Drudge thinks
he's funny:
About 55 million years ago, the Arctic was downright tropical
Wed May 31 2006 11:39:53 ET
Scientists have found what might have been the ideal ancient vacation spot -- smack in the middle of the Arctic!
First-of-its-kind core samples dug up from deep beneath the Arctic Ocean floor show that 55 million years ago an area near the North Pole was practically a subtropical paradise, three new studies show.
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To him and his idiot friends, this means that global warming is a sham and heating and cooling is all a part of some natural plan. Of course, being an idiot, he doesn't realize that nothing
even remotely human existed on this planet 55 million years ago, so we'd better hope he's not right or it's "Goodbye, Mr. Chimp" and all of Mr. Chimp's cousins.
Drudge, it seems, is also too stupid to actually investigate what this really means.
The findings, in three separate papers in the issue of the journal Nature that comes out on Thursday, show how much remains to be learned about climate change, both natural and human-caused. But experts say that if anything, the papers suggest that scientists have greatly underestimated the power of greenhouse gases to warm the planet.
Computer simulations done without the benefit of the seabed sampling do not reproduce an ancient Arctic nearly that warm, the authors said, and thus must be missing elements that lead to greater warming.
"Something extra happens when you push the world into a warmer world, and we just don't understand what it is," said one lead author, Henk Brinkhuis, an expert on ancient Arctic ecology at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.
At the same time, he said, the new work reveals no tendency in the polar climate system to turn things around, from warming to cooling. Some scientists have suggested that warming may be a self-limiting process."There is nothing pointing in the other direction," Dr. Brinkhuis said...
The new analysis confirms that the Arctic Ocean warmed to a remarkable degree 55 million years ago and that the warming was driven at least in part by an explosive buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases -- one far greater than the current human-caused rise.
The samples also chronicle the subsequent cooling, with many ups and downs, that the researchers say began about 45 million years ago and led to the cycles of ice ages and brief warm spells of the last several million years.
Experts not connected with the studies say they also support the idea that it is greenhouse gases -- not slight variations in the Earth's orbit around the Sun -- that largely determine the extent of warming or cooling.
"In my opinion, the new research provides additional important evidence that greenhouse-gas changes controlled much of climate history, which strengthens the argument that greenhouse-gas changes are likely to control much of the climate future," said one such expert, Richard B. Alley, a geoscientist at Penn State.
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Matt Drudge: Idiot.