The Left keeps claiming SCIENCE! when it suits them but going silent when the SCIENCE! throws them a curve (reformatted, emphasis mine):
Million-Year-Old Plants Show Greenland Was Once Ice-Free
Jars of dirt taken from a Cold War-era military caper and lost in a freezer for decades could hold crucial new information about climate change and sea level rise. A study published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists says that plant fossils found in a sample of dirt collected from a mile beneath the ice in the mid-1960s suggest that the world’s pre-human climate was at one point warm enough to completely melt the Greenland ice sheet.
The dirt researchers inspected is a sediment sample from the bottom of an ice core, retrieved by drilling down into the ice sheet that covers the majority of Greenland. It’s pretty hard to actually reach all the way down to bedrock when taking samples due to the incredible pressure from the ice, explained Drew Christ, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Vermont. There are only a few expeditions that have actually gotten sediment from the bottom of the glacier…
This particular sample yielded a lot of plant matter, some of which was visible to the naked eye. “It’s like if you went hiking, and got a bunch of twigs and forest floor stuff in the bottom of your boot and poured it out at the end of the day,” Christ said. “It’s kind of like that, but it’s been frozen for 1 million years.”
Christ and the team behind the study used isotope analyses of various elements that helped the researchers tease out the last time the samples were exposed to the sun and cosmic rays. The dating showed the plant matter is roughly 1 million years old.
…“The Greenland ice sheet has disappeared in a climate system that didn’t have any human influence,” Christ explained. “Before humans added hundreds of parts per million of fossil fuels to the atmosphere, our climate was able to melt away the ice sheet. In the future as we continue to warm the planet at an uncontrollable rate, we could force the Greenland ice sheet past some threshold and melt it and raise sea levels.”
As always, go read the link. This story shows that our climate HAS changed dramatically over the epochs – far warmer times and certainly the better known Ice Ages in that natural cycles exist and they do have a tremendous effect on time series and localized weather. Thus, I am not a denier – climate change exists. Most folks like me with any kinds of a science background readily agree to this. Rather, I’m a skeptic in that while I believe that Man may have had some effect on climate, I remain unconvinced that Man is totally responsible for it as the Eco-Socialists (who see it as a “crisis not to waste” in changing our economic and governance systems) and Climate Religionists (Gaia, from whom all good things flow and that all non-believers are heretics and should be jailed).
Of course, there will be those that have eternal blinders on. As Steve’s post shows (“Before They Erase It: In Feb 2021 US Had Lowerest Surface Temps in 30 Years“), our personal Climate Religionist commenter will use any angle to brush aside the SCIENCE! that varies from his religion.
(H/T: Gizmodo)
