As the temps in the Western U.S. soar to new records, it's probably very easy for us to think apocalyptic thoughts about the impact of global climate change. Look - it's clearly getting hotter! As I've mentioned recently, Greenland is melting quite rapidly, which is creating a unique opportunity to view evidence on the past. According to BBC News, a new article in the journal Science is showing that Greenland may well have been a lush, forested place a mere 450,000 years ago. If you think back to the tree ring data that Al Gore uses in An Inconvenient Truth, which shows a natural series of peaks and valleys over the past 400,000 years - correlating to increases in temp/CO2 and then mini ice ages - then this new data should jump out at you. The tree rings don't go back farther than 400k years. Hmmm. Might that be because of a major global climate shift? To me, an interesting question, and one that I still maintain we'll see played out in the next 50 years...
