Since a wacko minority disbelieves the earth is 44,000 years old, this significant information is irrelevant to them, but pretty impressive --- there surely will be additional discoveries revealed as Global Warming moves forward without abatement:
Arctic warmth - unprecedented in 44,000 years, reveals ancient moss
Ancient moss samples exposed by modern Arctic warming have been found to date as far back as 44,000 years ago, according to radiocarbon dating.When the temperature rises on Baffin Island, in the Canadian high Arctic, ancient Polytrichum mosses, trapped beneath the ice for thousands of years, are exposed.
Using radiocarbon dating, new research in Geophysical Research Letters has calculated the age of relic moss samples that have been exposed by modern Arctic warming. Since the moss samples would have been destroyed by erosion had they been previously exposed, the authors suggest that the temperatures in the Arctic are warmer than during any sustained period since the mosses were originally buried.The records suggest that in general, the eastern Canadian Arctic is warmer now than in any century in the past 5,000 years, and in some places, modern temperatures are unprecedented in at least the past 44,000 years. The observations, the authors suggest, show that modern Arctic warming far exceeds the bounds of historical natural variability.
"The great time these plants have been entombed in ice, and their current exposure, is the first direct evidence that present summer warmth in the Eastern Canadian Arctic now exceeds the peak warmth there in the Early Holocene era", said Gifford Miller, from the University of Colorado. "Our findings add additional evidence to the growing consensus that anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases have now resulted in unprecedented recent summer warmth that is well outside the range of that attributable to natural climate variability."
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/01/22/1271617/-Arctic-warmth-unprecedented-in-44-000-years-reveals-ancient-moss?detail=emailGOProud co-founder gives up, leaves Republican Party
“I just came to the realization that the Republican Party doesn’t represent my principles and values,” LaSalvia told POLITICO. “I’m a small government conservative and they’re for big government. They’re happy to have big government as long as they’re in charge. More importantly, I don’t tolerate bigotry of any kind, whether it’s anti-gay bigotry, anti-Muslim bigotry. And they do and that’s just not OK with me.”That may be the slowest damn realization in the history of people having realizations. I don't mean to pick on the poor guy, but this is a man who has spent five years with his hand on an oven burner suddenly phoning up a reporter and saying "You know what? Fire hot." Surely there has to be more to it than that, and LaSalvia has a long list of recent well-known examples, though I think he still misdiagnoses the problem:
I was astonished when Ken Cuccinelli was embraced as an acceptable candidate. To me, his views about gay Americans or Americans who are different from him are simply unacceptable in this day and age. I was astonished to see the party embrace him as their nominee. I likened it at the time to David Duke running in the early ‘90s. That’s not acceptable now. The fact that that doesn’t register with them is disturbing to me. [...]The whole culture of the party is just not what I had always worked for, and I think though that the fact that they are so out of touch culturally is the biggest issue for me. That’s something that can’t be dealt with with policy changes or messaging changes. That’s about who they are. To me, that is the biggest issue, that the leadership in the party is so out of touch culturally that I don’t think there’s any hope for them.True enough, but the worse interpretation is that the leadership in the party is in fact precisely "in touch" with the culture of the party; Ken Cuccinelli did not rise to fame in a vacuum, and Mitt Romney did not distance himself from GOProud because Mitt Romney does not like gay people, but because Mitt Romney felt he could not gain the support of the Republican base if they saw him treating gay Americans with respect. The party leaders are subservient to the base, and it's the base that demands bigotry. The business wing of the party doesn't give a damn whether the party is bigoted or not, so long as the tax breaks keep coming.Give LaSalvia credit, though, he's certainly blunt.
“I think there’s a cultural problem within the Republican Party that’s beyond fixing. [...] I don’t think they can win a national election again. Pull the plug on the patient, the party’s brain dead.”
See there? And you thought we couldn't find common ground.
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