Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical.

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One Wonders What Else They are Wrong About!!

Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 03:47.

…….uummmm, new animal phyla suddenly spike during warming of PETM, sounds suspiciously like they were designed to do that.

Mark in Durango

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Question is

Submitted by Allen T on Sun, 11/28/2010 - 20:07.

Can direct and meaningful comparisons really be made between holocene ecology and the ecology of the already warmer (and somewhat geographically different) paleocene? Particularly considering that the CO2 increase back then wasn't even a doubling, and the changes were apparently over 10,000 years, with stronger warming at high latitudes than in the tropics.

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Good questions

Submitted by Doug L. Hoffman on Mon, 11/29/2010 - 11:03.

Some good questions. I have written often about the PETM and find it a fascinating example of just how stable Earth's climate system is. Evidently climate scientists also find it an interesting subject since new papers continue to appear in journals about it. Here are a few points I have gleaned from my study of the PETM:

  • Estimates of how large a pulse of CO2/CH4 was released to initiate the PETM varies widely. The estimates all tend to be in the range of 1,200 – 5,000 gigatons of carbon with 2,000 gigatons cited most often and at least one estimate as high as 10,000 gigatons. Based on the upper limit temperature rise, ~9°C, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels more than doubled.

  • Whether that release came all at once or over a period of several millennia is also a matter of speculation. The problem is that when trying to measure time spans at a remove of 55 million years science simply cannot resolve dates any closer than thousands of years. They are sure that it happened over a time span less than 10,000 but how much less is pure conjecture. Some papers say the release could have taken less than 1,000 years, instantaneous for all practical purposes, but we have no way of resolving the time span precisely.

  • Regardless of whether the hypothesized GHG release happened all at once or took thousands of years the result would have been pretty much the same. Gases in the atmosphere are well mixed, meaning any warming effect should have occurred quickly and globally. However, Earth's climate system has a great deal of hysteresis: the oceans, particularly the cold deep waters around Antarctica, act as a huge heat sink for the planet, as do the large glacial ices sheets in Antarctica and Greenland. Single release or ramped up over thousands of years, the global temperature increase would not have been instantaneous but rather a moderated rise that would slow as it approached the new thermal equilibrium point (what a control engineer would call an over-damped system). Again, there are problems resolving the actual timeline.

  • The pattern of greater relative warming in what are now the temperate latitudes, with the equatorial regions remaining largely unchanged, has been observed over other historical periods as well. This is probably because the Earth system is quite effective at transporting heat energy away from the tropics to higher latitudes.

  • People get hung up on doubling atmospheric CO2 levels. The first thing to know is that the effect of doubling atmospheric CO2 very much depends on where you start from. Going from 250 ppm to 500 ppm will have a much bigger effect in terms of total temperature rise than going from 500 ppm to 1,000 ppm. As noted, the starting point for the PETM episode was considerably higher than modern levels, implying that it would take significantly more CO2 to cause the observed jump in temperatures.

  • Noting that thousands of Gt of carbon dioxide would be needed to cause the planet's temperature to rise 5-9°C, the point that is often missed is that it is the absolute level of atmospheric CO2 that is important if one is interested in absolute temperature levels. To make things as hot as the PETM you would need the same level of GHG in the atmosphere as then, regardless of where you start from.

  • Another thing that is often missed is that the GHG released at the start of the PETM was removed from the atmosphere quite rapidly, taking on the order of 20,000-40,000 years. In fact, a recent paper states that the ecosystem accelerated its rate of carbon sequestration in response to the PETM release (see “Rapid carbon sequestration at the termination of the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum”). The implication here is that, though a massive release of CO2/CH4 can cause a rise in global temperatures, such a rise is only a perturbation of the system. The system will correct itself over time by removing any “excess” carbon from the atmosphere.

That last point is quite important in that it shows that CO2 does not regulate Earth's climate. Sure, it does have an impact on temperatures, but it cannot cause long-term changes in climate because it is rapidly removed from the environment. To keep temperatures at PETM levels would require an ongoing release of thousands of gigatons of carbon. Other things drive climate with CO2 acting as one of the many feedback mechanisms within the system. Human CO2 emissions may cause some temporary warming but the system is actively working to remove those emissions. For these and other reasons I find the CO2 global warming threat overblown.

See my earlier article, “Could Human CO2 Emissions Cause Another PETM?,” for details and links to papers. For more on what caused the PETM see “Ancient Evidence That CO2 Does Not Control Climate.”

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A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY GLOBAL COOLING Vs GLOBAL WARMING RESULT

Submitted by praveen panwar on Tue, 11/23/2010 - 05:55.

A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY GLOBAL COOLING Vs GLOBAL WARMING RESULTING? BIG ATOMIC EXPLOSION Vs TRY TO SHIFT THE EARTH AXIS?
Before Starting any comparison between above topics .Some lines from a Article “ History of the greenhouse effect and global warming“ “By S.M. Enzler MSc”
Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927) was a Swedish scientist that was the first to claim in 1896 that fossil fuel combustion may eventually result in enhanced global warming. He proposed a relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and temperature. He found that the average surface temperature of the earth is about 15oC because of the infrared absorption capacity of water vapor and carbon dioxide. This is called the natural greenhouse effect. Arrhenius suggested a doubling of the CO2 concentration would lead to a 5oC temperature rise. He and Thomas Chamberlin calculated that human activities could warm the earth by adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This research was a by-product of research of whether carbon dioxide would explain the causes of the great Ice Ages. This was not actually verified until 1987.
Now staring Lines of a report “A Study of Climatologically research as it Pertains to Intelligence Problem” are the Document is a working paper prepared by the office of Research and development of the central intelligence Agency for its internal planning purpose. Therefore, the views and conclusions contained herein are those of the author and should not be interpreting as necessarily representing the official position, other expressed or impelled of the central Intelligence Agency.
August 1974, By CIA for its internal planning process.
In the second page of the report “The world is returning to the type of climate which has existed over the last 400 year that is the abnormal climate of agricultural optimum is being replaced by normal climate agricultural optimum is being replaced by a normal climate boreal era.
According to this report climate change began in 1960,but no one including the climatologists recognized it. crop failures in the soviet union and India during the first part first part of the sixties were attributed to the natural fluctuation of the weather, In this report it was clearly mentioned that india was supported by massive U.S. grain shipment that feed over 100 million people the world quietly ignored the varying provided by the 1964 crop failure .during the reminder of 1960s,The climate change remained hidden in these back washes of the world where death through starvation and disease where already a common occurrence.
Later ,in the 1970s one nation after another experienced the impact of the climate change.
BURMA(MARCH 1973)
Little rise for export due to draught
NORTH KOREA (MARCH 1973
Record high grain import reflected poor 1972 harvest.
COSTA RICA AND HANDURAS (1973)
worst draught in 50 year
United States (April 1973))
Flood of the century along the great lakes
JAPAN (MARCH 1973)
Cold spell seriously damaged crops.
PAKISTAN (March 1973)
Islam planned import of U.S.grain to off-set crop failure due to draught
PAKISTAN (Aug.1973)
worst flood in 20 years affected 2.8 million acres.
NORTH VIETNAM (SEP.1973)
important crop damaged by heavy rains.
MANILA (MARCH 1974)
millions in Asia face critical rise shortage.
ECUADOR (APRIL 1974)
shortage of rice reaching crisis proportion ,threaten its political stability.
USSR (JUNE-1974)
Poor weather threatens to reduce grain yields in the USSR.
INDIA(JUNE-1974
Monsoon late
CHINA (JUNE1974)
Draught and Floods
UNITED STATES (JULY 1974)
Heavy rain and draught causes record loss to potential bumper crop.

All these data are collected from the CIA report in this report “Climate is now a critical factor. Food will become the central issue of every government. “The rains come not on the day for which for which we pray but only when making hay.”The climate of the neo-boreal time period has arrived.
Early in 1970’s a series of adverst climatic anomaties occurred.
1-the world’s snow and ice cover had increased by at least 10 to 15%.
2-In the eastern Canadian area of the arctic green land ,below normal temp were recorded for consecutive months, Nothing like this happened in the last 100 years.
3-The Moscow region suffered its worst drought in tree to five hundred year.
4-Drought accrued in central America ,Sub Sahara, South Asia, china and Australia. Massive flood take place in the mid western United States.
According to dr Imbnies,s group they has been able to establish that these ice ages are cyclic in nature and consist of approx, a 90,000 years, Glacial period followed by a relatively brief warming peik for 10,000 to 12500 years called the interglacial periods.
According to this report ‘based on the wisconsion study.it would meen that INDIA will have a major drought every four year and could only support three froths of her present population. the world reserve would have to supply 30 to 50 million MT og grain each year to prevent the deaths Indians in 1973.In 1973,the office of research development (ORD) had obtained sufficient evidence for climate change during the two days conference at SAN DIEGO .
Second and final day , In two days they argued, discussed and defended their approaches to climate forecasting and the impact of climate change. By second day they agreed in the following fundamental issues.
1-Global climate change is taking place.
2-We will not soon return to the climate patterns of the recent past.
According to news week article dated 28 April 1975 “the Cooling World”.
In this ‘There are ominous signe that the earth weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production-with serious political implication for just about every nation in Earth. The drop in food output could began quite soon perhaps only ten years for now.the regions destined to feel its impact are Canada,USSr,parts of india,Pakistan,Bangladesh,Indochina and Indonesia.
According to 1975 US national Academy of Science. National Research Council Report,
“But this exaggerated concern about global warming contrasts sharply with an earlier NAS/NRC report “under standing Climate Change “A program for Action”
These in 1975,The NAS Experts exhibited the same hysterical fears –This time however asserting a “finite possibility that a serious worldwide cooling could be fall the earth.The 1975 NAS panel claimed to have good reason for their fears: Global Temperatures head bean in steady decline since 1940’ .They considered the proceeding period of warming between 1860 and 1940 as “unusual” following as it did the little ice age, which had lasted from 1430 to 1850.
The winter of 1856-57 was one of the severest winters ever known in New England, USA (Perley 2001). It began much earlier than usual, and continued far into the spring. There were 32 snow storms in total, three more than the average number for the preceding period, and the snow covered the landscape to a depth of six feet and two inches, while the 20 year average depth for eastern Massachusetts (Perley 2001).The summer of 1856 had been hot, and the weather remained pleasant until mid December. On the night of 17 December extremely cold weather began. In both Massachusetts and Maine the temperature dropped to at least -12oF (-24oC), and the following day the temperature remained below 0 F all over New England, the coldest day recorded since 1836 (Perley 2001). On the night of 23 December there was a violent blizzard with much snow. Because of the high wind speed, several ships were lost along the coast.
In 1899, the Swedish scientist Nils Eckholm, an early and eager spokesman for anthropogenic climatic control, pointed out that at present rates, the burning of coal eventually could double the concentration of atmospheric CO2. According to Nils Eckholm, being influenced by the thoughts of his lifelong friend and colleague Svante Arrhenius, this would "undoubtedly cause a very obvious rise of the mean temperature of the Earth." By controlling the production and consumption of CO2, he thought humans would be able to "regulate the future climate of the Earth and consequently prevent the arrival of a new ice age (Fleming 1998).Eckholm, like his friend Arrhenius, thought warmer was better than cold. An increasing concentration of CO2 would counteract the expected deterioration of especially the northern and Arctic regions, as predicted by James Croll's astronomical theory of the ice age.
What you think about Global Warming is real or Global Cooling is real.
Suggestion required
By
PRAVEEN PANWAR (praveenpanwar.blogspot.com)

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