Humble author wins prestigious National Geographic award 26 February 06

Congratulations to Mark for winning the award!

Apologies if I am going back to something that was discussed a while ago (just saw somebody commented on what I wrote about it yesterday, though).

Norb had suggested that the Triassic showed that CO2 levels and high temperatures not always went together and anyway both were good for the planet (if only we could make the dinosaurs and other species that love it warm come back…).

Anyway, there is a very interesting article about the Triassic in this week’s New Scientist. I can recommend it! It states that the Triassic extinction event may have surpassed the Permian extinction in terms of the number of families that died out. It is still not certain what caused this mass extinction, but so far there is no evidence of a related asteroid impact. There is, however, some new evidence that it coincided with massive volcanic eruptions (splitting Pangea in two), a big spike in CO2 levels and a scenario not very different from what many think happened at the end of the Permian. Whilst many of us think of two massive global warming episodes in the distant past, this may well have been a third and similar one.

Almuth Ernsting

Keep up the good work, Mark.

Best,

D

I don’t know about the others, but I really think you deserve it anyway.

Keep it up and keep inspire us futher on!

Hope this big exposure leads to more & more exposure in a snowball effect.

Hope your SIX DEGREES comes out soon. I just read at http://www.climateark.org/articles/reader.asp?linkid=53034 “New scientific theory, hydrate hypothesis, suggests GW catastrophe.”

Hope all this publicity translates in to action, a boost to the anti-GW movement, and pulling back from the point of no return, before the ocean gets as hot as a hot tub (another article on ClimateArk a few days ago).

My daughter has had a NG subscription last Christmas, so we’ll be looking out for your profile later in the year. Well deserved! Keep carrying the banner forward!

all the best

Colin

You are a visionary; especially with the use of this blog to keep the conversation going after you had published High Tide.

Best wishes,

Peter

National Geographic is one of the best publications in the World.

I look forward to reading the articles they will write about you and your work in later issues.

Best Wishes,

Dan

Yes, a brilliant publication and congratulations Mark.

This month’s copy contains a fascinating article on the anticipated increase in the use of coal worldwide.

There are different laws of physics & such for each unique case. So, sometimes atmopheric CO2 & other GHGs cause GW & sometimes they do not. Sometimes gravity works, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes it’s reverse gravity.

But we never can predict when one of the billions of physics laws might kick in. So we simply have to wait, pump out as much CO2 as possible, and see what effect it might have.

This is known as “hind-sight science.” Then well after the extinction event we can be sure, or at least sort of sure, or maybe not sure at all it was or was not GHGs that caused GW this time and killed us off. Or whether it was only the GHGs emitted by nature, or whether it included those emitted by people. Because as we all know, GHGs emitted by people have differnt effects and properties than those emitted by nature.

I wonder if there will be a few bizzaro hind-sight scientists left to do this final analysis.