"New research shoes that average summer temperatures in the Canadian Arctic are the highest in at least 44,000 years."

"Plenty of studies have shown that the Arctic is warming and that the ice caps are melting, but how does it compare to the past, and how serious is it?

New research shows that average summer temperatures in the Canadian Arctic over the last century are the highest in the last 44,000 years, and perhaps the highest in 120,000 years.

'The key piece here is just how unprecedented the warming of Arctic Canada is,' Gifford Miller, a researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said in a joint statement from the school and the publisher of the journal Geophysical Researcher Letters, in which the study by Miller and his colleagues was published online this week. 'This study really says the warming we are seeing is outside any kind of known natural variability, and it has to be due to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.'"

Douglas Main reports for Livescience/Christian Science Monitor October 25, 2013. [2]