Real Global Temperature Trend, p24 – Paleoclimate tells we may have 3 degrees additional warming in pipeline at current CO2 concentration!

Either the entire world is set to experience dramatic additional warming once we stabilise at the current (400+ ppm) CO2 concentration – or we are still dramatically underestimating the local climate sensitivity of the Arctic – a region that might … Continue reading

Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum caused by thawing permafrost?

In a new study reported in Nature, climate scientist Rob DeConto of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and colleagues elsewhere propose a simple new mechanism to explain the source of carbon that fed a series of extreme warming events about 55 million years ago, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), and a sequence of similar, smaller warming events afterward.

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Metastudy shows current climate change makes flora and fauna shrink

The paleoclimatic record shows it has happened before – and now two well-read researchers illustrate it is already happening again: species across life’s kingdoms are decreasing in size, due to warming, droughts and acidification. It’s a sign ecology is feeling … Continue reading

Ongoing paleo study may help tune CO2 climate sensitivity

Here on Bitsofscience.org we’ve discussed the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) – that sudden CO2 and methane-induced peak climate warming (or ‘hyperthermal’) 55.8 million years ago of around 6 degrees over 20,000 years – on several occasions, because it offers an … Continue reading

Oceans to enter Holocene Mass Extinction

The cumulative effect of environmental threats like climate change, ocean acidification and overfishing, brings the world’s interconnected ocean close to a phase of extinction of marine species that is ‘globally significant’ and unprecedented in human history, an international panel of … Continue reading

Current CO2 rise 10 times as fast as PETM climate disaster

For the layman paleoclimatology is ‘proof’ that any climate change is natural. For educated thinkers the lessons from the long ago contain the biggest warnings for the current artificially created state of our planet.

No evidence bacteria ate methane at end of Snowball Earth

Same story as yesterday, but now 635 million years earlier. This time again no evidence can be found that it were microbes that ate climate-disrupting amounts of methane, at the end of the Marinoan ice age, better known as ‘Snowball … Continue reading