Study: Past global warming altered forests

Not so sure about William the Conqueror and the 11th century..
But it seems to me, the subsequent Little Ice Age contributed to the nearly total deforestation of England and Europe.. ( IIRC, it's no joke..It was very serious for the people at the time.. )

This over-utilization of wood/timber resources contributed to the mining of coal for heat and energy..
The coal mining industry in turn fueled the need for better pumps to keep water out of the mines, which led to steam engines which powered those pumps, which led to the Industrial revolution, which led to...

Man, there are just too many connections there..

Well put. The climate influences human activity, rather than the other way around.

There is the phenomenon of the March of the Pine
Forest. The pines have been moving north, headed for Alaska, for a long time, even before the SUVs. A mile a year. This is climate change happening for centuries now.

No, you are wrong. The global warming of 55 million years ago was caused by the previous race of humans (the Ancients) who existed then. They burnt fossil fuels (without regard to the environment) with these huge bonfires to keep the T-Rex's and Raptors away.

Certain very liberal Ancients said it was better to get eaten by T-Rex than despoil the planet. In a rigged election, the liberal Ancients won, put out the bonfires, and sure enough the ancients got eaten, except for the redneck Ancients who survived (Homo Arkansas).

This is why the first human-like fossils found are ape-like. Only the redneck Ancients reproduced, and they were hairy, had big eye-brow ridges and intermarried with their kinfolk. They would have fit in well on the Ancient's version of Jerry Springer. Anyway, the redneck Ancients destroyed their own gene-pool and we all regressed to little furry critters and had to re-evolve.

parsy, who is sorta warm right now.

22 million year-old impact, links much more recent, but I didn't check 'em, so they may be long gone:

Northern Crater Shows Prehistoric Deep Impact
by Ned Rozell
To the rhinos and crocodiles of the far north, the day was like any other. They ate, swam and napped, unaware a celestial body was headed their way at 60,000 miles per hour. Suddenly, a wayward comet screamed into the atmosphere, struck Earth and created a bowl a mile deep and 15 miles in diameter.
Mars On Earth: Arctic Crater Reveals Martian Secrets (pt 2)
Haughton Crater is the remaining scar from a high-speed collision between Earth and some heavy object from space about 23 million years ago. The comet or asteroid that created the crater was perhaps more than a mile (up to 2 kilometers) across and slammed into the forest that existed on Devon Island. Everything was annihilated for scores of miles in all directions. The impact churned up rock from more than a mile below the surface, vaporizing much of it. It's estimated that between 70 and 100 billion tons of rock was excavated from the crater in the moments just after the impact. While clouds of dust and gas filled the air, rock rained down from the sky, much of it in the form of what geologists now call breccia, which simply means "broken up." Scattered within the breccia are pieces of a rock called gneiss that normally is dark and dense. In Haughton Crater breccia, the "shocked gneiss" resembles pumice stone -- it's ash-white, porous and very lightweight.
Voices of the Rocks
by Robert Schoch
and Robert Aquinas McNally
(pp 1-3)
other supplier
"Yet, as it will, life returned to this site of complete devastation... The world those fossils described, the one that flourished on the order of 20 million years ago, during the early Miocene epoch, was strikingly different from today's Arctic... Devon Island was covered with a forest of birch trees and conifers, a landscape that one now finds about 2,000 miles to the south, in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Maine. Now-extinct forms of rhinoceros and mouse deer browsed among the trees; shrews and pika-like relatives of modern rabbits darted through the shadows; and freshwater fish swam the lakes and streams...

"Even farther back, on the order of 45 to 65 million years ago, during the Paleocene and Eocene epochs, the fossil record shows Devon Island to have been still more profoundly different. Back then, what is now the Arctic was a region of swampy lowlands, slow-moving rivers, and towering forests of dawn redwood, kadsura, and ancestral forms of hickory, elm, birch, sycamore, and maple. Primitive fishes, crocodiles, salamanders, newts, and turtles inhabited the rivers and marshes, while the forests and meadows supported flying lemurs, early primates, forerunners of today's cats and dogs, and ancestors of the rhinos, tapirs, and horses."

In one of Oppenheimer's books he speaks of of an Ice Age 'over-shoot' (I think it was in the 7-8,000 year surge), where the world's oceans were higher/deeper than they are now...and, then settled back to about todays level.

Well, I've been thinking about that and the Piri Reis map of the Arctic coast. This would have been a period where the rising salt water may/could have melted the ice around the coast and exposed it for mapping before it had a chance to freeze back up and hide the coast line.

Your thoughts?

Antarctica is very elevated. A lot of it is ice, but the sea would have to rise considerably to overwhelm that. In the Gulf of Alaska near Valdez the glaciers come right down to the water and you can see the ice-water interface and how it works. The ice flows into the sea and essentially rots at the edge, breaking off piece by piece. The parts of the Antarctic ice shield that are floating could be broken off rapidly with rising sea level, but the mass of ice behind it would remain intact, only the edge crumbling into the water. If the air were warm the ice would eventually all flow into the water and the mountainous terrain underneath would be exposed, but the ice would have to flow out and not be replaced. The mere presence of water would not speed up that flowing process since it is driven by gravity.

When I was in the 5th grade in Vernal, Utah, my teacher found a large section of a petrified palm tree. We were on a field trip to the Dinosaur National Monument and he found it just outside the monument while we were eating lunch so he could keep it.

I think Schoch's analysis of the supposed prediscovery maps of Antarctica is correct.

One problem for any gradualist model is that, based on fossil evidence, Antarctica was temperate less than 3 million years ago (meaning that the Arctic also must have been). Unless a polar tipping has occurred (between 2 and 3 million years ago), the entire Earth will have to have been closer to the Sun. But if the latter, it's also possible that the Earth had less water at the time.

The bending over backwards to push the greenhouse nonsense is a consequence of adherence to a gradualist model.

The 55,000,000 BC Ford Expedition.

"If the air were warm the ice would eventually all flow into the water and the mountainous terrain underneath would be exposed, but the ice would have to flow out and not be replaced. "

Yes, that's partly what I mean and that alone could do the trick. Huh? Eventually, as the temp drops the ice would accumulate again and the sea level would drop again too...concealing the coastline again.