Ice bubbles reveal biggest rise in CO2 for 800,000 years

[Excel1]

Thursday September 7, 2006
By Steve Connor

 
LONDON - Britain has been colonised at least eight times over the past 700,000 years and on seven of these occasions the entire human population was wiped out by intensely cold winters.
 
This is one of the main conclusions of a five-year investigation into the prehistoric sites of Britain which has shown that the last colonisation occurred less than 12,000 years ago - making Britain a younger country than Australia, which has been continuously inhabited for at least 50,000 years.
 
"Britain had to be repopulated over and over again. Completely new people had to come back, sometimes with a gap of 100,000 years between these occupations," said Professor Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London.
 
"Early Britons had to cope with these changes of climate. Often they couldn't and they died out completely. Britain and the British people today are new arrivals. We're products of only the last 12,000 years," Stringer said.
 
Studies of several prehistoric sites have revealed that the early human inhabitants of Britain lived alongside large mammals such as elephants, mammoths, rhinos and hippos as well as fierce carnivores such as hyaenas and scimitar-toothed cats.
 
 Over the past 800,000 years the climate has fluctuated widely from being semi-tropical to the freezing cold of an ice age.
 
On seven occasions the winters became extremely cold with average temperatures plummeting to well below freezing.
 
There was a severe cold spell between 12,000 and 15,000 years ago that seems to have wiped out all humans who lived here. Then there was an eighth wave of colonisers who crossed from the continent over a land bridge that connected Britain to the mainland.
 
"It looks like there have been eight separate colonisation events that we can record and seven of those were unsuccessful so it is only the one in the present interglacial that is a successful one that leads through to the present day," Stringer said.
 
There was one particularly cold period that seemed to have prevented people from living in Britain for about 40,000 years.
 
"We're talking about little windows of time when the climate was good enough for them to survive here, until we get to the late part of the story," he said.
 
At Lynford in East Anglia scientists have found evidence that Neanderthals lived in Britain and managed to cope with very cold winters with temperatures of minus -10C.
 
"The interesting thing is how were they surviving at Lynford. There are no trees there so the wind-chill factor alone must have been quite severe. They must have had shelters and some form of clothing," Stringer said.
 
However, this population was eventually wiped out. Ultimately, the Neanderthals were replaced by anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens, who became the ancestors of today's Britons.
 
- INDEPENDENT

Neaderthal man sure was a heavy polluter, where was neanderthal-Al Gore when all this was going on?

[storch]

Originally posted by Excel1
Neaderthal man sure was a heavy polluter, where was neanderthal-Al Gore when all this was going on?

no doubt he was likely to be grooming his neanderthal beard and preparing to teach at a neanderthal institute of higher learning.

[Angus]

Oh my, interesting thread.
Here's a "wringing" cookie for you.
A Boeing 747 with maximum fuel load and 400 passengers, burning up every gallon in the tanks gives roughly 450 litres per passenger.
(link http://www.boeing.com/commercial/747family/pf/pf_classics.html)
That is not the best available setup of course, but not totally the worst (which would be 1 passenger )
So, how far do you get on 450 litres? In my car some 4500 kilometres actually. And a Boeing on full load? 10.000 probably.
But these numbers are a bit...off.

Here is the main thing. It's not all about just CARS. It's about human effect on global warming.
It doesn't really matter how we burn fossil fuel, it's the fact that we do it.
It's the fact that we are causing changes.

Like I said before, funny twists there are to this thread, blowing up all the smoke about airplanes. Doh.

[Angus]

Oh, here's a good linkie:

http://www.kvikmynd.is/video.asp?land=&offset=&id=2465

[Excel1]

Are we at war with aliens? cause I swear I just saw an anti human race propaganda film in that link you posted Angus

[Angus]

Hehehhrrr.
I'll look into that

More planet-human data inbound.

[lazs2]

funny twists?  

not one of you handwringers has told us yet how many seconds we can take off the doom of global warming by living in tents.

Not one of you has said that the global warming trend will stop or how much it will slow or.... even if we might be headed for a global cooling trend.

Do you really think we can control the sun and volcanoes and such?

you just want to appear to be "doing something"  yet... you see nothing wrong with pleasure jaunts in jets.... useless travel to "meet new people"

most environmentalists are like that... they only want to limit things that others do.  oh... and get grant money and make useless objects and make the government force people to buy em.

They are no different than the snake oil salesmen of old.

lazs

[Angus]

Strawman.
Diversions.
Twists.

Main issue is that the PART in global warming caused by humans is indeed something that the humans CAN do something about.

It has not much to do with tents (a bit more with bicycles perhaps, hehe),  and there is nothing we can do about volcanoes or the Sun. But our PART is there, and it's a composition of everything.
Big impact is the utter quality of life, which includes very much of fossile burning for consumption and lifestyle (pleasure jaunts in fossile fuelled vehicles included), then as well how far we push nature (as through agriculture) to make our life cheaper and easier.

As for your concern about an iceage, there have been many. They did not kill all primates on the planet, which is unlike the point-of-no-return which we are being warned about. That "doomsday" setup at large would wipe out just about all lifeforms on the planet for good.

[Angus]

And wringing...yes.
The French told the British, that if France was lost to Hitler, England had no point in fighting further. They would have their necks wringed like a chicken.
After the BoB, Winston Churchill said something like "Some neck. Some Chicken".
So, is there a point in fighting a problem, or should that particular French attitude prevail?

[Suave]

I believe that it is in the human's best interest to try to reduce activity that alters the composition of the earth's atmosphere.

Does anybody know what happens when we alter a planet's atmosphere?

No.

Does anybody suppose that it would be an improvement for the existing flora and fuana?

Me either.

It's foolish to think that man doesn't alter the planet's atmosphere more than any other living thing on earth.
It's just as foolish to think that we can continue proliferating without altering the composition of the sky.

For this virus called life, man is it's champion vector, and best hope of spreading it's infection to other planets, other solar systems, other galaxies.

Do not let humans who would trade the future of their seed for earthly fortunes impose the same fate on our own more worthy complex protien strands.

Stupid is an adverb, extinction has allways been stupidity's reward.

[lukster]

If you believe that evolution has wrought a good thing then why denounce it's natural continuation?

[Angus]

Since we all know that we're going to die one day, why not end it now?
After all, it's going to happen in a most natural way.
Dohhh

[Suave]

Originally posted by lukster
If you believe that evolution has wrought a good thing then why denounce it's natural continuation?

There are no good or bad in evolution or nature. There is only survivors and forgotten.

[lukster]

Originally posted by Angus
Since we all know that we're going to die one day, why not end it now?
After all, it's going to happen in a most natural way.
Dohhh

Suicide is the interruption of the natural process.

BTW, didn't we introduce more of these greenhouse gasses when panicked over the receding ozone layer? Maybe we should have looked before we leapt?

[Angus]

I guess you are referring to the extra energy needed in many cooling systems after Freon 12 was banned? (For cooling and freezing more energy is needed for the todays allowed materials)

Anyway, the Ozon layer is recovering, which could be an important lesson for the fight with greenhouse effect.
Problem was recognized, countered, and is getting less.