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Regis Philbin
Jul 5th, 2007, 06:38 PM
No doubt due to the Republican cavemen and their larger fires... :rolleyes:

What? You mean the planet was 9 degrees warmer than it is now? And the glaciers still didn't all melt? And the polar bears survived?

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=070705191403.gahmdtoi&show_article=1

Oldest DNA ever recovered shows warmer planet: report

Jul 5 03:14 PM US/Eastern

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.

That contrasts sharply with the prevailing view that a lush forest of this kind could only have existed in Greenland as recently as 2.4 million years ago, according to a summary of the study, which is published Thursday in the journal Science.

The samples suggest the temperature probably reached 10 degrees C (50 degrees Fahrenheit) in the summer and -17 C (1 F) in the winter.

They also indicated that during the last period between ice ages, 116,000-130,000 years ago, when temperatures were on average 5 C (9 F) higher than now, the glaciers on Greenland did not completely melt away.

"These findings allow us to make a more accurate environmental reconstruction of the time period from which these samples were taken," said Martin Sharp, a glaciologist at the University of Alberta, Canada, and a co-author of the paper.

"What we've learned is that this part of the world was significantly warmer than most people thought."

Richard Tafoya
Jul 5th, 2007, 07:06 PM
900,000 years ago? Doesn't that refute creationism?