New Scientist: South America’s tropical forests flourished when temperatures skyrocketed 56 million years ago. Could this mean that climate change will spare the Amazon? Carlos Jaramillo of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama, and colleagues excavated pollen and other plant remains from three sites in Colombia and Venezuela. Their samples span the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when soaring levels of greenhouse gases caused global temperatures to rise by 5°C in about 10,000…