"Life on Earth snuffed out by global warming"

In case you didn't know it, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but The Australian reports that life on Earth has indeed ended.

OK, it's really just a misleading headline. The article is about a paper published in Science, suggesting that "continuous volcanic eruptions in Siberia", versus a huge meteor impact, set off mass extinctions 250 million years ago. The eruptions released a lot of hydrogen sulfide which set off global warming.

Actually, the article is kind of misleading, too, since it just talks about climate change, while the abstract of the paper emphasizes a lack of atmospheric oxygen and indicates that "sulfide toxicity was a driver of the extinction and a factor in the protracted recovery." Well, until there's a heated debate over regulating volcanic emissions, I guess we'll never get the full story.

Meanwhile, it's a small comfort to me to know that I'm not really looking at a squirrel eat our little remaining birdseed. After all, life on Earth was snuffed out.