Tortoises and Alligators in the Arctic – where it is night for six months of the year

At http://geology.com/press-release/tortoises-alligators-on-ellesmere/ … being Ellesmere Island in the high Arctic, north of Greenland. Millions of years ago tortoises and alligators thrived on the island – and endured darkness for six months of the year. I did notice this article elsewhere but passed it over – but it seems geologists appear to take it seriously. The key of course is temperature – in this instance, during the Eocene era. The paper was written in a manner that suggested it was tied, not just to AGW funding, but the global warming that is happening right now – and attempt to relate assumed Eocene global temperatures to the insignifican warm blip of the 1990s. The researchers found evidence it did not fall below freezing point on Ellesmere Island in the Eocene (published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters August 2010, Fricke et al) and had the kind of climate enjoyed in the swampy zones of SE North America (such as the Everglades). The idea of pole shift is excluded – and continental drift at a greater rate than currently assumed. The finds are completely understandable if Ellesmere Island in the Eocene was somewhere near the latitude of Louisiana or Florida of today. Why such evidence is used as a prop to AGW alarmism can only be explained by dollars – but other areas of research are suffering in the process. An outbreak of a new mutant of wheat rust has spread across East Africa and the Yemen into the Middle East and has the potential to threaten the world’s food supplies – yet only nominal funding is available. Global warming is a theory that is increasingly looking as if it is dead in the water and its major advocates as greenback hungry (a modern form of gold fever). Meanwhile, if there is a shortfall in global wheat crops people may starve – but that might satisfy Malthusian elements in the AGW faith.