
Ancient life awakens amid thawing ice caps and permafrost - pseudolus
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/ancient-life-awakens-amid-thawing-ice-caps-and-permafrost/2019/07/05/335281f8-7108-11e9-9f06-5fc2ee80027a_story.html
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simonblack
The problem is not whether there is global warming or cooling per se, the
problem is in the RATE of warming or cooling.

Changes that would normally take hundreds of years and allow enough time for
gentle, imperceptible migrations are taking mere decades and causing problems
with thousands wanting to migrate daily.

Any area on Earth can cope with one or two families leaving or arriving every
year. But very few places can cope with hundreds of thousands of people
arriving or departing every year.

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8bitsrule
Fascinating.

Not surprised by the plant life, but the article surprised me when it
mentioned that nematodes (typically 0.1mm to 2.5mm worms) up to 40,000 years
old had 'awakened'. Which makes (at least one of) them the oldest living
individual animals [sic] ever discovered.

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want2know
These findings make the discussions about climate change very difficult.
Because now we have 'proof' that the icecaps were not there a long time ago.

The same applies to glaciers. Some melt away exposing ancient forests.

So I think the whole climate change discussion should be about the influence
of humans on the speed of the change. We know climate was different in our
history. But when the climate changes too fast we can't prepare for it.

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api
As George Carlin famously quipped, it's not about saving the Earth. The Earth
will be fine. We on the other hand may be fucked.

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DennisP
He's right, if your definition of "fine" includes things like the Permian mass
extinction.

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DennisP
...Evidently some people here think it's inconceivable that we could be
replicating the Permian extinction. Here's a recent MIT study supporting that
claim.

[http://news.mit.edu/2019/carbon-threshold-mass-
extinction-07...](http://news.mit.edu/2019/carbon-threshold-mass-
extinction-0708)

