Oldest DNA ever recovered shows warmer planet: report

www.breitbart.com...

Maybe the 'Gobal Warming' people who blame humans (especially the US) for Global Warming can explain this article:

Scientists who probed two kilometers (1.2 miles) through a Greenland glacier to recover the oldest plant DNA on record said Thursday the planet was far warmer hundreds of thousands of years ago than is generally believed.
DNA of trees, plants and insects including butterflies and spiders from beneath the southern Greenland glacier was estimated to date to 450,000 to 900,000 years ago, according to the remnants retrieved from this long-vanished boreal forest.

Originally posted by ferretman2
Maybe the 'Gobal Warming' people who blame humans (especially the US) for Global Warming can explain this article

OK, I'll try...

It was warm hundreds of thousands of years ago on the greenland land mass?

To be fair, I am skeptical of MMGW but relating to the article, the carbon level's were much higher back then than today.

An international scientific team which has been drilling beneath the bed of the Arctic Ocean says it enjoyed a sub-tropical climate 55 million years ago

Atmospheric carbon levels then are thought to have been about 2-3,000 parts per million (ppm), compared with almost 380 ppm today.

news.bbc.co.uk...

It's amazing how much the earth has changed over the years, I do think we are jumping the gun a bit to early to suggest we are the cause. However we do need to clean up are act with regards to pollution and deforestation, aslong as it doesn't harm Africa's econmic growth. I don't like to see hospitals in Africa being forced to use the most expensive and least reliable form of energy because some envioromentalist told them to do so. Hopefully new clean idea's will come soon, like the use of magnets instead of installing nuculear power plants all over the each country.

Originally posted by ferretman2
Maybe the 'Gobal Warming' people who blame humans (especially the US) for Global Warming can explain this article

That's because our globe didn't look like it does today. The main land masses were called "Gondwanaland" and Laurasia, and Iceland was part of Laurasia.

It was considerably closer to the equator. The maps on this page start 250 million years ago, but they're enough to show how the northern continental area drifts upward from near the equator:
www.bbm.me.uk...

...and of course it's hotter near the equator.

So, when evaluating these things, the first thing you should ask yourself is "what did the Earth look like back then"?

Originally posted by estar
To be fair, I am skeptical of MMGW but relating to the article, the carbon level's were much higher back then than today.

CO2 levels were somewhat higher back then, yes.

They've fluctuated over the milennia due to terrestrial changes. Oxygen in the atmosphere lowered at the end of the Permian (basically a lot of oxygen "rusted" out of the atmosphere... current thinking is that many plant species important to the oxygen-CO2 cycle died off (it was one of the Great Extinctions)).

Originally posted by Byrd

Originally posted by ferretman2
Maybe the 'Gobal Warming' people who blame humans (especially the US) for Global Warming can explain this article

That's because our globe didn't look like it does today. The main land masses were called "Gondwanaland" and Laurasia, and Iceland was part of Laurasia.

900k years ago, the world did not look drastically different, plate-wise, gondwana and laurasia existed hundreds of millions of years ago, no a few 100k

pubs.usgs.gov...

[edit on 11.7.2007 by Long Lance]

Yeah Byrd, you're a few orders of magnitude off time-wise.

This was less than a million years ago, the Earth wasn't significantly different tectonically.