Weirdly, there was actually a period of history where this was normal.
During the Carboniferous period 300 million years ago trees just fell over and lay there because nothing had evolved to decay them yet.
During the Carboniferous period 300 million years ago trees just fell over and lay there because nothing had evolved to decay them yet.
"""The delayed fungal evolution hypothesis is controversial, however, and has been challenged by other researchers, who conclude that a combination of vast depositional systems present on the continents during the formation of Pangaea and widespread humid, tropical conditions were responsible for the high rate of coal formation."""
It's interesting to think just how much went on before trees with lignin showed up. Flowers are also relatively recent - 150mya.
Will we have to develop antibacterial plastics to combat this for stuff we don’t want eaten, yet?
https://text.npr.org/2023/06/01/1178876648/tupperware-busine...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/14/bugs-acr...
So maybe extinctions after extinctions for animals that are visible to us, and then bunch of new superbugs.
* there is evidence for partial lignin breakdown in existing deposits, so we know it was a thing back then
* if it were just lignin breakdown, then we'd see orders of magnitude more deposits. that is, if you look at the per year deposit rate, you'll see only a small fraction of lignin being deposited.
* a large fraction of deposits doesn't even contain lignin, often below or above deposits with lignin, but without there being a different rate of depositions between them.
(copying my earlier comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34654837 )
"Before trees grew wood that was unable to rot and so became coal but after fungus came now wood is ruined and it's impossible to make coal again."
Understanding that coal formation is a reversible process and that a new agent didn't permanently ruin the process, is a sigh of relief.
And climate scientists are very smart and have worked out how much the added co2 amplified the original warming, and have been able to work out how much warming you would get by doubling co2 levels, which appears to be around 3 degrees C.
Basically the amount of co2 that the ocean can have dissolved in it is a function of temperature and the relative co2 concentration of the air. When the temperature of the water increases it can hold less co2. Just like when soda gets warm and isn’t pressurized, it gets flat.
What is your point exactly?
Strictly speaking that's not true. Listen man I don't really want to hold your hand and walk you through this.
Maybe you should actually read some of those studies?
[https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2013.009...]
Some of the recent ones (< 1 million years), co2 seems likely to be a feedback, not a forcing method - but there have been many times in the past where that is not a plausible explanation at all, with levels in the 2000 ppm range.