Extinction News Update

Consider this headline from an environmentalist website: "Worst mass extinction shifted entire ecology of the world's oceans." Well duh, ya think?

Mongabay: The study, published in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science, found that "ecologically simple marine communities were largely displaced by complex communities", a shift that continues has continue since. "It reflects the current dominance of higher-metabolism, mobile organisms (such as snails, clams and crabs) that actually go out and find their own food and the decreased diversity of older groups of low-metabolism, stationary organisms (such as lamp shells and sea lilies) that filter nutrients from the water," according to a news release from the Field Museum, an institution involved in the research.

The story is about how analysis of the Paleobiology Database demonstrates more ecologically complex communities forming after the Permian-Triassic extinction event kills off most forms of life on earth 251 million years ago. This appears to be good work on actual fossil data. Of course, with research dollars flowing to politically correct academics, it is no surprise the environmentalist movement desperately want to find a way to show the near annihilation of life on earth was do to global warming.

Global warming: A dramatic rise in carbon dioxide 250 million years ago may have caused global temperatures to soar and result in Earth's greatest mass extinction, according to a study published in the September issue of Geology. … The modeling presented unique challenges because of limited data and significant geographic differences between the Permian and present-day Earth. The researchers had to estimate such variables as the chemical composition of the atmosphere, the amount of sunlight reflected by Earth's surface back into the atmosphere, and the movement of heat and salinity in the oceans at a time when all the continents were consolidated into the giant land mass known as Pangaea.

Just to compare and contrast, if you study real world data you find life became much more complex after an unprecedented global tragedy. If you assume values for all the data you don’t know, you can program a computer to show CO2 was responsible for the kill off that allowed higher life to emerge on the planet. Since I am not a fan a fictional data analysis, I am more inclined to believe what actual evidence indicates.

Largest Ever Killer Crater: Planetary scientists have found evidence of a meteor impact much larger and earlier than the one that killed the dinosaurs -- an impact that they believe caused the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history. The 300-mile-wide crater lies hidden more than a mile beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. And the gravity measurements that reveal its existence suggest that it could date back about 250 million years -- the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction, when almost all animal life on Earth died out.

I guess I’m just inclined to believe damage from a high speed projectile is probably a more likely explanation than a series of warm summer days.