Aloha to Palm Trees in the Arctic: Blame it on Climate Change

An inconvenient truth for the climate change theorists.

PALMS flourished in the Arctic during a brief sweltering period about 50 million years ago, according to a study that hints at big gaps in scientific understanding of modern climate change.

The Arctic “would have looked very similar to the vegetation we now see in Florida,” Appy Sluijs of Utrecht University in the Netherlands said.

Evidence of palms has never been found so far north before.

The scientists, sampling sediments on a ridge on the seabed that was about 500km from the North Pole 53.5 million years ago, found pollens of ancient palms as well as of conifers, oaks, pecans and other trees.

“The presence of palm pollen implies that coldest month mean temperatures over the Arctic land masses were no less than 8C, the scientists, based in the Netherlands and Germany, wrote in the journal Nature Geoscience.