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arclein

No one knows exactly how much Earth's climate will warm due to carbon emissions, but a new study this week suggests scientists' best predictions about global warming might be incorrect. The study, which appears in Nature Geoscience, found that climate models explain only about half of the heating that occurred during a well-documented period of rapid global warming in Earth's ancient past. The study, which was published online today, contains an analysis of published records from a period of rapid climatic warming about 55 million years ago known as the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum, or PETM.

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arclein

That now brings up another issue. A previous post on the Antarctic ice core, established that every 100,000 years or so we swing by Sirius and get bathed in ultraviolet radiation for a thousand years or so. The effect of this is to essentially melt out a large part of the ice caps and add perhaps another couple of hundred feet of sea level. The temperature will rise several degrees on average and that surplus must migrate north. Far more importantly huge amounts of water will find its way into the atmosphere introducing enough rain to establish tropical conditions almost to the poles themselves. It also means a massive expansion of Amazon tropical rainforest like conditions far to the north. The Mississippi valley, the Sahara, the Outback, the Middle East will all become saturated swamplands fully able to support their own populations of crocodiles.

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arclein

The head appeared over bushes ten feet tall. It was about the size of a beer keg and was shaped like that of a tapir, as if the snout was used for pulling things or taking hold of them. The eyes were small and dull and set in like those of an alligator. Despite the half dried mud we could see that the neck, which was very snakelike, only thicker in proportion, as rough knotted like an alligator's sides rather than his back.

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