Now that was funny. My eyes skipped the first “not”… and my fingers added the redundant “not”.
My correction, being erroneous, has now been corrected!
All of what you say is true … but not relevant to the current situation.
All the geology being cited is the current thinking of Climate Scientists…
The only thing the Creationists added was “… and God did that on purpose!..”
The large scale collisions pale in comparison to the Himalayas. When the Earth oscillated between 180 and 280 ppm, the Earth was in one of the unusual periods of low CO2.
The usual location for the Florida peninsula is: UNDER the water … not ABOVE it.
I’ll see if I can find the chart that shows CO2 levels for millions of years prior to the current 1-million year bracket.
Oh, if you want to prove your point… try a citation or an illustration … that would make your crankiness easier to bear.
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We are talking past each other. I am not disputing that the Himalayas may have an effect on the global climate. I am also not disputing that current CO2 levels are low compared to many other periods in Earth history.
Whay I am disputing is that the Himalayas are unique in terms of scale - other orogens categorically do NOT pale in comparison - and I did provide references for this in my very first post (hence my crankiness).
I also dispute that the current low CO2 levels are a requirement for human life and civilisation to come into existence - precisely because earlier periods with higher CO2 levels accommodated advanced forms of life as well, so there doesn’t seem to be a particular strong correlation here. If dinosaurs can thrive in 2000 ppm CO2 levels, why couldn’t humans? (To be clear, I am not taking a position here on global warming and the effects of that on the current human civilisation - that is an issue entirely outwith the scope of Mr. Ross’s article and my response). The claim is entirely unsupported.
I fail to see what the sea level in Florida has to do with anything, sorry. There was plenty of land surface in the Mesozoic, even if sea levels were considerably higher than today. So what?
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I would think that similar plateaus created early in Earth’s history could have been eroded over those long time periods. This is why the Rocky mountains are higher than the Appalachians.
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I guess part of the communication problem is that I’m quite used to Creationists over-stating the nature of reality to make their points in “fine-tuning”.
While I agree with you that humans can survive high levels of heat … just like dinosaurs did … but you haven’t developed the skills that Creationists have in “selling” their points.
22 minutes ago, you wrote this:
You don’t say what you think is advanced life.
You don’t say how warm it got.
And you don’t say how long before the Quatenary.
And so I ignored your objections with a “meh”.
And frankly, you still haven’t really “sold” your objections… I just happen to have a better idea of what you mean.
The key here is that I’m more interested in what God is going to do with our current Human Civilization, and not so much focused on our ability to have produced a similarly impressive civilization on a much hotter Earth. Yes, of course we could have.
And now we are going to have Creationists talking about how “fine tuned” their autumn foliage has become for human enjoyment!
But for once … it’s nice to see them throw their wild exaggerations around in a way that might get Creationists to spend more time thinking about climate!
Why do I need to ‘sell’ my objections? I simply object to the lack of references and supporting data for the claims made by Mr. Ross in his article. I do know enough of geology to spot exaggerations and unsupported assertions like the ones I mentioned from the article, and I speak out to highlight them. There is no burden of proof on me - I am not making these claims.
In other words, I am waiting for someone (preferably the author of the article) to demonstrate that
- the Himalayas are unique in geological history in terms of size;
- For glaciations to occur, mountain ranges of the size of the Himalayas are required;
- Glaciations and interglacials are a requirement for humans and human civilisation to develop.
If that gets done I might change my mind and consider the article ‘nice’, or even ‘really good’.
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You don’t see the irony of the sentences above?
You object to the lack of citations/evidence… and you lay down a carpet bomb of objections without any citations/evidence.
In fact, I’ve provided more evidence FOR YOU than you do, while the article has at least a few footnotes that don’t come from Ross …
Endnotes
- About 100 million years ago the Indian subcontinent separated from Madagascar and, 75 million years ago, began racing northward toward Asia at the astoundingly rapid velocity of 20 centimeters (8 inches) per year. Geophysicists consider 4 centimeters per year to be especially rapid.
- Hugh Ross, Improbable Planet (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2016), 203–4.
- T. Su et al., “No High Tibetan Plateau until the Neogene,” Science Advances 5 (March 6, 2019), id. eaav2189, doi:10.1126/sciadv.aav2189.
- Chengshan Wang et al., “Outward-Growth of the Tibetan Plateau during the Cenozoic: A Review,” Tectonophysics 621 (May 7, 2014): 1–43, doi:10.1016/j.tecto.2014.01.036; Joel E. Saylor et al., “Topographic Growth of the Jishi Shan and Its Impact on Basin and Hydrology Evolution, NE Tibetan Plateau,” Basin Research 30, no. 3 (June 2018): 544–63, doi:10.1111/bre.12264; Xiao-Dian Jiang and Zheng-Xiang Li, “Seismic Reflection Data Support Episodic and Simultaneous Growth of the Tibetan Plateau Since 25 Myr,” Nature Communications 5 (November 2014): id. 5453, doi:10.1038/ncomms6453.
- Ross, Improbable Planet, 209–212.
Forgive me if my comment here beats on any dead horses. Josh asked if I (as a geologist) had anything to say about the RTB statement of the current Asia-India collision being the most dramatic tectonic event in Earth history. If the statement had simply said it was “ONE OF the most dramatic,” it would have been sufficient for the point and harder to quibble with. In terms of human existence, it is arguably the most influential to human development, though I would not try to defend it as entirely unique in the full 4.5 billion year history (e.g. The earlier collision between Africa/Europe and the Americas produced a phenomenal multi-continental range.)
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Please stop saying that I haven’t provided citations/evidence - in my first post I gave 3 (out of several I quickly found) that clearly demonstrate that the Himalaya orogeny is not unique in terms of size. So please stop saying this or I will end this conversation on the basis of bad faith.
Secondly, your evidence does not touch materially on the points I object to, which I handily summarised in my post immedately above yours. Yes, you posted a graph, but it does not add any support to the claims in Mr. Ross’s article.
Thirdly, there are references in the article, but they do not support the specific claims I object to. They simply support some basic facts about the Himalayas that are not under dispute.
Now, frankly all this is a total waste of time and effort. You bring in one irrelevant objection after another, you barely respond to my responses (again, what is relevant about Florida being under water most of the time?), and you ignore the simple core of my objections to the article - the fact that the specified claims are unsupported. Why is that so hard to admit?
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AHHH… now I see, @faded_Glory…
THREE (3) citations… with links no doubt.
And now we can see why I didn’t notice them. And this is why I impugned your salesmanship. I didn’t even realize you had links.
Look, Faded… you don’t have to sell anything you don’t want to sell. And I’m sure it must be neat to add links to a single word (or even a single letter) … I can tell you right now I don’t know how to do what you did there. But the difference between you and me is I try to make my links as obvious as possible. You, on the other hand, make them really subtle… almost invisible.
If you use pictures… it catches more attention than links.
If you use pictures WITH LINKs, you capture an awful lot of attention.
If you use pictures WITH LINKS and a quote … you’ve clobbered the other view with about all the visual energy that this platform can muster.
OR… you can be really subtle and then spend a few extra posts explaining what you did… and I still don’t know the facts of what you did.
But remember … you aren’t obligated to “sell” your pitch at all. But don’t be shocked if nobody notices how perfect your objections are (in theory).
And if someone “copies your narrative” to put into another media, or into another thread… they have ZIP … unless they were careful to preserve the links that you have embedded.
Communication is a two-way street. And you and I probably got off on the wrong foot because I thought you were one of these Global Warming Denialist fellows.
So I apologize for jumping to a conclusion … and I’m sure we’ll do better in the future.
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The Rockies are not in fact a continental suture belt. But there are plenty more ranges that are, and again, they’re sutures involving bigger entities than India. The Urals between Baltica and Asia, the Southern Appalachians/Atlas between North America and Africa, the suture that formed Laurasia (already mentioned), the suture between east and west Asia, The ancient assembly of Gondwana that’s now partly in South America, partly in Africa, and so on. Each of these would reasonably have been as large as or larger than the recent one we see as the Himalayas. Did Ross think about any of these at all, or did he just pull a claim out of nowhere?
Ross pulls his claim from climate science folks who have been recently drawing attention to the India/Asia collision.
There’s some YouTube videos out there by academics talking about it… mostly emphasizing the combination of length x height … and the surface area it creates for Carbon-fixing carbonates.
Most of the videos that I’ve accessed talk about the these 3 items in progression:
- India collides with Asia, emptying an existing seabed of water;
- the closing of the straights between North and South America
(forming north/south circulation from the equator to both polar areas); - the continued progression of the India/Asia contact thrusting more and more
land area up into the atmosphere.
With the progression of these 3 processes, the Earth gets cooler and cooler, and
yet more efficient in bringing equatorial warmth to the poles, the Earth reaches a
point where a small amount of increased CO2, either more or less, is able to
raise up, or melt away, large glacial formations in North America (and elsewhere).
As I’ve mentioned in earlier postings, eight (8) times the CO2 levels have swung
from 180 ppm to 280 ppm, and then back to 180 ppm… each time, the planet
went from inter-glaciation to glaciation.
But the pendulum has been drowned out by achieving CO2 concentrations of
400 ppm and more for the forseeable future.
I like the image above because:
- it mentions the India/Asia collision and the Panama;
- but it also mentions changes in the Circumpolar current that I had not heard much about;
- as well as the progression of ice in the Antarctic, followed - - eventually - - by ice in the
Arctic as well. - Even with all this “busy-ness” of the planet, it is not until the last “notch” in the timeline,
the most recent million years, that we achieve a pendulum like swing of glaciations…
8 of them in 800,000 years!
Can you imagine being a happy-go-lucky population of reptiles… enjoying the fruits of good long naps… when all of a sudden, things start “getting real” with a new spate of glaciation every time things start getting comfortable!
Since we can be reasonably certain (barring some titanic volcanic activity that darkens the skies) that the current CO2 levels will not permit another glaciation until we figure out how to control a whole planet’s atmosphere, we may find it very difficult to ever want to return to a planet with absolutely no regard to golf courses every 100,000 years!
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Where is the claim made that this collision is the largest in earth history? What is the basis for that claim?
And you’d be right; there are actually two events for the Rockies. (I’ve been doing lots of hiking with geologist friends lately.)
The Himalayas (if you’re an American, you’re probably pronouncing it wrong) are just the newest.
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I couldn’t tell ya. I didn’t find the explanation in that claim in either of 2 youtube videos I watched.
But I suppose there aren’t that many choices available to look at after the Dino-Killing Asteroid came and went.
I think you will find that the claim is made by several academics scattered around the country.
It seems much less controversial than the earlier claim that an asteroid killed all the Dinosaurs.
Geology is not my thing.
Whatever do you mean by that?
Could you name one or two of them?
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The question is:
What changed on Earth that would make it able to alternate quickly between glaciation and inter-glacial periods?
It has to be something recent.
The India/Asian collision is suggested as the biggest and still ongoing…
This seems the best academics can offer at the moment.
You ask me which academics… i have to say i dont recognize their names…
Do what i did. Go to youtube and search:
Climate India Asia Collision
What you get is what I would get.
No, that isn’t the question. The question is whether, and based on what data, the collision of India and Asia is the biggest continental suture in earth history. I don’t know why you are unable to understand that.
Yes, and you don’t answer. Why? Would it have been so difficult?
So far I see nobody claiming that this was the biggest such event ever. What am I missing?
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