Global warming and El Nino, a possible new mesozoic era?
During the time the dinosaurs ruled the world, the average global temperature was much higher than today and the water lever was alot higher, due to human activities and natural phenomina causing climate change like El Nino, could it be possible that we are involuntarilly bringing back the mesozoic era? Reptiles have outlived the dinosaurs and are ancestors to them and will outlive us even, it seems that the way things are going it is going to be more difficult to live in the harsh climate as a human than that of reptiles, they are more resiliant to climate change than we are.
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I have also noticed reports of crocodiles getting much larger recently, like gustav and Brutus being over 20 feet long, in due time even larger specimens may be found, eventually over a few decades in the future being as large as Deinosuchus or even Sarchosuchus!
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I doubt it. Oxygen levels remain way too low, and are much lower than were in the time of the dinosaurs.
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mr_bigmouth_502
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This is precisely the reason why we don't have things like giant bugs or anything else like that anymore.
The mean O2 didn't explode until the end of the Cretaceous, the Jurassic had only slightly higher O2 than now, and the Triassic has only about 4/5 the free oxygen we have now. All three periods supported giant reptiles. Reptilian (possibly some early amphibian) lungs were the first "modern" efficient lungs, therefore oxygen intake shouldn't be too drastically different than mammals of comparable size. Now giant insects, like during the Carboniferous, would need extra oxygen since they still rely on the old "book lung" model.
As for climate change, mammals are poorly adapted to hot environments. Having an active heat regulation system tends to "overheat" in higher temperatures because it's more costly to cool than it is to heat from an energy/resource standpoint. To heat up, a mammal merely needs to burn calories through movement, to cool down the body must release water as a coolant which is almost as costly calorie wise and also costs the water.
Animal evolution was my special interest from about 5-9 years old. I used to love this stuff until I realized we were on the path back to that era...
The future mesozoic era revived once again! Large crocodiles, giant lizards, snakes and birds starting to grow limbs and teeth, muahaha!!
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Unlikely. We are still in an ice age- defined as a period where there are permanent ice caps and glaciers. We could , at best, delay the return to a glacial maximum period (which would otherwise occur within the next 50,000 years at most). There are factors involved that would make it hard to end the ice age and return to cretaceous and Jurassic-like climates. It's thought that ice ages (as opposed to glacial maximums) occur when either there are large landmasses on the poles (Antarctica) or there are landlocked oceans near the poles (like the Arctic ocean). These configurations create large amounts of ice and ice reflects sunlight. Global warming has reduced ice in the Arctic, but the Antarctic is still way too cold to have seen any significant melting. Back in the dinosaur days- the configuration of the continents was different than it is today- with no landlocked oceans or continents at the poles. The onset of the current ice age was about the same time as when the present continental distribution was reached. We'd need to put out a lot more greenhouse gases to counteract this and completely get rid of all permanent ice.
As for El Nino- El Nino cannot lead to long term warming. There is usually an increase in global temperature after and during El Nino, but this goes away within the following year. So the 2015-2016 El Nino ended up being "very strong" and the global temperature anomalies that we are seeing now is unprecedented, but the effect of the El Nino will be gone by 2017. ENSO causes fluctuation about the main global warming trend, rather than simply contributing to it.
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I don't know, didn't humans survive the Ice Age while mammoths and sabre toothed tigers went extinct?
It's debatable whether or not humans are to blame for that, since the climate was changing and there were less plants for the mammoths, which meant less meat for the sabre toothed tigers. Prey controls the predator!(something I read at the wildlife park)