NEWS - Hanging out in Arctic circles?

OK. Apparently, the scientific community is mulling over new data that suggests the Arctic once had a climate more like present day Florida. I'm not surprised that two major points about global warming were neglected here; everyone seems to ignore them. What really surprised me is that one important point about the data itself, seem to have been neglected in what I've read.

That article, on LiveScience.com, states, "Unlike today's warming, however, the ancient rise in temperature was not associated with human activity, of course." Since only people who get their natural history from "The Flintstones" believe people were on the Earth 55 million years ago, that's belaboring the obvious. However, assuming global warming is happening today, why assume it is caused by human activity? After all, in this earlier instance, it wasn't--so isn't it at least possible that it isn't this time either?

An article in the Houston Chronicle also accepts the traditional, environmentalist global warming hypothesis. One paragraph from that article states,

"What's troubling is that this suggests that the current projections that say the Earth will grow warmer by several degrees over the next century may be on the low end, said the study's lead author, Appy Sluijs of the Institute of Environmental Biology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands."

I will grant that if global warming is happening according to the common hypothesis, then this data suggests things may get a lot hotter. The flipside, though, is that the Earth--even in this extreme example, was still habitable. The doomsayers will be quick to point out that much of the world would become inhospitably hot; it's easy to forget that while some of the world is already too hot for us, much of the world is also inhospitably cold, and those parts will become suitable for agriculture and habitation. The bottom line is that I've not yet seen anything to make me believe that global warming would be the end of the world.

I must admit, however, my skepticism about the data is a point made only by one letter to the editor in the Bucks County Courier Times (and then, at that, the letter writer uses the point to as proof that modern global warming is caused by pollution). The continents move. The Arctic Ocean seafloor wasn't always near the north pole. I don't believe I could have completely missed hearing about a major breakthrough in geology that a refutation of plate tectonics theory would be. No one seems to be addressing the important question: were the warmer temperatures simply a consequence of that place on the plate being at a lower latitude? I suppose it's possible the core sample came from someplace that was near the north pole 55 million years ago; however, the articles didn't explicitly state that--they simply seem to assume it. I would note that both articles' authors felt the need to clarify that the ancient global warming was not caused human activity. Accounting for continental drift is as basic a point, but a less obvious one than noting that people weren't around.