A rare moment of honesty!
lol , A Meet The Press worthy one for sure.. Flashback !
Tim Russert interviewing Colin Powell impersonating a palm tree.
Posted on 08/02/2012 1:05:45 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
Scientists drilling deep into the edge of modern Antarctica have pulled up proof that palm trees once grew there.
Analyses of pollen and spores and the remains of tiny creatures have given a climatic picture of the early Eocene period, about 53 million years ago.
The study in Nature suggests Antarctic winter temperatures exceeded 10C, while summers may have reached 25C.
Better knowledge of past "greenhouse" conditions will enhance guesses about the effects of increasing CO2 today.
The early Eocene - often referred to as the Eocene greenhouse - has been a subject of increasing interest in recent years as a "warm analogue" of the current Earth.
"There are two ways of looking at where we're going in the future," said a co-author of the study, James Bendle of the University of Glasgow.
"One is using physics-based climate models; but increasingly we're using this 'back to the future' approach where we look through periods in the geological past that are similar to where we may be going in 10 years, or 20, or several hundred," he told BBC News.
The early Eocene was a period of atmospheric CO2 concentrations higher than the current 390 parts per million (ppm )- reaching at least 600ppm and possibly far higher.
Global temperatures were on the order of 5C higher, and there was no sharp divide in temperature between the poles and the equator.
Drilling research carried out in recent years showed that the Arctic must have had a subtropical climate.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
A rare moment of honesty!
uhhh...too hot.......me need cave....going to find chick and cool cave....heard Kentucky have big cave
The early Eocene - often referred to as the Eocene greenhouse - has been a subject of increasing interest in recent years as a "warm analogue" of the current Earth.
So, CO2 was the culprit 53 million years ago too. Wow. Who knew? I can't wait until they dig up those old SUVs and coal fired power plants.
Also interesting is the recent book "Darwin's Ghost" that follows Darwin's subjects, chapter by chapter, with total respect to both Darwin and modern knowledge that backs Darwin's theory up; nothing is refuted.
Steve Jones is the author, and the book is terrific reading.
We are overdue for another earth axis shift. It will do the same thing again.
It took several more million years to recover the balance.
Just read where the CO2 in the atmosphere is reflecting much of the energy from the solar coronal mass ejections back into space away from earth, thus keeping earth cooler.
A rare moment of honesty!
lol , A Meet The Press worthy one for sure.. Flashback !
Tim Russert interviewing Colin Powell impersonating a palm tree.
Wasn't Antarctica further North in that era anyway?
Wow. This is stuff I learned as a child.
Also, I'm pretty sure that the climate was a bit nicer when the Ancients operated the Stargate down there.
Five hundred million years ago the air had twenty times as much carbon dioxide as it contains now. This led to a natural "greenhouse" effect which was reversed two hundred million years later when the level of the gas dropped. Oxygen, too, has swung between extremes. Twice as much of the gas as today allowed the growth of enormous plants, of spiders the size of a book, and of scorpions a foot long. A later burst led to the development of aerial reptiles such as Quet-zalcoatlus, with wings forty feet across.
Could have been.. I hear once upon a time there was one giant glob called pangeaea or such and it eventually split up over time calving the continents, stuff drifted all over the place and has since,, the magnetic poles flip gosh knows how many times and who knows what collided with us during whole mess,, the timespans over which they occurred are pretty large to say the least.
I told a liberal once that I suspected the dinosaur farts warmed the earth in the past. I was joking. He did not laugh. He glowered at me. :(
Heck, that's nothing. Where I live used to be the bottom of a large ocean.
dead links (used to be anyway, haven't checked 'em lately):The Palæogeographical Relations of Antarctica...Among early Tertiary vegetation brought from Seymour Island in the Antarctic by Dr. Nordenskjöld's expedition, Dusén has recognised a species of Fagus and an Araucaria like A. brasiliensis (Schwedische Sudpolar. Exp., Bd. iii. Lief 3, 1908). In the light of this discovery the range of the living species of these genera acquires an importance for the student of the Antarctic hypothesis. The distribution of the beech trees is a particularly interesting one, for on the principle of Antarctic extension it is simple and intelligible, but without it is complicated and inexplicable.
by Charles Hedley
(1912)
This genus Fagus, sensu latu, has two representatives in Europe, one in North America, and several in China and Japan. But in South America there are eleven, in New Zealand seven, and in Tasmania with Australia three. The northern forms are deciduous, but with one or two exceptions the southern are evergreen. The genus being a natural one is certainly not of polyphyletic origin, and the question before us is, from what centre of migration has it spread? Did the southern species radiate from the south or converge from the north? It is a strong argument for a southern origin that the bulk of the species are southern. Again, the evergreen state is primitive, the deciduous derived, and this indicates that the northerners are offshoots from an evergreen stock. Thirdly, the southern species more closely resemble each other than any northern does any southern form. Even, as Mr. Rodway (Proc. Austr. Assoc. Adv. Sci. 1912) points out, the same parasite afflicts Tasmanian and South American trees. This agrees better with radiation from the south than with convergence from the north.
and from the other end, the Arctic:Mechanics of Displacements...the Antarctic beech trees are from two to three million years old. The point that was being made was that plate tectonics, as a theory, was incapable of explaining the existence of this forest so close to the South Pole a mere two to three million years ago. This is not to say that plate tectonics is wrong: it is simply insufficient on its own to account for these facts. At the slow pace of change demanded by plate tectonics the beech trees would have to be many millions (not just 2 or 3 million) of years old to be 200 miles from the South Pole. In other words, to account for the beech forest on Antarctica we need another whole Earth theory to explain the facts. Earth crust displacement is a complementary whole earth theory to plate tectonics that can account for these facts. We are not disputing the power of the plate tectonic theory: we are simply adding another set of lens with which the past might be viewed.
by Rand Flem-AthSpending Time and Wasting Space:What we find from the ice core dating is that Lesser Antarctica has been covered in ice for at least 122,000 years, if not more. But when we shift our attention to the opposite side of the globe and look at Siberia, Beringia and Alaska we do not find equivalent ice sheets. Instead we find evidence of many large mammals such as horses, bison and rhinoceros swarming over grasslands. How can one part of the globe be under ice for at least 122,000 years while the exact opposite of the globe has no ice and large mammals (dating from 11,000 to 70,000 carbon-14 years ago)? This does not compute. Either the evidence from the north is wrong or the evidence from the south is wrong.
or how ice core dating went wrong
by Rand Flem-Ath and Colin Wilson
Northern Crater Shows Prehistoric Deep ImpactTo 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.
by Ned RozellMars 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"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...
by Robert Schoch
and Robert Aquinas McNally
(pp 1-3)
other supplier
"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."
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Better knowledge of past "greenhouse" conditions will enhance guesses about the effects of increasing CO2 today.
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