Paul Wignall is a paleo-mathemagician from the University of Leeds in England. He is a fanatic
volcanist and climate changer, although he has also kissed the hands of Luis Alvarez by
reinforcing that an asteroid did the Cretaceous. With influential volcanists like Paul endorsing
asteroids and old volcanists like Dewey dying of old age, the asteroidists will never again be
dislodged from the top of the mountain.
But Paul is primarily a Permian guy. He came up with a complex set of interrelated events to
explain the demise of the therapsids and pareiasaurs some 252 mya. Of course, as always,
catastrophists end up killing every living thing and then leave it up to God to reinvent the
species of plants and animals.
is AAA
The extinction occurred in at least two steps.
First there was a massive volcano eruption in Siberia
-- more like the opening of the Earth. This killed some animals, but its more lethal impact was its
short
term effect on the environment. The CO2 that the Siberian Traps eruptions produced created a
greenhouse. This raised the temperatures of the planet some 5°C, not enough to kill almost 90%
of
the species that existed at the time. However, the higher temperatures now triggered the release
of
methane buried underneath the sea beds. That raised the global temperatures another 5°C for a
total of 10°C. He was satisfied that 10°C was enough to fry practically all the animals on the
planet.
Extinction and, as all rock experts, he favors the gradual approach to extinction, which is a great
start. All Mass extinctions are preceded by a great number of background extinctions, therefore,
he's on the right path. It is when he introduces the volcanoes and plumes and earthquakes where
he messes it
up.
explains all extinctions gradually 10s of thousands of years with volcanoes bone a a a a
xxxxxxxxxxx aaaaaaaaa xxxxxxxxxxxxxx aaaaaaaa release of methane trapped beneath the
sea floor during warming increased the level of Carbon 12 in the atmosphere. "If you warm the
oceans a lot they will stagnate and lose oxygen" (anoxic) "The extinction in the oceans i due to
stagnation and loss of oxygen."
"It became so hot on land that the plants started to struggle... we see the direct effect of warmth
on
land causing the extinction of a lot of plants." Kill plants which absorb CO2 and you have a
greenhouse. It never dawned on Wignall that if you kill plants, you kill the source of food of the
animals that have
become accustomed to eating them for thousands if not million s of years. He drew the wrong
conclusion.
In his book 'The Worst of Times', Wignall reaches the conclusion that the Permian food chains
did not collapse because fish -- which he arbitrrily places at the top of the food chain -- survived
the ordeal...
"...it appears that fish suffered very few losses at the end of the Permian. This remarkable
survival is an underappreciated facet of the crisis. Fish are often the top predators in the food
chain, and the fact that they survived the Permo-Triassic crisis so well indicates that at no time
did the food chain collapse, despite evidence that the cirsis also struck the tiniest creatures at
the bottom of this chain."
Wignall merely shows why he is nothing more than a stamp collector and why he should leave
reasoning out extinction to people with more common sense and intelligence. Not only does he
start from a misconceived assumption that he learned by rote somewhere, but it should have
dawned on him
A
aPermian "The crisis seems to initially affect plants on land, There's a change in the composition
of the vegetation... We see a final loss of sort of many different plant species as well.... "
"we see the direct effect of warmth on land causing the extinction of a lot of plants." Paul Wignall
| Paul Wignall |
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