We've had tropical weather in the Arctic and it follows the same must have occurred in the Antarctic. Now, a rock core on the sea bed off the cold continent has revealed, from pollen grains therein, that palm trees and baobabs once grew upwind of the South Pole – 50 million years ago. However, the study, steeped in uniformitarian clogs to slow things down, even the brain, says the explanation is that it was an intensive warming phase in global climate – see http://phys.org/print263041092.html. As co2 is not warming the climate in the modern world is it likely it did so in the palaeo world? The study, published in Nature, which has a history of making hay with the CAGW money feast, even rolling in the hay with politicians that see co2 emissions as the ultimate tax foist, taxing fresh air with no requirement for them to actually come up with anything tangible in return but supplying mountains of the stuff to boost the coffers to spend even more vaingloriously on among other things CAGW research and PR hype. It's a circular bean feast it seems – yet the odd pea keeps popping out of the thimble. Is this paper one of them? Does it fly in the face of the glaringly obvious? It assures us that c02 was twice as high as it is today 50 million years ago, and this is what set in motion the global warming that caused exotic plants to grow at the Poles and we must be aware that the same thing might happen again, in the nearest future if the blurb is right. If current emissions continue unabated we will all be having our holidays on a sandy beach at the bottom of the world – unless we are drowned by all that melting ice. The computer models show just how this is going to happen – but I don't suppose movement at the Poles is programmed into those computer models.
On the blogosphere there is a lot of mixed yelling over a pre-release by first Muller and the BEST team and then countered by an Anthony Watts et al paper that contradicts most of what the former has been saying. Even the news sleuths on MSM are a bit confused by it all – and they don't usually look much further than what is supplied by the universities and the PR people touting the CAGW meme. The dust needs to settle a bit to get a clear handle on how all this is going to pan out. You can of course read the debate at http://wattsupwiththat.com and at www.climateaudit.org or www.bishop-hill.net (among others).