One of the great things about WUWT is that people from all walks of life frequent here. We have PhD’s right down to Average Joe that read and post comments here. Everyone has something to contribute.
A general truism that I’ve noticed through life is that the people that actually work “hands on” with the things they study often know far more about them than the people that study them from afar. As in the case of the surface stations project, top scientists missed the fact that many of the climate monitoring stations are poorly sited because they never bothered to visit them to check the measurement environment. Yet the people in the field knew. Some scientists simply accepted the data the stations produced at face value and study its patterns, coaxing out details statistically. Such is the case with Briffa and Yamal tree rings apparently, since the tree ring data was gathered by others, field researchers Hantemirov and Shiyatov.
American Indians have been said to be far more in tune with the patterns of the earth than modern man. They had to be, survival depended on it. They weren’t insulated by technology as we are. Likewise somebody who works in the forest whose daily livelihood is connected to trees might know a bit more about their growth than somebody sitting behind a desk.
WUWT commenter “Caleb”, who has worked with trees for 50 years, wrote this extraordinary essay on Briffa’s lone tree core known as YAD061, which has a pronounced 8 sigma effect on the set of 10 tree cores Briffa used in his study. Caleb’s essay is in comments here, which I’m elevating to a full post. While we may never know the true growth driver for YAD06, this is one possible explanation.
Guest comment by Caleb Shaw:
I’ve worked outside since I was a small boy in the 1950’s, and have cut down hundreds of trees. I always check out the rings, for every tree has its own story.
I’ve seen some rather neat tricks pulled off by trees, especially concerning how far they can reach with their roots to find fertilizer or moisture. For example, sugar maple roots will reach, in some cases, well over a hundred feet, and grow a swift net of roots in the peat moss surrounding a lady’s azalea’s root ball, so that the azalea withers, for the maple steals all its water.
I’ve also seen tired old maples perk right up, when a pile of manure is heaped out in a pasture a hundred feet away, and later have seen the tree’s rings, when it was cut down, show its growth surged while that manure was available.
After fifty years you learn a thing or two, even if you don’t take any science classes or major in climatology, and I’ve had a hunch many of the tree-ring theories were bunkum, right from the start.
The bristlecone records seemed a lousy proxy, because at the altitude where they grow it is below freezing nearly every night, and daytime temperatures are only above freezing for something like 10% of the year. They live on the borderline of existence, for trees, because trees go dormant when water freezes. (As soon as it drops below freezing the sap stops dripping into the sugar maple buckets.) Therefore the bristlecone pines were dormant 90% of all days and 99% of all nights, in a sense failing to collect temperature data all that time, yet they were supposedly a very important proxy for the entire planet. To that I just muttered “bunkum.”
But there were other trees in other places. I was skeptical about the data, but until I saw so much was based on a single tree, YAD061, I couldn’t be sure I could just say “bunkum.”
YAD061 looks very much like a tree that grew up in the shade of its elders, and therefore grew slowly, until age or ice-storms or insects removed the elders and the shade. Then, with sunshine and the rotting remains of its elders to feed it, the tree could take off.
I have seen growth patterns much like YAD061 in the rings of many stumps in New Hampshire, and not once have I thought it showed a sign of global warming, or of increased levels of CO2 in the air. Rather the cause is far more simple: A childhood in the under-story, followed by a tree’s “day in the sun.”
Dr. Briffa should spend less time gazing at computer screens, and actually get out and associate with trees more. At the very least, it might be good for his health.
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Yup, that was my assessment of the situation on the other YAD061 thread. It seems rather intuitive to me.
.
ralph (14:55:35) :
All this proves, is that when a tree gets tall enough to get its head above the tree-canopy, it grows quicker. Axiomatic, one would have thought. And this has been interpreted as Global Warming????
Oh, dear. Its back to the Dark Ages of science.
Stunning. I see an analogy in fishery scientists and fishermen.
The science there seems disconnected from reality also.
Or in fewer words:
I’ll see your PhD and published papers and raise you with first hand knowledge and wisdom.
That was awesome.
Please, don’t take this guy seriously. His post, although demonstrating a way with words, was not peer reviewed by experts in the field ;).
Beyond awesome in fact.
You know this is just piss in the wind
he has no phd and no Goverment funding, no-one will believe this sh*t 😀
Great post.
“Therefore the bristlecone pines were dormant 90% of all days and 99% of all nights, in a sense failing to collect temperature data all that time,”
That’s actually why they’re useful. In a ‘hot year’, those same numbers would be, say, 85% and 99%. Versus the cold year of 95% and 99%.
A three-fold change in the time spent growing is a dramatic effect.
On the other hand, picture the tree outside my house in Seattle. In a cold year, it might freeze solid enough to stop growth for, say, 21 nights. That is:
You’d be trying to measure the difference in growth based on 365 days of growth versus 355 days of growth. And the ‘hot’ years would be identical to a normal year. So there is very little “swing” in the size of the rings (based on temperature alone) if the trees are unstressed.
Ditto!
Awesome! 🙂
Andrew
Consciousness vs. intelligence, actual reality vs. virtual reality, facts vs. wishful thinking.
I’d have thought that if protecting developing countries from global warming was going to cost $100bn per year and that so much rests on one tree someone might have gone to check by now.
“Please, don’t take this guy seriously. His post, although demonstrating a way with words, was not peer reviewed by experts in the field ;).”
Robinson
I don’t know. Maybe he showed it to the forester in the next field….?
Excellent….just excellent.
It is about time we felled the tree that AGW was built upon. Way to go Caleb!
Average Joe Rocks!
Brent in Calgary
quote “His post, although demonstrating a way with words, was not peer reviewed by experts in the field ;).”
Let’s make sure to correct that deficiency.
Does anyone know any loggers? Australian, Austrian, Swiss, maybe some Indonesians, that should get enough knowledgeable people to review his comments. Certainly, it would get enough folks with common sense enough to shed light on the “other” experts.
Trees with 90% down time – sheesh! Sounds like some Government employees I’ve seen.
Excellent post! Thanks for elevating it Anthony!
This is actually a huge mistake of our time, taking PhD’s at their word. I went through two degrees of physics and let me tell you, even very smart people from very good schools who took very difficult paths to professorship can indeed be very very ignorant.
People will attack me for saying this, but it’s the truth.
If I could quote Leonardo da Vinci – “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” – excellent post.
My ad hominem attack on Caleb:
1. He is not using his real name, therefore the reasonable information he presents is invalid.
2. He is not a climatologist, so he is not qualified to speak.
3. My tree growth computer model, which includes the impact of manure, supports the Hockey Stick and the Team.
4. Caleb is no doubt funded by Big Oil.
5. Maple trees and/or maple syrup are not proxies for bristlecone pines or computer climate models.
6. His comment did not come in the form of a Hadley CRU peer-reviewed scientific paper.
7. The science is in, so Caleb’s point is moot anyway. The debate is over.
8. He posted on WUWT, and is therefore discredited.
“YAD061 looks very much like a tree that grew up in the shade of its elders, and therefore grew slowly, until age or ice-storms or insects removed the elders and the shade. Then, with sunshine and the rotting remains of its elders to feed it, the tree could take off.”
In a temperate forest often all that needs to give way is a few trees whose boughs may overhang the young tree to see a surge.
Above the Arctic Circle you probably see the greatest surges when an acre or more of competition, including other young competitors to give way as the sunbeams shine at so low of an angle.
Here’s a question: Has Briffa actually been to the Yamal peninsula?
Great story Caleb, and one that brings a little of perspective to the issue. One thing you might consider however is that the canopy of the broadleaf hardwood forest of the NE is quite different than that of the boreal larch forest of the Yamal.
The photo that Anthony provided above looks like the boreal forest I spent many years working in up in northern Canada. These’s not a lot of shade there and its really a single rather than multi-canopy environment. The amount of root space is also quite different due to the presence of permafrost.
I do agree though with the general point you make though. Too many folks in climate science seem to do all their work in front of computers and do not consider field conditions when they make their analyses or conclusion. This may not be related to why Briffa’s data archive was missing the metadata, but I have to wonder.
Tree rings may be missinterpreted. Tree LINES cannot.
Rashit M. Hantemirov* and Stepan G. Shiyatov (2002) A continuous multimillennial ring-width chronology in Yamal, northwestern Siberia. The Holocene 12,6 pp. 717–726
http://www.nosams.whoi.edu/PDFs/papers/Holocene_v12a.pdf
This is the paper that provided the (unused) Yamal data.
Look at page 720. It shows how tree lines have moved SOUTH over the last 700 years. Tree line reflect minimum growth temperatures.
It has been getting progressively COLDER.
Dr. Keiller:
This is your field of expertise not mine, but wouldn’t a simple tree line reconstruction of temperatures be complicated by forest succession and species changes?
Alan S. Blue wrote:
If you want your trees to validate global warming, then I agree. If, however, you want your trees to measure average temperature throughout the year, then having them be dormant over 90% of the time is not going to tell you anything.
Say the same thing happened with a thermometer used to measure air temperature: the liquid in the thermometer is water. Totally useless if put in an area where the temperature drops below freezing 90% of the time. You will never be able to determine the average temperature throughout the year.
I think this is better than “Fanfare For Common Man” (Copeland) in that, as “The Plumber” in a previous thread did, asked a basic question – devoid of complex wording, stripped of all but very plain meaning. Caleb and “The Plumber” both say “Tell me why (this) is so?” seeing knowledge and understanding.
As in a previous post, I say this (and other blogs) provide an opportunity for excellent scientists (You know who you are) to rub shoulders with (sarc on) the great unwashed (sarc off) who ask those questions you didn’t think to consider. This is true peer review – human to human – how do we use well and wisely this wonderful planet we live on?
Thank you all, and thank you Anthony and the moderators for your hard work.
Mike Bentley