Bundle Up For the Next Ten Million Years

The following science report came through the digital grapevine today:

Mummified forest offers glimpse of a warmer Arctic

Melting glaciers on Ellesmere Island reveal branches and trunks from millions of years ago, when the North was a temperate zone

By Randy Boswell, Postmedia News, Montreal Gazette, December 17, 2010 [here]

A research team probing a melting glacier near Canada’s northernmost point of land has discovered a “mummified” forest that’s at least two million years old, with “perfectly preserved” tree trunks, branches and leaves from a time when the Arctic was transforming from a temperate environment into the ecological ice box it’s been for millennia.

The present-day thaw at the north end of Ellesmere Island — another sign of the widespread warming now taking hold of Canada’s polar frontier — has served up intact spruce and birch trees believed to have been buried in a landslide during the Neogene period of Earth history between two million and eight million years ago.

The U.S. scientists studying the ancient forest, who say the liberation of the long-frozen relics will offer a unique window on a lost world, are also warning that pent-up carbon released from such sites across the Arctic could worsen the modern-day climate change being driven by human activity. … [more]

Reality check: The paleo boreotemperate forest (with boreotropical elements) was extant for ~100 million years, or as long as modern “trees” have been in existence. In fact, paleobotanists have to go back ~250 million years to the Permian-Triassic boundary to find conditions similar to today — it has only been for the last 2 million years that the Earth has been locked in a similar deep freeze.

Despite 250 million years of warmth, the seas did not boil away into outer space, life on Earth did not come to a screeching halt, the continents were not submerged, there were no searing deserts, and the atmosphere did not burst into flame.

That’s right, sports fans. Despite all the hysterical Thermageddon sky-is-burning raging paranoia trumpeted by mega-crooks and their bug-eyed dimwit followers, it turns out that a warmer Earth was a more abundant, diverse, life-giving planet. For hundreds of millions of years.

The scientists who made the discovery noted above found nothing that hasn’t been thoroughly investigated already. See: Late Cretaceous and Cenozoic History of North American Vegetation by Alan Graham (1999) Oxford Univ. Press.

But they did feel compelled to issue a WARNING. Hold on to your pants, the Earth might get warm again someday.

Probably not for 10 million years, though, which is time it is estimated that it will take for Antarctica to tectonically drift away from the South Pole. You see, the presence of a continent on a pole is what causes Snowball Earth.

All this is well-known to the researchers above, but they have to toe the party line, no matter how glaringly unscientific that party line might be, in order to keep their jobs as government-funded scientists.

Government-funding of science is killing science. Humanity gets stupider every day because politicians, the most knuckle-dragging throwbacks of our species, hold the purse strings of science.

Any gummit-funded science-schmuck who wants a steady paycheck has to totally bend, subvert, and/or deny his/her scientific findings until they match the Lunacy of the Overseers.

But so what? Who needs science anyway? Better to huddle, starving, in the cold and dark than to free the mind, explore Creation, and otherwise advance knowledge. Remain stupid, serve your masters, and keep your eyes, ears, and mouth shut. Reality bites. Be delusional. It is your feudal duty as a serf.

17 Dec 2010, 2:18pm
by Al B.


Then there is this case where some scientists have departed the reservation. Perhaps there is hope for science after all, thanks to clear-thinking people like Joanne Nova:

A journalist who confuses journalism with propaganda

By Joanne Nova, JoNova, December 18th, 2010 [here]

In the print edition of The Australian the headline read “Newspapers should lead the country”.

David McKnight’s criticism of The Australian makes a good case study of the intellectual collapse of Australian universities.

Here is a UNSW “Senior Research Fellow” in journalism who contradicts himself, fails by his own reasoning, does little research, breaks at least three laws of logic, and rests his entire argument on an assumption that he provides no evidence for. Most disturbingly — like a crack through the façade of Western intellectual vigour — he actually asserts that the role of a national newspaper is to “give leadership”. Bask for a moment in the inanity of this declaration that newspapers “are our leaders”. Last time I looked at our ballot papers, none of the people running to lead our nation had a name like “Sir Sydney Morning Herald”. Didn’t he notice that we live in a country that chooses its leaders through elections?

The role of a national newspaper is to report all the substantiated arguments and filter out the poorly reasoned ones (like his), so the readers can make up their own minds.

The point of the “free press” is surely for the press to be free to ask the most searching questions on any topic. Yet here is a supposed authority on journalism attacking The Australian for printing views of scientists? And these scientists that McKnight wants to silence are not just the odd rare heretic. The swelling ranks of sceptical scientists is now the largest whistle-blowing cohort in science ever seen. … [more]

17 Dec 2010, 4:37pm
by Mike


Mummified? Mummified? The freaking trees were frozen and they’re still frozen. They’ve been frozen so long all the H2O is gone, so I guess you could call them dessicated. But mummies got that way with embalming fluids.

Evidently the “scientists” at Ohio State don’t know the difference between mummified and frozen! They probably think the ancient Egyptians put their dead pharaohs in deep freeze lockers! Hey, before you cook that Christmas turkey, be sure to de-mummify it!

Science marches backwards.

17 Dec 2010, 4:57pm
by Mike


Fossils from Ellesmere Island reveal a much-warmer past

by Jane George, Nunatsiaq News, August 26, 2010 [here]

Ellesmere Island today: its Strathcona fossil forest, with its 50-million-year-old tree trunks, is typical of the High Arctic sites scientists study…

From her study of these fossils, Jaelyn Eberle from the Univ. of Colorado has determined that some 53 million years ago temperatures on Ellesmere Island averaged from 19 to 20 C during the warmer months and from 0 to 3.5 C during the colder period of the year.

This means the winter temperatures probably never fell below freezing and the summers were pleasant, Eberle told Nunatsiaq News.

That’s unlike today, when the average annual temperature for Ellesmere hovers around -19 C. …

Get that? -19°C is below freezing. Way below freezing. Like -50°C in the winter. Eureka Station on Ellesmere Island has the lowest average annual temperature and least precipitation of any weather station in Canada. Look it up.

17 Dec 2010, 11:20pm
by Bob Zybach


That Ellesmere Island could probably use a little more Global Warming. Then “scientists” like Jaelyn Eberle could take some measurements to see how “mummified” those forests actually are.

WTF?!?

Didn’t science use to have rules of some kind for this type of “research?” Who’s paying for this crap? Taxpayers?

Reply: Who else? Another thing to note while watching the Great Carbon Dioxide Freakout is that if it ever gets warm enough to generate CO2 from Ellesmere Island fossil trees, then it will also become warm enough to grow new trees that will capture the CO2!!!! It’s a cycle, sports fans! Net zero.

18 Dec 2010, 6:04pm
by YPmule


Many years ago, my smarter half was working as a geologist up on the North Slope in Alaska. He said they were drilling thru “mud” and at around 2000 feet the samples were coming up with chunks of trees. Not petrified.

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