Mysterious network

Back in 1850, Italian paleontologist Giuseppe Meneghini found a peculiar fossil in the early Cambrian rocks of Sardinia.  It had a very distinctive appearance -- a set of what appeared to be tubes arranged in a network of perfect hexagons, regular as a honeycomb -- and Meneghini named it Paleodictyon, which means "early net."

The problem was, no one could quite figure out what it was.  There was speculation that it was the skeleton of a sea sponge, that it was some kind of filter-feeding trap laid down by peculiar giant single-celled organisms called xenophyophores, or that it was the tunnel network of some burrowing creature like a tube worm.  None of these hypotheses had much in the way of direct evidence in their favor, and all had significant arguments against.

Then Paleodictyon was found in Devonian rocks.  Then Carboniferous rocks.  Then Triassic rocks.  Always in sedimentary strata associated with deep marine environments -- and never with the slightest evidence of who might have created it.

So it went into the catalogues as a "trace fossil" -- a remnant of some unidentified organism.  This didn't mean the paleontologists were giving up, however; the origins of other trace fossils have been solved, most notably the incredibly common conodonts, small, spiky fossils found in oceanic sedimentary rocks up through the Triassic Period, and which were finally determined to be the teeth of primitive fish a little like today's lampreys.

But Paleodictyon proved more difficult, despite the fact that pretty much everywhere -- and everywhen -- you look in deep-ocean sedimentary rocks, you find it.  Here's a specimen from the Miocene Epoch:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Hectonichus, Palaeodictyon, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Then a survey of the seafloor near volcanic vents on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge -- in very recent sediments -- came across a series of regularly-spaced holes.  Curious, the oceanographers studying the area devised what amounted to a giant water gun to blow away the sediment and see what was beneath the mud, and hopefully, what might be creating the holes.

And underneath...

... was Paleodictyon.

Here, though, there was an additional clue; at each of the nodes in the network was a small upward-facing tube.  It was the openings of the tubes, poking above the sediment, that had attracted the attention of the scientists.  Naturally, they took samples (not to mention a closer look) to see what was in there.

Nothing was.

Detailed DNA analysis was performed on the samples, looking for anything that might give a clue as to what had made the network.  All three of the most commonly-held hypotheses -- sponges, xenophyophores, and tube worms -- came up negative.  There were traces of DNA present, but all of it seemed to be from bacteria and protists living in the tubes, not the creature that made the tubes.

To cut to the punch line: we still have no idea what Paleodictyon is, or who made it.

But whatever it is has been around for a very, very long time -- at least 540 million years -- substantially unchanged.  It's true that there are lots of things in nature exhibiting hexagonal tiling; it's the simplest way to tile a two-dimensional surface, and is seen in everything from quartz crystals to the symmetrical cooling cracks in the Giant's Causeway in Ireland.  But the fact that this trace fossil is only found in deep-sea sedimentary rocks is certainly suggestive that its origin is biological.

In the end, we're left with a mystery, and are honestly no closer to figuring Paleodictyon out now than we were when Giuseppe Meneghini first discovered it over 170 years ago.  So we'll continue looking -- and trying to determine the origin of one of the most persistent and widespread fossils ever found.

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A new view of the "eye lizard"

I am forever astonished at the level of detail we can infer from fossils that are hundreds of millions of years old.

The most recent example of this came from analysis of a fossil of Stenopterygius, an ichthyosaur that lived during the Jurassic Period (this particular fossil has been dated to about 180 million years ago).  We usually think of fossils as preserving bones and teeth, and occasionally impressions of scales or skin or feathers -- but this one was so finely preserved that researchers have been able to make some shrewd inferences about color, metabolism, and the structure of soft tissues.

Artist's conception of Stenopterygius [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com), Stenopterygius BW, CC BY-SA 3.0]

We've known for a long time that ichthyosaurs are bizarre animals. They were streamlined predators that look remarkably like dolphins, although they are only distantly related (making the two groups a great example of convergent evolution).  A number of them had an even stranger feature, which is the largest eye-diameter-to-body-size ratio of any animal known -- the well-named Ophthalmosaurus (Greek for "eye lizard") was six meters long and had eyes the size of basketballs.

Stenopterygius was a bit smaller, with an average adult size of four meters.  But up until recently, all we've been able to do is speculate on what it might have looked like, and how it behaved.  A discovery in Germany, described in a paper in Nature called "Soft-Tissue Evidence for Homeothermy and Crypsis in a Jurassic Ichthyosaur" and authored by no fewer than 23 scientists, has given us incredibly detailed information on these oddball dinosaurs.

The authors write:

Ichthyosaurs are extinct marine reptiles that display a notable external similarity to modern toothed whales.  Here we show that this resemblance is more than skin deep.  We apply a multidisciplinary experimental approach to characterize the cellular and molecular composition of integumental tissues in an exceptionally preserved specimen of the Early Jurassic ichthyosaur Stenopterygius.  Our analyses recovered still-flexible remnants of the original scaleless skin, which comprises morphologically distinct epidermal and dermal layers.  These are underlain by insulating blubber that would have augmented streamlining, buoyancy and homeothermy.  Additionally, we identify endogenous proteinaceous and lipid constituents, together with keratinocytes and branched melanophores that contain eumelanin pigment.  Distributional variation of melanophores across the body suggests countershading, possibly enhanced by physiological adjustments of colour to enable photoprotection, concealment and/or thermoregulation.  Convergence of ichthyosaurs with extant marine amniotes thus extends to the ultrastructural and molecular levels, reflecting the omnipresent constraints of their shared adaptation to pelagic life.

So from a 180-million-year-old fossil, we now know that Stenopterygius (1) was a homeotherm (colloquially called "warm-blooded"), (2) had a blubber layer much like modern dolphins and whales, and (3) were countershaded -- dark on top and light underneath, to aid camouflage -- similar to dozens of species of modern fish.

This level of preservation is extremely unusual.  "Both the contour of the body and the remains of internal organs are clearly visible," said paleontologist Johan Lindgren of the University of Lund, who co-authored the paper.  "Surprisingly, the fossil is so well preserved that it is possible to observe individual cell layers inside the skin."

"This is the first direct chemical evidence of warm blood in an ichthyosaur, because a subcutaneous fat layer is a characteristic of warm-blooded animals," said Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University, also a co-author.  "Ichthyosaurs are interesting because they have many features in common with dolphins, but they are not related at all to these mammals that inhabit the sea.  But the enigma does not stop there...  They have many characteristics in common with living marine reptiles, such as sea turtles; but we know from the fossil record that they gave live birth to their young...  This study reveals some of those biological mysteries."

Which is pretty astonishing.  I've always had a fascination for the prehistoric world, and have spent more time than I like to admit wondering what it might have been like to live in the Jurassic world. This research gives us one more piece of information -- about a fierce prehistoric predator that shared some amazing similarities to creatures that still swim in our oceans.

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A glimpse of a monster

Ever heard of TON 618?

I hadn't until a few days ago, which is surprising considering my dual fascination with (1) astronomy, and (2) things that are huge and violent and could kill you.  TON 618 is a quasar, a luminous active galactic nucleus common in the universe's distant past.  Thankfully the cosmos has settled down a bit, because these things are so energetic their light is still visible today from billions of light years away.

Even by quasarian (I just made that word up, you should find a way to incorporate it into your daily speech) standards, TON 618 is impressive.  It showed up in a 1957 survey of faint blue stars, but its intense red shift indicated it was extremely distant and therefore a lot brighter than it looked.  It was entry #618 in the Tonantzintla Catalogue, a list of stars described in the bulletin of the Tonantzintla and Tacubaya Observatories in Mexico, and that's what gave it its rather unassuming name.

Once you start looking into this thing, though, you find it's anything but unassuming.

First, it's huge.  The black hole at the center of TON 618 is forty billion times more massive than the Sun.  If you put it where the Sun is, the entire Solar System would be inside its event horizon -- in fact, its event horizon is estimated at forty times the orbit of the planet Neptune.

Because of this, it has an impossibly high gravitational field, and is the center of a turbulent infall of matter.  This unfortunate gas and dust, as it accelerates toward its inevitable doom, is compressed and heated, emitting enough light to make TON 618 one of the most luminous objects in the known universe.  If the above comparisons weren't enough to blow your mind, TON 618 is estimated to have a luminosity of 4 x 10^40 watts -- about 140 trillion times brighter than the Sun.

It's also what is known as a Lyman-alpha blob.  This is another astronomical creature I just learned about, only found in the early universe (and therefore at this point, very far away).  The name comes from its extremely high emission of the Lyman alpha emission line of hydrogen, which has only been used as a tool for astronomers in recent years; it is so strongly absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere that it is essentially invisible to ground-based telescopes.  With the advent of orbiting telescopes like the Hubble, Kepler, and James Webb Space Telescopes, astronomers are finding more and more Lyman-alpha emitters in the distant (i.e. early) universe, but the debate goes on about what those emissions mean -- and why they aren't seen in nearby objects.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons J.Geach/D.Narayanan/R.Crain, Computer simulation of a Lyman-alpha Blob, CC BY 4.0]

The most fascinating question about all this is where -- and what -- are quasars now?  The surmise is that for the most part they've settled down to become quiet, ordinary galactic nuclei.  But what about monsters like TON 618?  It's on the order of ten thousand times more massive than Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way; so if this eventually evolved into a galactic center, it would have to be one big-ass galaxy.

To put it in quantitative scientific terms.

Of course, there's no way to find out for sure.  When you look into the distance, you're also looking into the past, because the light that reaches your eyes (or telescope) took a finite length of time to arrive.  So you're always seeing things as they were, not as they are, and the farther away something is, the further back in time you're looking.  We're seeing TON 618 as it was about 10.8 billion years ago -- there's no way to know what, or where, it is now.

But that doesn't stop it from being an astonishing object.  The more sophisticated our instruments get, and the more detailed our scientific knowledge, the more weird and wonderful and magnificent the universe becomes.  

Even so, I'm glad that TON 618 -- whatever it is -- is located at a safe distance.  As fascinating as it is, it wouldn't make a good neighbor.

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The backfire

From the Spectacular Backfire department, today we have: the guy who sponsored a bill to crack down on "pornographic and inappropriate" materials in public school classrooms in Utah has stated that he needs to "revisit" the wording of the law when a school district used it to remove Bibles from elementary and junior high school libraries.

Representative Ken Ivory (R-West Jordan) was alarmed at the unintended consequences of his bill, and held a rally of "faith and conservative" groups at the State Capitol this week, where protestors held signs saying "God cannot be cancelled" and "Remove porn, not the Bible."

"Is there any artistic value to the Bible?" Ivory asked the crowd.  "Has anyone been to Rome and visited the Sistine Chapel?  Has anyone also been to Paris and in the Louvre, seen The Last Supper?  Or have you been to Florence and seen the sculpture of the David?"

Which is an interesting example to choose, because it was people of precisely the same mindset who, just three months ago, got a school principal in Tallahassee fired for showing fifth graders a photograph of Michelangelo's David.

But hypocrisy, however blatant, never seems to register with these people.  Apparently, material is inappropriate whenever they say it is, and might well be appropriate tomorrow if the context changes.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Amandajm, Bible Johns Gospel 3 16, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The deeper problem is, it doesn't take much searching to find parts of the Bible that are inappropriate for children.  I mean, really inappropriate.  One of the best-known examples is Ezekiel 23:20-21: "There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.  So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled."

Then there's Genesis 19, which is not just about sex, but about drunken incest:

Lot and his two daughters left Zoar and settled in the mountains—for he was afraid to stay in Zoar—where they lived in a cave.  One day the older daughter said to the younger, “Our father is old, and there is no man in the land to sleep with us, as is the custom over all the earth.  Come, let us get our father drunk with wine so we can sleep with him and preserve his line.”

So that night they got their father drunk with wine, and the firstborn went in and slept with her father; he was not aware when she lay down or when she got up.

The next day the older daughter said to the younger, “Look, I slept with my father last night.  Let us get him drunk with wine again tonight so you can go in and sleep with him and we can preserve our father’s line.”

So again that night they got their father drunk with wine, and the younger daughter went in and slept with him; he was not aware when she lay down or when she got up.

Thus both of Lot’s daughters became pregnant by their father.  The older daughter gave birth to a son and named him Moab.  He is the father of the Moabites of today.  The younger daughter also gave birth to a son, and she named him Ben-ammi.  He is the father of the Ammonites of today.

And don't even get me started about the Song of Solomon.

The trouble is, people like Ken Ivory want one standard for Christian texts and a different standard for everything else.  A kids' story about a child with gay parents?  Oh, no, can't have that, it's inappropriate.  But a text that features lots of sex (consensual and not), violence, torture, and genocide -- that's just fine, because "God cannot be cancelled."

If he, and the others like him, want to have an honest conversation about what is and is not appropriate to have available to schoolchildren, that's just fine.  I don't know of a single person -- liberal or conservative, religious or not -- who wants to expose children to material that is unsuited to their personal and emotional development, and no one argues that young children should read explicitly sexual or violent books.

But you can't just set a standard, then when it's applied to your favorite book, say, "No, wait, not like that."

So as usual, it's not the idea behind the law that's the problem, here; it's the hypocrisy of its supporters.

Something I don't suppose Ken Ivory will understand.  People who specialize in performative virtue seldom do.  But maybe another biblical quote, from Matthew chapter 6, will strike home with him more clearly, something Jesus said about making a show of being holy: "When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men… but when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray in secret, to your Father who is unseen."

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The myth of the Golden Age

You hear it all the time, don't you?  There's no such thing as common decency any more.  Moral values are in freefall.  Simple politeness is a thing of the past.  Kids today don't understand the value of (choose all that apply): hard work, honesty, compassion, loyalty, friendship, culture, intellectual pursuits.  The whole world has gone seriously downhill.

Oh, and we mustn't forget "Make America Great Again."  Implying that there was a time in the past -- usually unspecified -- when America was great, but it's kind of gone down the tubes since then.  But it's not just the Republicans; a 2015 study found that 76% of respondents in the United States believed that "addressing the moral breakdown of the country should be a high priority for their government."

This whole deeply pessimistic attitude is widespread -- that compared to the past, we're a hopeless mess.  The first clue that this might not be accurate, though, comes from history, and not just the fact that the past -- regardless which part of it you choose -- had some seriously bad parts.  Consider in addition that just about every era has felt the same way about its own past.  Nineteenth century Europe, for example, had a nearly religious reverence for the societies of classical Rome and Greece -- which is ironic, because the Greeks and Romans at the height of their civilizations both looked back to their ancestors as living in a "Golden Age of Heroes" that had, sadly, devolved into chaos and highly unheroic ugliness.

The Golden Age by Pietro de Cortona (17th century) [Image is in the Public Domain]

So psychologists Adam Mastroianni (of Columbia University) and Daniel Gilbert (of Harvard University) decided to see if there was any truth to the claim that we really are in moral decline.

Their findings, which were published last week in Nature, drew on sixty years of surveys about moral values, with respondents from 59 different countries.  These surveys not only asked questions regarding whether morality had declined over the respondents' lifetimes (84% said it had), they asked them to rate their own values and their peers'.

Interestingly, although most people said things were worse now than they had been in the past, there was no decline over time in how people rated the values and morality of the people around them in the present.  The percentage of people respondents knew and described as kind, decent, honest, or hard-working has remained completely flat over the past sixty years.

So what's going on?

Mastroianni and Gilbert say it's simple.

People idealize the past because they have bad memories.

It's the same phenomenon as when we recall vacations where there have been mishaps.  After a couple of years have passed, we remember the positive parts -- the walks on the beach, the excellent food, the beautiful weather -- and the sunburn, mosquito bites, delayed flights, and uncomfortable hotel room beds have all faded from memory.  It has to be really bad before the unpleasant memories come to mind first, such as the trip I took with my wife to Belize where the guests and staff of the lodge where we were staying all simultaneously came down with the worst food poisoning I've ever experienced.

Okay, that I remember pretty vividly.  But most vacation mishaps?  Barely remembered -- or only recalled with a smile, a laugh, a "can you believe that happened?"

What Mastroianni and Gilbert found was that we put that same undeserved gloss on the past in general.  It's an encouraging finding, really; people aren't getting worse, morality isn't going downhill, the world isn't going to hell in a handbasket.  In reality, most people now -- just like in the past -- are honest and decent and kind.

The problem, of course, is that given how widespread this belief is, and how resistant it is to changing, how to get folks to stop looking at the past as some kind of Golden Age.  Because the fact is, we have made some significant strides in a great many areas; equality for women and minorities, LGBTQ rights and treatment, concern for the environment are all far ahead of where they were even forty years ago.  There are a lot of ways the past wasn't all that great.

Believe me, as a closeted queer kid who grew up in the Deep South of the 1960s and 1970s, I wouldn't want to go back there for any money.

So maybe we need to turn our focus away from the past and look instead toward the future -- instead of lamenting some mythical and almost certainly false lost paradise, working toward making what's to come even better for everyone. 

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The whistleblower

From the make-of-this-what-you-will department, today we have: a well-respected and decorated military veteran and former member of both the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office who has stated under oath to Congress that the United States is in possession of "intact and partly intact craft of non-human origin."

His name is David Charles Grusch, and his shift from intelligence officer to alien whistleblower came as a shock to the people who know him.  An Army colonel who worked with him called him "beyond reproach;" another called him "an officer with the strongest possible moral compass."  He went to Congress with the information, he said, to expose "a decades-long publicly unknown Cold War for recovered and exploited physical material – a competition with near-peer adversaries over the years to identify UAP [unidentified anomalous phenomena] crashes/landings and retrieve the material for exploitation/reverse engineering to garner asymmetric national defense advantages."

The recovered "material," he said, is clearly not of human manufacture.  It is "of exotic origin (non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or unknown origin) based on the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures."

Further -- although details were not forthcoming, as the transcript of the hearing was classified -- several current members of the recovery team testified under oath to the Inspector General, and corroborated Grusch's claims.

Grusch has stated that his actions have resulted in retaliation, although it is unclear by whom.

Now that Grusch has come forward, a surprising array of officials have voiced their support.  Jonathan Grey, an intelligence officer specializing in UAP analysis at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, said, "The existence of complex historical programs involving the coordinated retrieval and study of exotic materials, dating back to the early twentieth century, should no longer remain a secret.  The majority of retrieved, foreign exotic materials have a prosaic terrestrial explanation and origin – but not all, and any number higher than zero in this category represents an undeniably significant statistical percentage...  A vast array of our most sophisticated sensors, including space-based platforms, have been utilized by different agencies, typically in triplicate, to observe and accurately identify the out-of-this-world nature, performance, and design of these anomalous machines, which are then determined not to be of earthly origin."

The whole thing is curious, to say the least.  On the one hand, we have several highly-respected and high-ranking military officials putting their reputations on the line to come forward with this information, and -- thus far -- all of them pretty much corroborating each other's stories.  On the other hand, we still have zero hard evidence that has been made available to scientists.  I am especially curious about the "unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures" Grusch refers to.  How are we to tell the difference between an odd, but naturally-occurring, material and one of alien manufacture?  Take, for example, quasicrystals -- about which I wrote here at Skeptophilia a few months ago -- which were thought to be only produceable in the laboratory, until a sample was found in a Siberian meteorite.

If we had piece of a spaceship console with lettering in Klingon, I might pay more attention.

Now, I'm not saying I disbelieve Grusch et al., mind you.  I'm merely saying that, to quote Neil deGrasse Tyson, "what I've seen so far does not meet the minimum standard of evidence required in science."

As I've said about a hundred times, nobody would be more delighted than me at having unequivocal proof of extraterrestrial intelligence.  But this -- as of right now -- is still in the category of "equivocal."  So I'm willing to defer forming a definite opinion, pending someone dragging out the "intact craft of non-human origin" and letting us all take a look at it. 

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The long rain

Imagine going back 240 million years.

This would land you in the early Triassic Period.  By this time, the Earth would have had twelve million years to recover from the cataclysmic Permian-Triassic Extinction, the largest mass extinction on record.  Life had rebounded some -- two of the dominant terrestrial animal groups were the terrifying crurotarsans (picture a long-legged on-land crocodile) and the dicynodonts (which looked a little like a rhino with a parrot's bill -- and tusks).

Finding your way around the place would be confusing, if all you know is the current continental arrangement.  Pangaea was still locked together, and would be until rifting began to open up the Atlantic Ocean -- but that was still forty million years in the future.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Fama Clamosa, Pangaea 200Ma, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Because virtually all the land masses of the world were jammed together into one supercontinent, the climate was really dry.  There probably was a reasonable amount of rainfall along the coastline, but most places were very far away from the coast.  The result is that one of the major early Triassic sedimentary rocks is the "Triassic red sandstone" formed from wind-blown layers of sand deposited in conditions that resembled today's Sahara Desert.  But instead of being restricted to a part of a single continent, this was what it was like in the interior of Pangaea -- i.e., the entire land mass on planet Earth.

But even the Sahara isn't lifeless, and neither was the continental interior of Pangaea during the early Triassic.  Organisms found a way to cope with the dry conditions, and -- all things considered -- life was doing okay.

Then -- 234 million years ago -- it started to rain.

I'm not talking about your short-lived desert thunderstorm, here, nor even the kind of "atmospheric river" event that hit the Central Valley of California this year, causing not only flooding but an explosive burst of wildflowers.

This rainstorm lasted two million years.

It's called the "Carnian Pluvial Episode," and evidence for it can be seen in a sudden shift in sedimentary geology, a change in the isotope concentrations in carbonate rocks (like limestone), and a huge spike in heavy elements (like osmium and mercury) that are much more common in deep-mantle rocks.  The last bit is a clue to what happened -- there was a massive eruption called the Wrangellia Flood Basalts in what would eventually become southern Alaska and western British Columbia.  I've written before about two other flood basalt provinces, the Siberian Traps (implicated in the Permian-Triassic Extinction) and the Deccan Traps (contributory to the Cretaceous Extinction), and while the Wrangellia event isn't as big as either of those, it is many orders of magnitude larger than anything you probably picture as a volcanic eruption.  The Wrangellia Flood Basalt injected huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, largely through the lava burning through limestone, coal, and any organic matter on the surface.  This spiked the atmospheric temperature, increased seawater evaporation...

... and it started to rain.

Imagine being an animal adapted to living in Arizona, and all of a sudden, you find you're living in the Amazon lowlands.  That's pretty much what happened.

The result was another extinction.  Both the crurotarsans and dicynodonts bit the dust.  Or actually, at that point, the mud.  Let me emphasize that both groups were doing fine before the climatic shift; but having spent millions of years adapting to the early Triassic desert conditions, they couldn't handle it when the long rain started.

The winners here were the animals that had the flexibility to cope with the changing conditions -- in this case, dinosaurs, which would go on to dominate the place for another 165 million years.  The early mammals also made it, obviously, but they were still small at this point (and would remain so until the non-avian dinosaurs met their demise).  Interesting that the quintessential Mesozoic group, the dinosaurs, might never have taken off like they did if it hadn't been for a sudden geological event that triggered a climatic shift and knocked out the two main competitor groups.

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the rate at which the Wrangellia Flood Basalts injected carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is thought to be significantly smaller than the rate we're doing the same from burning fossil fuels.

Any wonder why environmentalists are worried?

We've already had our share of bizarre weather in the last few years; it seems like not a week goes by without my hearing someone say, "This hardly ever happens."  At the moment, here in upstate New York, it hasn't rained for a month, and we're getting spectacular sunsets (and difficulty breathing) because of a pall of wildfire smoke that's come all the way from central Quebec.  Vietnam and Laos have already set record high temperatures this year, reaching a devastating 44 C (with correspondingly high humidity), as did the Pacific Northwest of the United States, with Portland at a less dangerous but still scorching 35 C.  

Weather isn't climate, something I feel obligated to remind the climate change deniers every time we have a cold snap in January; but as anomalous weather happens over and over and over, these kinds of patterns begin to add up to something significant.  As a Louisiana native, I'm already worried about this year's hurricane season -- especially given that the most recent sea surface temperatures are (in the words of Australian climatologist Matthew England) "heading off the charts."

To judge by the geological record of events like the Carnian Pluvial Episode, it looks like we might be in the last half of "fuck around and find out."

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