Well, duh...

From the NYT via Drudge-

Scientists Say Arctic Once Was Tropical -- Before Mankind!

The first detailed analysis of an extraordinary climatic and biological record from the seabed near the North Pole shows that 55 million years ago the Arctic Ocean was much warmer than scientists imagined — a Floridian year-round average of 74 degrees.

The findings, published today in three papers in the journal Nature, fill in a blank spot in scientists' understanding of climate history. And while they show that much remains to be learned about climate change, they suggest that scientists have greatly underestimated the power of heat-trapping gases to warm the Arctic.

Previous computer simulations, done without the benefit of seabed sampling, did not suggest an ancient Arctic that was nearly so warm, the authors said. So the simulations must have missed elements that lead to greater warming.

They missed something? Ya think? And no humans anywhere to be found! Though they (the authors of the NYT article, not the researchers)had to get in a dig about greenhouse gases controlling climate shifts:

Experts not connected with the studies say they support the idea that heat-trapping gases — not slight variations in Earth's orbit — largely determine warming and cooling.

"The new research provides additional important evidence that greenhouse-gas changes controlled much of climate history, which strengthens the argument that greenhouse-gas changes are likely to control much of the climate future," said one such expert, Richard B. Alley, a geoscientist at Pennsylvania State University.

In fact, it does nothing of the kind. And elsewhere:

Almost all climate experts agree that the present-day gas buildup is predominantly a result of emissions from smokestacks, tailpipes and burning forests.

No they don't. Anthropogenic sources of CO2 (which is what you get from combustion)are currently thought to be about 6% of the total. The rest are natural sources. There is also a good deal of evidence that high temperatures lead to increased atmospheric CO2, not the other way around. Leave it to the NYT to try to make reality conform to their own vision - "humans HAVE to be causing climate change". Anyway, see ecoEnquirer for the likely results of global warming. I can't wait!

Read it all. (the NYT article)

Update: You won't see this one in the NYT ever. It's in Geophysical Rsearch Letters, which means it's fairly technical, but here's an extract:

"We investigate global temperature changes using surface as well as satellite measurements and
show that lower tropospheric temperature trends for the period 1979–2001 are spatially correlated to anthropogenic surface CO2 emissions, which we use as a measure of
industrialization. Furthermore, temperature trends for the regions not spatially correlated with these CO2 emissions are considerably smaller or even negligible for some of the
satellite data. We also show, using the same measure, that two important climate models do not reproduce the geographical climate response to all known forcings as found in the observed temperature trends. We speculate that the observed surface temperature changes might be a result of local surface heating processes and not related to radiative greenhouse gas forcing."

In other words, the models are not reproducing reality, there's observed warming in industrial areas but not so much in other areas, and the warming that is occurring may be due to local processes, not greenhouse gases. They're speculating about this last part, but they admit they're speculating, which is more than the people at Earth Defense or the IPCC do.