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Wednesday, October 30th, 2013

Arctic Temperatures at 44,000-year High Because of Greenhouse Gases

Author:    
Source:     Aljazeera America
Publication Date:     October 27, 2013 11:00PM ET
 Link: Arctic Temperatures at 44,000-year High Because of Greenhouse Gases
Stephan:   I still get climate denier emails, and a friend wrote to tell me that he had just come from a presentation by a man who presents himself as a research based futurist, who proclaimed he had done a lot of 'research' and found no evidence of human mediated climate change. I have gone from thinking of people like this as willfully ignorant morons, to seeing them as a toxic obfuscating force in society.

The average summer temperature in the eastern Canadian Arctic is higher than in any previous century in the past 44,000 years – and perhaps the highest in 120,000 years – reflecting what scientists call an unprecedented warming of the region due to climate change, according to a new study by the University of Colorado, Boulder.

‘This study really says the warming we are seeing is outside any kind of known natural variability, and it has to be due to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,’ Gifford Miller, a study leader, said in a joint statement from the school and the publisher of the journal Geophysical Researcher Letters, which published the findings this week.

The study, according to the statement, presents the first direct evidence that the present warmth in the Canadian Arctic exceeds the peak warmth there when Earth’s last glacial period ended, about 11,700 years ago. In the early stages of that period, the amount of the sun’s energy reaching the Northern Hemisphere during summer months was roughly 9 percent greater than today, causing world sea levels to rise about 115 feet.

Researchers took dead moss clumps from receding ice caps on Baffin Island, the world’s fifth-largest island, west of Greenland, and […]

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