Six Degrees?! Anyone know who Barry Bock is?

[robertpaulsen]

Climatologists are throwing out their most pessimistic forecasts, since reality has already outstripped them. More carbon dioxide is being discharged into the atmosphere now than even the worst-case scenario in last year's assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. http://www.ipcc.ch/ "We're seeing events predicted for the end of the 21st century happening already," Adelaide University's Barry Bock told http://www.theage.com.au/environment/no-return-fears-on-climate-change-20080611-2p53.html the Canberra conference Imagining the Real Life on a Greenhouse Earth, and anticipates a temperature rise of six degrees. Such a spike would mimic the conditions of the Permian Extinction of 251 million years ago, which came as close as anything has to eradicating all life on Earth. "Oxygen isotopes http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/scienceandnature/story/0,,2063401,00.html in rocks dating from the time suggest that temperatures rose by six degrees, perhaps because of an even bigger methane belch (the release of the ocean's methane hydrates http://www.ornl.gov/info/reporter/no16/methane.htm) than happened 200 million years later in the Eocene":

Sedimentary layers show that most of the world's plant cover was removed in a catastrophic bout of soil erosion. Rocks also show a "fungal spike" as plants and animals rotted in situ. Still more corpses were washed into the oceans, helping to turn them stagnant and anoxic. Deserts invaded central Europe, and may even have reached close to the Arctic Circle.

One scientific paper investigating "kill mechanisms" during the end-Permian suggests that methane hydrate explosions "could destroy terrestrial life almost entirely". Acting much like today's fuel-air explosives (or "vacuum bombs"), major oceanic methane eruptions could release energy equivalent to 10,000 times the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons.

http://rigint.blogspot.com/

[phantom power]

1. Does anybody remember what it was like to look forward to the future?

[Javaman]

2. yeah, remember those days?

it's a sad state of affairs when one waxed nostalgically over the past when thinking about a hopeful future.

[tom_paine]

4. Yes, and quite fondly. But those days are over and most likely are not coming back.

[pscot]

3. Methane firestorms raging across the tundra

destroying all life over hundreds of square miles; I wonder how Senator Inhofe will explain that away.

[Shoelace]

5. Inhofe will say that it's all natural and not human caused!

because "Global Warming is a hoax" in his infamous words. With his Koch Oil riches, he'll probably move to Paraguay with the Bushistas.

[Shoelace]

6. Prof. Barry Brook, bio (interesting guy)

Professor Barry Brook holds the Foundation Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change and is Director of the Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability at the University of Adelaide. He has published two books and over 120 peer-reviewed scientific papers, and regularly writes opinion pieces and popular articles for the media. In 2006, he was awarded the Australian Academy of Science Fenner Medal for distinguished research in biology and the Edgeworth David Medal by the Royal Society of New South Wales, and in 2007, the H.G. Andrewartha Medal by the Royal Society of South Australia and was listed by Cosmos as one of Australia's top 10 young scientists.

His area of expertise is climate change, global change biology, and the synergies between different human impacts on biodiversity. Specific topics include analytical and computer simulation modelling for risk assessment of climate change impacts, understanding the relevance of past extinctions to the present biodiversity crisis, tropical conservation, and wildlife population management.

His research methods focus primarily on the statistical analysis, interpretation and computational modelling of long-term data, and meta-analysis of large-scale databases. Scenarios for future impacts are modelled at global, regional and local scales, to provide a robust scientific underpinning for scientific management and government policy. His current work is aimed at determining the extent to which climate change might amplify other major anthropogenic threats to biodiversity (e.g., demographic and genetic stress, habitat degradation, introduced predator and competitor species), and developing new modelling systems which realistically captures this information and so can be used for the purposes of prediction, adaptation and ecosystem management and restoration.

http://www.adelaide.edu.au/directory/barry.brook