CREDIT
© H. Bucher, Zürich
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A paper published in Paleoworld worries that a repeat of the greatest mass extinction event in Earth’s history could be triggered by Anthropogenic CO2. But Cambridge Professor Peter Wadhams, our favourite sea ice alarmist, thinks the attempt to link the Permian extinction to modern events is a bit wild.
Earth’s worst-ever mass extinction of life holds ‘apocalyptic’ warning about climate change, say scientists
Runaway global warming saw the planet’s average temperature hit about double what it is today about 250 million years ago
Ian Johnston Environment Correspondent @montaukian Friday 24 March 2017 13:15 GMT
Researchers studying the largest-ever mass extinction in Earth’s history claim to have found evidence that it was caused by runaway global warming – and that the “apocalyptic” events of 250 million years ago could happen again.
About 90 per cent of all the living things on the planet were wiped out in the Permian mass extinction – described in a 2005 book called When Life Nearly Died – for reasons that have been long debated by scientists.
…
Now a team of researchers from Canada, Italy, Germany and the US say they have discovered what happened and that their findings have “an important lesson for humanity” in how we deal with current global warming.
According to a paper published in the journal Palaeoworld, volcanic eruptions pumped large amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, causing average temperatures to rise by eight to 11°C.
…
Professor Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge University, suggested a major methane pulse was possible.
However he said this would be “maybe not apocalyptic, but catastrophic”.
“If there were a large methane release, which is now possible because of the instability of the methane hydrates underneath the Arctic continental shelves, the off-shore waters, that could quite easily give rise to a very large pulse,” Professor Wadhams said.
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However, Professor Wadhams criticised the title of the Palaeoworld paper, which was “Methane hydrate: Killer cause of Earth’s greatest mass extinction”.
“There’s a serious tendency these days to offer a breathless overkill on the importance of a discovery. The title of the paper is over the top,” he said.
…
The abstract of the paper;
Methane Hydrate: Killer cause of Earth’s greatest mass extinction
Uwe Branda Nigel Blameya, Claudio Garbellib, Erika Griesshaberc, Renato Posenatod, Lucia Angiolinib, Karem Azmye, Enzo Farabegolif, Rosemarie Cameg
The cause for the end Permian mass extinction, the greatest challenge life on Earth faced in its geologic history, is still hotly debated by scientists. The most significant marker of this event is the negative δ13C shift and rebound recorded in marine carbonates with a duration ranging from 2000 to 19 000 years depending on localities and sedimentation rates. Leading causes for the event are Siberian trap volcanism and the emission of greenhouse gases with consequent global warming. Measurements of gases vaulted in calcite of end Permian brachiopods and whole rock document significant differences in normal atmospheric equilibrium concentration in gases between modern and end Permian seawaters. The gas composition of the end Permian brachiopod-inclusions reflects dramatically higher seawater carbon dioxide and methane contents leading up to the biotic event. Initial global warming of 8–11 °C sourced by isotopically light carbon dioxide from volcanic emissions triggered the release of isotopically lighter methane from permafrost and shelf sediment methane hydrates. Consequently, the huge quantities of methane emitted into the atmosphere and the oceans accelerated global warming and marked the negative δ13C spike observed in marine carbonates, documenting the onset of the mass extinction period. The rapidity of the methane hydrate emission lasting from several years to thousands of years was tempered by the equally rapid oxidation of the atmospheric and oceanic methane that gradually reduced its warming potential but not before global warming had reached levels lethal to most life on land and in the oceans. Based on measurements of gases trapped in biogenic and abiogenic calcite, the release of methane (of ∼3–14% of total C stored) from permafrost and shelf sediment methane hydrate is deemed the ultimate source and cause for the dramatic life-changing global warming (GMAT > 34 °C) and oceanic negative-carbon isotope excursion observed at the end Permian. Global warming triggered by the massive release of carbon dioxide may be catastrophic, but the release of methane from hydrate may be apocalyptic. The end Permian holds an important lesson for humanity regarding the issue it faces today with greenhouse gas emissions, global warming, and climate change.
Read more (Paywalled): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1871174X16300488
One theory for the cause of the Permian Extinction Event is the eruption of the Siberian Traps, a gigantic million year long volcanic eruption which covered 770,000 square miles of Siberia in 100s of thousands of cubic miles of flood basalt lava.
I know human emissions produce the occasional impressive smoke haze, but I think I’ll go with Professor Wadhams on this one. It does seem a little wild to compare what we do to the atmosphere, to a colossal volcanic eruption which lasted a million years.
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Here’s why… I’m not conceded if somehow we see an onset of a Triassic-Permian event.
Because we’re now “highly technological”.
If shît gets bad, we can leave.
OR
If shît starts to really spiral, we can “fix it” thru scrubbing.
Don’t tell me that humanity couldn’t plant billions or even trillions of trees; we certainly have spent considerable energy and (mostly) manly toil cutting ’em down. Yep, we could plant more than we ever chopped into toothpicks. For sure.
Don’t tell me that humanity couldn’t fertilize the vast sterile ocean with FeSO₄ (iron sulfate) and suck up way more CO₂ that we are emitting. WAY more. Enough if we are really enthusiastic that we could also easily suck CO₂ down to the 280 ppm civilization started with, if prudence leaves the stage of right reason.
And don’t tell me that (for an instance) we were to become sufficiently motivated … we couldn’t gird the planet with superconducting power grids, to move a nearly ridiculous amount of solar power (and nuclear!) around the planet, where needed, from where generated. We (popularly) pine over needing to fix the “solar storage problem”. Yes, it is partially so. But the best fix is not to worry so much, use nuclear at 70% plate production, let it provide its own backfill to the caprice of solar and wind.
This is not a hard problem; but it does require taking action that has become mind-bogglingly pin-headed in not “doing stuff” because it offends the sensibilities of the least critically quantitative group of pseudo-scientists and fluffy-centric politicians and so called educators ever. Fertilize Ocean. Go all-in France-style with nuclear. Sure, pound in solar/wind operations where the sun is bright and the wind is strong. And then take the environmentalists, put ’em in work-gangs, and go plant billions of trees. They can retire, finally, at cushy desk jobs once they’ve invested their youth planting trees. The Aborists.
Just saying.
Needed to rant.
GoatGuy
(#conceded# = concerned) … its still 6 am here…
Couple of things about the Siberian traps (read them years ago so can’t find references)
They were erupted onto (and intruded into) an existing sedimentary sequence including coal, which apparently burned very extensively (CO2!! save us!!) and gypsum evaporites, which introduced loads of sulphur into the magma, (leading to the formation of the rich Norils’k nickel-copper-platinum-palladium deposits) but also discharging SO2 into the atmosphere (SO2!! aerosols!! save us!!).
Climate change orthodoxy therefore says there was simultaneous warming and cooling. Perhaps one or the other was dominant, so take your pick.
Catastrophic release of methane from polar seas and permafrost. It’s the wild card they keep up their sleeve to bring out when CO2 alone isn’t enough for the job. It’s just around the corner if we don’t mend our ways.
Massive eruptions of basaltic lava seem to be fairly common in the earth’s history. So if you’ve got an extinction to explain, you can usually find one ready to hand. E.g. the Deccan Traps at the K-T boundary.
I think we may be missing half of the discussion. Many of these large thousand-year eruptive events are a result of large asteroid impacts. Evidence of one or more large impacts may be found in the area of the Siberian Tuffe. A large asteroid impact goes a long way to explain the extinction-level atmospheric events that may have been present at that time.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8CuinzWfFF9UXZORVc0R3ZXY28
I love “real scientists”. Unlike we engineers who build things, they can take some minimal observations and invent shit like climate change and dark matter, neither of which anyone can prove in the real world. If engineers worked in the same way we would still all be living in caves as all of our buildings and bridges would fall down before they are even completed. But then we are not “real scientists”.
Spot On, Jim!
‘Imagining’ tabloid disasters is much more difficult than designing and building the everyday marvels of our modern world. /s
Expect to see Paleoworld right next to ‘Scientific America’ in the tabloid racks at the supermarket check out stands soon!
You forgot the Big Bang! The king of all desk jockey, empirically null science.
Hi Jim,
the only real difference between a “Engineer” and a “Scientist” is that Engineers are actually accountable for the results they produce (and liable in case something goes wrong, depending on where you live :-).
oh,
and the results are generally useful in the real world,
That reminds me of a Mark Twain quite
“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such trifling investment of facts”.� Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
According to largeigneousprovinces.org, the Siberian events are not impressive in either volume or duration by Phanerozoic standards. Approximately .66m cubic kilometers per year over 7 million years. For comparison, the Mesozoic events averaged 2m cubic kilometers per year over 50 million years with no major extinctions.
The size of an extinction need not correlate with the size of the event that caused it. In fact, large extinctions can – in principle – happen with little or no external perturbation.
This is the conclusion reached by considering an ecosystem such as the world 🌎 as a chaotic network. In his excellent book “Deep Simplicity”, John Gribben showed that a multitude of species linked in a chaotic network can respond highly variably to extinction of one or two species. In some cases no further extinctions occur. Sometimes one extinction could trigger a series of extinctions. The “trademark” of a chaotic/nonlinear system is the appearance of log-log distribution of the magnitude of events. Small events very common, big events rare, very big events exceedingly rare according to a straight line relationship when both axes are log.
Species extinctions could be like this if ecosystems were chaotic networks. The same magnitude of perturbation might cause either one or two extinctions, or a hundred, or ten thousand. The sensitivity of the ecosystem might vary with system parameters such as the slowly changing continental configuration.
Thus my suspicion is that the earth has during the Phanerozoic (half billion year history of multicellular life) been subjected to hundreds of extinction-causing catastrophes. But the extent of mass extinctions is not necessarily in proportion to the size of the perturbing events. The biggest extinctions may have been caused by perturbations that were not exceptional. The chaotic network paradigm even allows a large, or even mass extinction, to result spontaneously from no perturbation at all.
gymnosperm
The size of an extinction event does not necessarily correlate with the magnitude of a catastrophic impact on earth’s ecosystem. That is a conclusion from considering a multitude of species in an ecosystem as a chaotic network.
John Gribben, in his excellent book “Deep Simplicity”, showed that if living species in an ecosystem operate as a chaotic network, then extinction events will follow a characteristic log-log relationship. Very frequent small extinctions, rare large extinction events and exceedingly rare mass extinctions. A plot of the log of the scale of an extinction event against the log of the frequency of such events will be a straight line. This is characteristic of fractal systems and indicate the operation of chaotic-nonlinear dynamics.
What I therefore suspect is that earth has been subject to hundreds of perturbations such as asteriod impacts and large volcanic events, or violent continental collisions or tearings apart. Each of these causes some extinctions, and the biggest mass extinctions such as the Permian-Triassic, are not necessarily caused by the biggest perturbations.
In fact, the chaotic network predicts that extinctions, large extinctions and even mass extinctions can, very rarely, occur spontaneously with no outside perturbations.
The scientific community when looking at complex systems such as climate and living ecosystems needs to move away from a “deus-ex-machina” way of thinking that every phenomenon much have directly proportional external causation, and recognise the powerful chaotic dynamics that can cause a system to change itself profoundly with little or no external provocation.
You argue essentially a quantum theory biological of causation, as if the true causes of mass extinctions are unknowable, like the exact position of an electron. I disagree.
We can navigate to the moon, or any other planet in our solar system (except Mercury) with deus- x-machina mechanics.
In my opinion, quantum inexplicability does not apply of the scale of mass extinctions, or climate. We can know these things, but it will not be easy for us.
This is not about inexplicability. Its about internal dynamics and the solidly established phenomenon of nonlinear pattern formation and chaos which science is continually forgetting, 50-blind-dates-style. It’s a fundamental piece of understanding of the universe which for some reason just can’t take root in the scientific community. If must offend some powerful element of socio-psychology. Maybe one has to be autistic to understand it.
It’s quite easy to visualise. Consider a species going extinct. Sometimes this will not affect others all that much, perhaps just reduce competition. But what if the departed species is a major food item for another species? That species will also go extinct. Other species may have interactions with both species causing them to go extinct. Occasionally one extinction can lead to a large chain of extinctions. However results of perturbations are modified by adaptation of the network, making it more resilient.
Chaotic hard-to-predict-ness is not analagous in any way to Heisenberg uncertainty or superposition of simultaneous waveforms and entanglement.
In a chaotic network every change between two connected elements affects all other connections to a greater or lesser extent. The log-log maths that emerge from it are quite deterministic – it can be shown on an Excel spreadsheet.
Sorry for repeat post – thought the first one had disappeared but not
As limited as the science is at this point, the extinctions might as well have been caused by carbon taxes imposed on the victims.
And the attendant HCl and SO2 were no big deal after all that CO2.
I am sure this post is an April fools day joke.
Calling Bill Illis – come and shes some light on this – you have previously shown graphs of cooling rather than warming at the P-T double headed extinction event.
OH MY GOD WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!
In other news,
OH MY GOD WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!
Paper is patient and computer panels are also there. Do you know how many stars stand at the great heavenly tent, the good Lord God has counted them so that not a single one is missing. Hopefully, he also counted the earth and she is not the devils. Notwithstanding the crap that is poured down on paper and computer panels.
Even stopped clocks get it right once in a while. In this case Science Daily has the astonishing privilege of flatly contradicting Doc Wadhams regarding the cause of the Permian extinction. A group of Swiss researchers have found that It was COLD that did the damage.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170306091927.htm
The headline reads:
“Cold extermination: One of greatest mass extinctions was due to an ice age and not to Earth’s warming”
The original citation is:
Björn Baresel, Hugo Bucher, Borhan Bagherpour, Morgane Brosse, Kuang Guodun, Urs Schaltegger. Timing of global regression and microbial bloom linked with the Permian-Triassic boundary mass extinction: implications for driving mechanisms. Scientific Reports, 2017; 7: 43630 DOI: 10.1038/srep43630
too late, the science is settled…
The paper(s) are available online, see below.
This is an utterly wretched paper that should never have made it through peer review. Just consider this statement:
“Considering the global warming potential of both CO2 and CH4, the Global Mean Air Temperature (GMAT) may have varied from 29 to 34°C, which correspond well to within several degrees to water temperatures recorded by tropical end Permian shallow-water brachiopods from northern Italy (Brand et al., 2012) and Tibet (Garbelli et al., 2015).”
Today tropical surface water temperatures usually range in the 25-32 degree temperature range, while GMAT is about 15 degrees, but in the late Permian they are supposed to have been equal? I would dearly like to know how a climate system without any temperature difference between tropics and polar areas is supposed to work.
Also if you take the trouble to dig into the data (Table 1-2) you find that the central postulate of the paper, that the CO2/CH4 ratio of the atmosphere is reflected in gas inclusions in brachiopod shells is pure nonsense. The CO2/CH4 ratio for modern shells varies from 1.1 to 390 and as a matter of fact all the measured gas ratios vary wildly with no discernable relation to atmospheric ratios, N2 for example from 0.1 % to 3.7 % (compared to 78 % in the atmosphere).
The Late Permian ratios oddly enough are rather more stable (but overlapped by the modern ones), suggesting that diagenetic factors are at work, evening things out.
Manic self citationing is, as always, a warning sign (“Brand et al 2012” is cited 18(!) times in 14 pages).
By the way the photograph at the top with the text about the P/Tr regression and probable glaciation is a hold-over from a few weeks ago when two very careful papers argued for a “short sharp” volcano-induced glaciation exactly at the extinction level as the killer mechanism. They are well worth reading, though quite technical:
http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:90970
http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:92433
It is worth noting that all the analysed brachiopod shells are actually from before the extinction interval for this very reason. The regression means that there are virtually no shallow-water deposits known from the extinction interval.
+1
The Swiss paper has a number of interesting points. However the glacial event was I suspect either simply a contributing factor or even irrelevant. The primary problem with all land-based “causes” to the Permian extinction is that it was most extensive in the oceans (90% of marine genera IIRC). It was bad on land, but significantly less so. That leaves you with the question of what kind of event or process could have a significantly greater effect on the oceans than on dry land. No “climatic” explanation short of extended global cloud cover causing primary production to collapse seems feasible. I feel reasonably confident that primary production collapse was the “cause” of the extinction. CO2 was scant, comparable to the present, and the planet was cold, also similar to the present. But even so, how did the oceans happen to take the brunt?
Apparently these alleged “scientists” didn’t bother to study the Permian-Triassic MEE before presuming to write about it.
The mass extinctions occurred due to global cooling, not global warming.
Amusing that this UPI report uses the same graphic:
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2017/03/06/Ice-age-not-warming-explains-Permian-Triassic-extinction-event/6871488815458/
Yet another pontification on the Permian-Triassic extinction…….it will keep geoscientists busy for centuries
Think of all those research grants
Currently the applications will all be worded something like….. “A new perspective on the P-T extinction…and its relevance to current climate change”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event