Sounds dirty, but no, it's three papers being published in Nature this week (1, 2, 3 also Nature News and lay article) suggest that about 50 million years ago (about 50 years before the earth was formed by God) the polar regions were hot hot hot. Water temperatures may have been as high as 74 degrees and the climate represented Florida more than the polar tundra of today.

Very interesting, people tend to think the Earth will always be the way it is now, more or less, but the potential for extreme variation is actually pretty striking. Not suggesting this kind of change might happen any time soon, but it gives us an idea of the potential variation the earth can throw at as.

In related global warming news, Al Gore is being swiftboated for his new movie, and two new papers link global warming to hurricane strength. I've heard the guys arguing this point to death on NPR, the NOAA scientist being the opponent of this hypothesis and the MIT/Purdue people being the proponents of the link. But don't let the debate fool you, this is one of the areas of legitimate debate over global warming science, neither side is disputing the existence of warming, but they are arguing over the climate models indicating a direct effect on hurricanes from warming.