This article will make VJ's most infamous DFH cry

[^_^ 5,021]

Implicit in this article - climate change is normal.

Conclusion - The DFH's are lying to you.

Around 500 million years ago, animal life was almost non-existent on Earth. Today, biologists recognise up to 6 million animal species.

Humanity – ** sapiens – is just one among the 4,500 living mammal species; and some understanding of where we might be headed can be gleaned from where we’ve been – our evolutionary journey.

Our starting point as a group of two-footed, small-toothed, weakly-muscled, brainy “have-a-chat” apes is the ancestor we share with living chimpanzees some 7 million years ago.

(The two chimpanzee species are endangered, incidentally, because of the environmental destruction caused by us, their closest cousin).

Our evolutionary group – the hominins – diversified quickly after the split from the human-chimp ancestor, and through its multiple evolutionary iterations natural selection produced 25 or 30 two-footed ape species – undoubtedly with more to be found as anthropologists discover more fossils. All of these are now extinct, except us.

Those 7 million years represent only the last couple of minutes on a 24-hour clock of Earth’s 5 billion year history. The culling of 30 species to 1 in this short timeframe, or a more than 95% loss of hominin biodiversity, is worse than the worst mass extinction episode recorded in the fossil record: the Permian event some 250 million years ago.

But these mass events obscure the fact that, in the history of life, extinction has been a dominant theme, a continuous process. Evidence from the last 600 million years shows roughly one-third of existing animal species going extinct every 10 million years.

Seen in this context, the rate of extinction in the human evolutionary tree is striking, about three times faster than normal. This strongly suggests that we hominins are a highly extinction-prone mammal.

Why the dramatic loss of hominin diversity? What caused all these species to disappear? These are difficult and complex questions, but the answer may in part centre on the dramatic changes in climate that provided the backdrop for much of our evolution.

The last half million years or so in particular represent an episode of especially severe climate fluctuation, with intensely cold periods followed by warm phases, flip-flopping between the two on timescales of hundreds or thousands of years – in short, the worst bit of the 2.6 million-year Ice Age or Pleistocene Epoch.

The archaeological record of Europe suggests that vast areas were largely emptied of hominins during cold phases only to be recolonised during warm periods.

Hominins, pre-dating our own species, were living in Europe at latitudes as high as 53° north by 700,000 years ago.

The 53rd parallel runs from the United Kingdom east through the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Belarus, Russia, Kazakhstan, China (Inner Mongolia), United States (Alaska), Canada and Ireland.

Many places at this latitude today experience temperatures as low as -40° Celsius. But the climate at that time was Mediterranean in character. Soon after, the planet plunged into another cold phase lasting 100,000 years, with vast areas of Europe covered by ice.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-humans-extinction-proof.html

[Ban Hammer 13,491]

But these mass events obscure the fact that, in the history of life, extinction has been a dominant theme, a continuous process. Evidence from the last 600 million years shows roughly one-third of existing animal species going extinct every 10 million years.

but that's only because there wasn't hippies to save them then!

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

They were missing a tax on carbon.

[Darnell 8,479]

wots a DFH, and why is there an infamous one on VJ, what did he/she do to become so infamous, and should we be calling the cops or the coroner or the psychiatric sherriff?

[one...two...tree 2,762]

It is the rapid speed of climate change now that is threatening life on this planet as we know it. Idiots like to keep repeating ignorant statements like, "The climate always changes." Really? No sh!t. People's body weight changes constantly also, but see what happens to your health if you lost half your weight in a matter of days. For some, the concept and the consequences of Climate Change are either intangible or just beyond their comprehension. For them, they want simple results.

Here's a good video for the deniers....

Edited June 12, 2011 by 8TBVBN

[웃 910]

ATT is a fossil fuel company?