“Increasing temperatures at high altitudes are fueling the post-1950 growth spurt seen in bristlecone pines, the world’s oldest trees, according to new research.”
[...]
“There is increasingly rapid warming in western North America,” said Hughes, a UA Regents’ Professor of dendrochronology. “The higher you go, the faster it’s warming. We think our finding may be part of that whole phenomenon.”

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091116163206.htm

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/11/13/0903029106

I am fond of puns, but that connection had not occurred to me. Usually I label the obscure puns. :)

Is that a bad pun, relating to The Elephants Back, a broad mountain just down the trail from Round Top Lake?

Jon Adams (17:21:24) :

One more puzzle piece.

Perhaps, we need more backpackers with GPS and cameras…

I bet a systematic search of the web for back packer pictures of popular destination lakes would yield at least 20 years worth of record. Those destination lakes are very frequently photographed to document trips, and in all the “hiking guides” on the web an enterprising graduate student could dig though google searches for peoples hiking documentary blogs and pull up lots of old pictures of the same or very similar view.

It is not uncommon for folks to include pictures of “the last time we were here” shots showing children at a young age etc.

Larry

That said, I’d like to respond to phlogiston (14:20:28):
“Is it possible to date the clone-groups of Whitebark Pines at Round Top Lake – when each one began? Perhaps carbon dating?”

Dating an individual clone-group is not a trivial exercise. If expense was not a consideration, we could go with DNA. Scientists are already doing that in the Mitochondrial Eve (ME) research. It’s a 4-step process:
1. Quantitate the differences in mitochondrial DNA from living humans from all over the world.
2. Assume that there was a single ME for all living humans.
3. Measure the current mutation rate for human mitochondrial DNA (mDNA), and assume that it’s essentially constant.
4. Use the above plus random-walk theory to arrive at a rough estimate for a hypothetical ME.

As is the case with all measurement-based quantities, there are uncertainties and nuances. For openers, ME is not unique.

If we include the 40-thousand-year-old remains of Mungo Man from New South Wales (in which some mDNA has been preserved) in our sample, then that ME is considerably older than the one that’s commonly reported in the popular press.

In the case of the clone-groups at Round Top Lake, we could take DNA samples from trees at opposite ends of the clump, and attempt to use a similar methodology. However at best, we’d only get a ballpark figure for the age of the clone-group.

Big Al has the same ulcer acting up from CCI and PETA.
I like to think, as he reachs for the antacid, that some few of those calcium tablets he pops, are popped on our account.

Thanks for posting that [unintentionally] funny link. Some choice quotes:

***
“In the sense of reducing atmospheric CO2 concentrations, it is actually a good thing that these old trees are kicking into life again,” says Jinbao Li of the Tree Ring Lab at Columbia University in Pallisades, New York.

***

“This is a cautionary tale,” says Michael Mann, who uses tree rings to gain insights into past climates at Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Center, most famously to create the ‘hockey stick’ graph showing an increase in temperature. “Only the human impact of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations can explain that warming.”

[But they don't mention that Mann's hokey stick graph has been repeatedly debunked.]

***

Christof Bigler… says that if the ancient trees grow more rapidly they may simply die younger.
***

“Temperature only explains about a quarter of the variance in ring-widths, so CO2 fertilisation could still play a minor role.”

Huh? Then what explains the rest of the growth? They don’t say.

Round Top Lake

Curt (18:34:46) :

Fallen Leaf Lake, Lake Tahoe

Erik (04:36:29) :

Lake Pietsaure, next to Saltaluokta, Sweden.

Good point. I believe USHCN does some adjustment, but this is data before it has been though the GIStemp homogenisation process. The Giss site has been down so I couldn’t check last night.
Tahoe City – GIStemp pre-homogenisation:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=425724880010&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Tahoe City – GIStemp post-homogenisation:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=425724880010&data_set=2&num_neighbors=1

Not one of the worst adjustments – for a “Hall of Shame” (IMHO) see:
http://diggingintheclay.blogspot.com/2009/11/how-would-you-like-your-climate-trends.html

The obvious question is, which part of a suckered tree mass to you core? The different suckers have time-variable interactions with each other, with ones now dead, whith new ones just sprouting. It’s like a big family of children dividing up the breakfast porridge. Some will end up with more tree ring than others, in a manner unpredictable, that has a good chance to interfere with the temperature record.

It would still be in the realm of SPDC to core them all. It’s a relatively small cluster. Taking two cores at 90 degree angles from each tree (assuming permission could be obtained) would still be in the SPDC realm. How these then should be averaged would be a whole different ball game, requiring some statistical and dendro skills. This averaging of the cluster might show believable growth curves.

Regardless of the warming record shown by rings, Mr. Fields says that one objective is to get a record of the elder tree’s absolute age, to see whether it started at a warmer period. This an SPD-expedition could accomplish with relative ease.

Hints of that occured in the 1840′s and 1870′s in California.
The Indian legends of rivers going dry in N. Calif in 1840′s are recently found to tie into the Columbia River record lows, and in 1870′s the Stanislaus and Mokelumne Rivers went dry.
In the Younger Dryas period, the State is modelled as being Semi-Arid.

In Sami, or Lappish if you wish, Pietsaure means the “Pine lake”. There are no pines there now, there haven’t been any for maybe 3000 years, but the name remains.

Here is a link that discusses some of this. In Nordic languages though:
http://www.arkeologiforum.se/forum/index.php?topic=1679.140

This ties in well with scaninavian studies on tree line heights.