Dinosaurs--dark, cold extinction

[dragon53]

Link: http://www.foxnews.com/science/2017/02/02/dinosaurs-died-cold-dark-death-new-study-shows.html

[CityRaptor]

Well, that is hardly new. And boy does the comment section suck....

[BlueKrono]

Well, that is hardly new. And boy does the comment section suck....

Why, did someone mention climate change or something?

Oh...

[spinosaurus1]

that comment section hurt my brain

[BlueKrono]

"It dropped below zero in my neighborhood today. So much for your 'global warming'!"

[stargatedalek]

This is quite horrifying. It shouldn't be possible that so many people openly deny facts in favour of whatever the closest living toupee claims is real. I get a lot of these are just trolls, but the point still stands.

[Sigmasaurus]

Dang, glad I'm not a dinosaur.

[Neosodon]

I didn't find the article that great. Dinosaurs had already adapted to cold temperatures. It was most likely a combination of things but mainly loss of food. Alligators, amphibians and mammals could just hibernate and borough underground and stuff and wait out the harsh conditions.

The comment section on the other hand was slightly more amusing ... I guess the sensible people no better than to join the madness. It bugs me when people keep stereotyping religious people as anti science because most, at least the ones I know including me aren't.

[Simon]

Comment deleted. 

[stargatedalek]

I didn't waste time looking at the comments, but I did note that after a sensible article confirming what all of the earlier evidence about the magnitude of the K-T disaster had suggested, the authors chose to end it with an alarmist sentence right out of the current contemporary PC-science fiction hallucination about man-made "climate change."

The unfortunate effect of that (other than annoying the reader who is not expecting a purely political issue to be thrown into an article about dinosaurs) is to throw discredit on the earlier substance of the article.

This is not a political issue, it's an objective scientific fact that human interference is artificially speeding up natural climate warming. That being said the actual warmth itself is heavily overplayed because its effects are more easily seen in reference to humans than greater environmental threats, namely pollution (including the air pollution itself rather than the warming it causes) and over-exploitation.

How to act on climate change is a political issue. Whereas pretending that it isn't real, or acknowledging that it is, is simply one of those two things and out of context denotes no political affiliation.

Seeing someone on this forum using "PC" (= political correctness for those who aren't familiar) as an insult is frankly disheartening. Political correctness is very serious, it isn't about "safe zones" or whatever other new-age millennial garbage (as I hear many right wing people claim it is), political correctness is about being a decent human being. Political correctness is not shouting racist slurs in public, and not swearing Swastikas to work, it has nothing to do with "spoiler culture" wherein people try to hide themselves from all potentially offending influences.

For the record, before I'm accused of being a lazy Canadian socialist who does nothing but steal American jobs, my favorite US politician is a Republican (and he had some great things to say about the current administration earlier today).


Apologies to the staff for such blatant disregard of rules regarding avoiding discussion of politics, but I've done my best to avoid stating my opinion on political concerns and kept it as technical as I could, I just couldn't bear to leave this unsaid. I will not reply to any further comments on this as I've already done enough harm.

[Simon]

Comment deleted. Carry on. Nothing to see here.

[Neosodon]

This is something that might be worth making a thread about but I've always wondered this. Can paleontology predict what a post global warming world might look like? All the fossil fuels we burn are mostly plants from millions of years ago. So by burning them we are releasing all those elements back into the environment returning the atmosphere to a similar composition to that of the Mesozoic. The earth will be warmer and higher sea levels will lead to more stable climates.

My second thought, is global warming bad? I watched a dinosaur documentary that said the earth was in the middle of a warm period between ice ages. So as time passes the earth will naturally get colder. A little bit of gradual global warming could help to balance that out.

[Simon]

This is something that might be worth making a thread about but I've always wondered this. Can paleontology predict what a post global warming world might look like? All the fossil fuels we burn are mostly plants from millions of years ago. So by burning them we are releasing all those elements back into the environment returning the atmosphere to a similar composition to that of the Mesozoic. The earth will be warmer and higher sea levels will lead to more stable climates.

My second thought, is global warming bad? I watched a dinosaur documentary that said the earth was in the middle of a warm period between ice ages. So as time passes the earth will naturally get colder. A little bit of gradual global warming could help to balance that out.

I recall reading somewhere that many geologists don't believe that we have yet come fully out of the last Ice Age ... the problem is that in order to be meaningful climate data needs to cover eons of time - 130 or so years or imperfectly measured temperatures in a few spots around the globe is less than a drop in the bucket of data that would probably be needed to come up with a meaningful analysis.

[Simon]

On a related topic, this discussion reminded me of an article I read years ago that hypothesized that the rise of Himalaya mountain chain in Asia may have caused changes that triggered the Ice Ages.  Just Googled it and here's the link (fascinating stuff - shows you how little we really know about the subject): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rise-of-the-himalayas-may/

[Blade-of-the-Moon]

Sorry, all I could think of with that title :  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9b9aoINXzk

[suspsy]

I didn't waste time looking at the comments, but I did note that after a sensible article confirming what all of the earlier evidence about the magnitude of the K-T disaster had suggested, the authors chose to end it with an alarmist sentence right out of the current contemporary PC-science fiction hallucination about man-made "climate change."

The unfortunate effect of that (other than annoying the reader who is not expecting a purely political issue to be thrown into an article about dinosaurs) is to throw discredit on the earlier substance of the article.

This is not a political issue, it's an objective scientific fact that human interference is artificially speeding up natural climate warming. That being said the actual warmth itself is heavily overplayed because its effects are more easily seen in reference to humans than greater environmental threats, namely pollution (including the air pollution itself rather than the warming it causes) and over-exploitation.

How to act on climate change is a political issue. Whereas pretending that it isn't real, or acknowledging that it is, is simply one of those two things and out of context denotes no political affiliation.

Seeing someone on this forum using "PC" (= political correctness for those who aren't familiar) as an insult is frankly disheartening. Political correctness is very serious, it isn't about "safe zones" or whatever other new-age millennial garbage (as I hear many right wing people claim it is), political correctness is about being a decent human being. Political correctness is not shouting racist slurs in public, and not swearing Swastikas to work, it has nothing to do with "spoiler culture" wherein people try to hide themselves from all potentially offending influences.

For the record, before I'm accused of being a lazy Canadian socialist who does nothing but steal American jobs, my favorite US politician is a Republican (and he had some great things to say about the current administration earlier today).


Apologies to the staff for such blatant disregard of rules regarding avoiding discussion of politics, but I've done my best to avoid stating my opinion on political concerns and kept it as technical as I could, I just couldn't bear to leave this unsaid. I will not reply to any further comments on this as I've already done enough harm.

Well, I'm not a climate scientist, and I certainly can't tell you whether man-made "climate change" is real or not.  So  how to evaluate all the competing claims about this (and many other matters that you and I have zero expertise on)?  Scott Adams has some interesting thoughts on just that topic here: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/154082416051/the-non-expert-problem-and-climate-change-science

Scott Adams is among the last organisms in existence whose advice I'd ever heed, especially anything to do with science. He's demonstrated a profound lack of understanding and a gross overabundance of narcissism on numerous occasions.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Adams

[Simon]

Nevermind. Let's just get back to discussing dinosaurs and dinosaur toys. Nothing good ever happens when people go off-topic, (and I should know).