A runaway spurt of global warming 55 million years ago turned Earth into a hothouse but how this happened remains worryingly unclear, scientists said on Monday.
Previous research into this period, called the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, estimates the planet's surface temperature blasted upwards by between five and nine degrees Celsius (nine and 16.2 degrees Fahrenheit) in just a few thousand years.
The Arctic Ocean warmed to 23 C (73 F), or about the temperature of a lukewarm bath.
How PETM happened is unclear but climatologists are eager to find out, as this could shed light on aspects of global warming today.
What seems clear is that a huge amount of heat-trapping "greenhouse" gases -- natural, as opposed to man-made -- were disgorged in a very short time.
The theorised sources include volcanic activity and the sudden release of methane hydrates in the ocean.
A trio of Earth scientists, led by Richard Zeebe of the University of Hawaii, try to account for the carbon that was spewed out during PETM.
They believe that levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) rose by 70 percent during PETM's main phase to reach 1,700 parts per million (ppm), attaining a concentration of between four and five times that of today.
But all this CO2 can only account for between one and 3.5 C (1.8-6.3 F) of PETM's warming if the models for climate sensitivity are right, the team found.
There must have been some other factor that stoked temperatures higher.
Even though there are big differences between Earth's geology and ice cover then and now, the findings are relevant as they highlight the risk of hidden mechanisms that add dramatically to warming, says the paper.
Some of these so-called "positive feedbacks" are already known.
For instance, when a patch of Arctic sea ice melts, this exposes the uncovered sea to sunlight, depriving it of a bright, reflective layer.
That causes the sea to warm, which leads to the loss of more ice, which in turn helps the sea to warm, and so on.
But these "feedbacks" are poorly understood and some scientists believe there could be others still to be identified.
"Our results imply a fundamental gap in our understanding about the amplitude of global warming associated with large and abrupt climate perturbations," warns Zeebe's team.
"This gap needs to be filled to confidently predict future climate change."
After the big warm-up, the planet eventually cooled around 100,000 years later, but not before there had been a mass extinction, paving the way to the biodiversity that is familiar to us today.
Man-made global warming, driven mainly by the burning of oil, gas and coal, has amounted to around 0.8 C (1.12 F) over the past century.
Last week in L'Aquila, Italy, the Group of Eight (G8) industrialised countries and other economies that together account for 80 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions pledged to try to limit overall warming to 2 C (3.6 F) over pre-industrial times.
ONE of Afghanistan’s most wanted terrorists is to be offered a power-sharing deal by the government of President Hamid Karzai as the country’s warlords extend their grip on power.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is on America’s “most wanted” terrorist list, is to hold talks with the Kabul government within the next few weeks.
Hekmatyar is the leader of Hezb-i-Islami, which has been fighting Nato troops alongside the Taliban. The hardline group is responsible for many attacks in the eastern and central regions, including the massacre of 10 French soldiers in Sarobi last year. It controls Kapisa province, just 50 miles north of Kabul.
Canada has no business being over in Afghanistan. If Canada did not have military forces deployed to Afghanistan then this would not be an issue. Given that our soldiers are dying to "free" Afghanistan from the cluches of these war lords and terrorists, it does cause us some concern. If Karzai is offering deals to terrorists, why are we propping up his government?
The Canadian Press Updated Fri. Jun. 26 2009 10:14 PM ET
OTTAWA -- Allowing Canadians to vote electronically may be the remedy for the ever-dwindling percentage of voters who bother to exercise their democratic rights, Elections Canada suggests.
In a report released late Friday, the independent electoral watchdog says it will push this fall for legislative changes that would allow it to implement online registration of voters.
And it wants parliamentary approval to conduct an electronic voting test-run in a byelection by 2013.
Canada has it so much better than the United States when it comes to our voting procedures. By studying the way the United States has used this technology we can learn a lot and avoid some very dangerous issues. Black Box Voting is a group of citizens in the United States that expose a lot of the problems.
No matter how good they try to make these machines they will always be subject to attack.
(NaturalNews) Last week, when what is now called a "swine flu" was first reported to be infecting and killing some people in Mexico, health officials noted it was a strain of flu never before seen. In fact, it is technically incorrect to call this simply a "swine" flu. Analyses showed it's a mixture of swine, human and avian viruses, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Moreover, it is genetically different from the fully human H1N1 seasonal influenza virus that has been circulating globally for the past few years. Bottom line: the new flu virus contains DNA from avian, swine viruses (including elements from European and Asian viruses) and human viruses.
So did this curious mixture just develop naturally, out of the blue? Is it the result of inhumane farming practices, as the Humane Society of the United States (http://www.hsus.org/) has suggested, that exposes immune-compromised pigs to all sorts of animal and human feces?
Well, maybe. But let's go back and look at the facts to see if any other scenario could be possible.
First of all, there's the troublesome detail that the virus has elements that come from multiple continents. Then there's the fact that true swine flu is only rarely transmissible to humans -- this flu is spreading human-to-human, most likely because it contains DNA from human flu.
Could someone have deliberately mixed these viruses together? Is that possible? Absolutely.
Was this virus mixing being done artificially in the lab, or had it already been done? Yes.
Who was blending potentially swine, human and/or avian viruses in labs? Were those horrible generic boogie men known to Americans far and wide as "terrorists" doing it? There's no proof of bioterrorism at work here yet. However, there is evidence the United States government has been working on concocting new flu virus blends.
So could the hysteria-provoking, new swine flu have escaped from a lab? Or was it deliberately released as some kind of test? When these kinds of questions are asked, the knee-jerk reaction of the mainstream media (MSM) is to giggle and talk about "conspiracy theories" and to joke about wearing tinfoil hats.
But here's the potential smoking gun, the facts that suggest a potential source of the pandemic could be CDC labs. And at the very least, this possibility deserves thoughtful examination and research.
The University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) is hardly a place most Americans have heard about and, apparently, the Center's web site has news the MSM isn't familiar with, either. But information they published years ago has now taken on an urgent importance. CIDRAP, along with the Canadian newspaper Canadian Press (CP), revealed back in 2004 that the CDC was launching experiments designed to mix the H5N1 (avian) virus and human flu viruses. The goal was to find out how likely it was such a "reassortant" virus would emerge and just how dangerous it might be. Of course, it's logical to wonder if they also worked with the addition of a swine flu virus, too.
Here's some background from the five-year-old report by the University of Minnesota research center: "One of the worst fears of infectious disease experts is that the H5N1 avian influenza virus now circulating in parts of Asia will combine with a human-adapted flu virus to create a deadly new flu virus that could spread around the world. That could happen, scientists predict, if someone who is already infected with an ordinary flu virus contracts the avian virus at the same time. The avian virus has already caused at least 48 confirmed human illness cases in Asia, of which 35 have been fatal. The virus has shown little ability to spread from person to person, but the fear is that a hybrid could combine the killing power of the avian virus with the transmissibility of human flu viruses. Now, rather than waiting to see if nature spawns such a hybrid, US scientists are planning to try to breed one themselves -- in the name of preparedness."
