The tropic arctic and propaganda

Today let’s dissect a news article from this week and fact- check
it for unproveable assumptions or untruths. I will highlight the
questionable bits in the news article I am quoting:

Scientists say Arctic was once tropical

“WASHINGTON
(AP) – Scientists have found what might have been the ideal ancient
vacation hotspot with a 74-degree Fahrenheit average temperature,
alligator ancestors and palm trees. It’s smack in the middle of the
Arctic.

“First-of-its-kind
core samples dug up from deep beneath the Arctic Ocean floor show that
55 million years ago an area near the North Pole was practically a
subtropical paradise, three new studies show.”

I wonder if those core samples had a label attached saying “55 MILLION
YEARS OLD!” No, of course not. So how do the scientists determine that
their core samples are 55 million years old? The article doesn’t say,
but a methold in common use is to look at the fossils in the rock. The
article says alligators and palm trees were present. Then you look up
alligators and palm trees on the geologic column, and it says the rock
they are in must be 55 million years old. How did they come up with the
geologic column? Evolutionary theory, silly!

Is there a fact anywhere that says these core samples MUST be 55
million years old? Noooooo … All we can really know is that the area
must have once been subtropical, and that alligators and palm trees
lived there, which died, and were buried in rock layers laid down by
water. (Let’s see, do we have any history which tells of catastrophic flooding even in the Arctic? Why yes, lots of it, in fact!)

“The
scientists say their findings are a glimpse backward into a much
warmer-than-thought polar region heated by run-amok greenhouse gases
that came about naturally.”

How
do the scientists know how the Arctic region was heated, back in the
days supposedly before humans walked the earth and there was no one
around to record what was happening? Good question: we have another
unproveable assumption. The news article makes the statement about
greenhouse gases as if it were fact, early on. But only if you read
much deeper into the article, do you pick up this bit of information:

“Millions
of years ago the Earth experienced an extended period of natural global
warming. But around 55 million years ago there was a sudden
supercharged spike of carbon dioxide that accelerated the greenhouse
effect.
Scientists
already knew this “thermal event” happened but are not sure what caused
it. Perhaps massive releases of methane from the ocean, the
continent-sized burning of trees, lots of volcanic eruptions.”

There
are so many assumptions in this one paragraph alone: the millions of
years mentioned twice; the carbon dioxide spike; the methane gas, tree
burning, and volcanic eruptions. My guess as to how they came up with
this ridiculous theory is that scientists have been told that CO2
causes the global greenhouse effect, and that methane gas from cattle
puts CO2 in the air, as does forest fires, as do volcanic eruptions.
Therefore the warming must have been caused by extra CO2 from methane
(of course it was from the ocean, everyone knows that cattle had not
evolved yet), forest fires, and volcanoes.

It is a house of cards built on one assumption after another. Now here
is a fact: plants breathe CO2. Who is to say that the more CO2 is
released into the atmosphere, the more plants grow to use it up, so
that an equilibrium of sorts is maintained?   ???   They
haven’t even done that study in today’s world, let alone to be
confident enough to exclude it from the possibilities affecting the ancient
world.

Conclusion: beware “news” articles which are propaganda vehicles in disguise.