Trop artics

NY Times:

The first detailed analysis of an extraordinary climatic and biological record from the seabed near the North Pole shows that 55 million years ago the Arctic was much warmer than anyone had thought — a Floridian year-round average of 74 degrees Fahrenheit.

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.

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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.

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So global warming may not be so bad afterall. Canada might be the place to be. 40 years ago when I took Geology at the University of Texas we examined rock formations outside of Austin that had fossils of sea creatures suggesting that the sea level was at one time 150 feet or so higher than it is now, and that was without any man made greeenhouse gas. Most Greenhouse gas comes from sources other than man anyway. There is also evidence that the earth is warming because of son spot activity. This would correspond with teh warming that is occurring on other planets.