Cosmos Recap: The One With Geology And Also Too Global Warming
This week's episode of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, "Lost Worlds of Planet Earth," is about time travel -- the path of all the life that clings to the thin habitable crust of our planet, and the forces that have shaped both. Neil deGrasse Tyson starts us off with a visit to the Carboniferous period, roughly 350 million years ago, at the point where trees began to cover the planet, the result of a newfangled plant molecule, lignin, which allowed trees to grow higher -- and so, with nothing getting in their way, they did. With all that photosynthesis going on, there was more oxygen than at any time in the planet's history, arthropods were huge, and virtually all the planet's land mas was a supercontinent, Pangea. All those trees ended up getting buried without decaying much, since bacteria and fungi hadn't yet evolved a means of digesting lignin. And so eons of forests were buried, their carbon eventually becoming coal. This got messy eventually -- twice.
Maybe Obama should go on record saying "ehh ... fuck the climate," as a way of getting the teabaggers, RWNJs, Republicans, and Fucks Gnus blowhards all screaming for control of CO2 emissions.
There seems to be a major gaffe in this episode, where they show a mammal surviving the Permian Extinction.