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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The Twelve Disciples set of cores back up what Caleb said. The other Eleven Disciples tell us that the Twelfth is an outliar. (Yep, I mean outLIAR! – an out and out liar 🙂 There was something different about the tree, probably something about its environment, just as Caleb said.
And the name of the Twelfth Tree shall be Judas.
**********************
rbateman (16:24:57) :
Good job, Caleb.
For a tree that has evolved to take full advantage of scarce sunlight, the Siberian Larch did exactly what nature programmed it to do…take off. I was thinking a wound healed or two trees joining.
***************
Or maybe Judas experienced good fortune when one of his fellows fell around his base. Like in the picture above.
Caleb’s post neatly brings to mind that old computer adage,
“Bull Shit in – Bull Shit out,”
Ha HA Robinson (13:34:58) :
Please, don’t take this guy seriously. His post, although demonstrating a way with words, was not peer reviewed by experts in the field ;).
Our erstwhile Team experts never get into the field
Concise and succinct description of influences on tree growth. Good post.
When i look at the 12 graphs, the YAD061 has quite high 1950 temperatures.
This would not support the final 1970-1995 warming much.
What i then also see is that all the other 11 chosen temperature trends has a DIVE in 1950. These takes down the YAD061 high 1950 somewhat and thus support the global message optimally.
Nice picking of the 11 …
K.R. Frank Lansner
REPLY: FYI, there are 10 graphs – Anthony
Espen (14:32:04) : “Suppose for a moment that trees in the artic did actually start to grow faster as co2 levels went up – wouldn’t the direct effect of co2 on growth be a better and simpler explanation than an indirect effect through temperature?”
Photosynthesis is an endothermic reaction requiring 15MJ of solar energy per kilogram of glucose. The irony is that a the presence of snowpack near a tree during a growing season can reflect more energy to the tree’s leaves. The influence of microclimate on tree growth can be profound.
Could we combine new solar cycle low state date with the new tree ring discussion combined with the previously discredited Mann data? Can we walk and chew gum at the same time?
Lovely posting, Caleb, sir.
Utter sense.
Not in the folksy sense for this is much, much more than that.
This is scientific observation and logic tempered as happens so rarely with these dopey self-aggranizing AGW people.
Thanks. Blast of fresh air.
Alec Kitson
What would be interesting would be to remove that single tree and rerun the analysis and plot the two together.
That would make it apparent to all what that one tree means.
Don Keiller (14:10:39) : [Hantemirov…] 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.
Spot on, spot on! this is really important, thanks.
Re Caleb’s Post
I couldn’t agree more. There is a vast variability in tree ring growth which makes them poor proxies for temperature, CO2 etc. For example, we had trees on our farm which grew TWO rings in a single year when we had an unusual year where we in effect had TWO wet spring periods. We could not have known this happened if we had not been having the trees assessed by a forester to determine whether they were under ten years old and could be legally cleared to re-establish pasture. The trees in question could be accurately dated from aerial photographs as well so there was no doubt that we had trees which were less than ten years old which had twelve or more tree rings. The fact that this happened brings into doubt the chronology of tree ring data which is vital to determining its accuracy. If you can’t know how old the tree is from its rings then everything else about it is equally dubious. Nothing at all can be concluded from a false premise.
John Silver (16:08:49) : Can I make a bonsai by lowering the temperature?
Maybe you can – about 2 minutes into this U-tube, a 50-year-old tiny tree
I think Caleb’s reality check is a very pertinent one. I also respect his experience, particularly as I am currently trying to fell 30 feet of vigourous top growth in several stems on a tree overhanging and shading my house, which is so vigorous because it was cut back six years ago leaving a enormous bole and huge root system wanting to replace its crown. And I have the roof on one side, my telephone line on another and my neighbours line on a third side.
We sometimes get so obsessed with temperature in proxies that other possible variables are assumed stable and ignored.
Am I right in thinking that the very first hint of Steve’s breaking story was his posted comment on this site?
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/09/25/circling-yamal-delinquent-treering-records/
I hope that eventually history will adequately acknowledge all those who have and continue to contribute their unfunded time and efforts devoted to the analysis, discussion and audit of the dendro and related data, facilitated, and perhaps only made possible, by modern internet communications.
I’m not a climate expert and I’m not a statistics expert and I’ve only been reading on this site for a few days but I was simply shocked to discover how few trees these studies include. How can you make any meaningful conclusions based on 10 trees. Or even 34. Especially if you know nothing of the local factors affecting them specifically – nutrient availability, shade or sun conditions, water accessibility. It seems to me for these kind of studies to be even minimally valid you have to cancel out the effect of local variations of individual trees by having many, many more samples. Thousands would seem to be the bare minimum. They could have samples from 10 trees in that picture above and still not necessarily have a good representation of that one small area. How are ten trees spread out over an entire peninsula supposed to be taken seriously? Why didn’t it pass the smell test with Briffa and everyone else? Would it really be that hard to go out and sample 2000 trees using some objective criteria? And even if it is hard, it seems to me to be absolutely the minimum required to do the job properly. Ten thousand would be even better.
This also reminds me of shows I’ve seen about the wine industry, where they claim that farmers know their fields so well that they know that the grapes from a particular row on a particular hillside make better wine than grapes a few rows over, for hyperlocal reasons of soil, sunlight, or whatever. They segregate those grapes and don’t mix them with the rest for just that reason, because they’re considered more valuable. How much do the researchers know about these trees they’re using in such small numbers? Anything?
“Siberia photos
In the gallery below you find photos from Yamal Peninsula and October Revolution Island, Russian Arctic. Photos that are not signed in caption were shot by me. Feel free to use my photos for educational purposes, but please refer to my home page as the source. Please respect the copywright of collegues who have contributed with photos to this site, and whose names are given in the captions.”
http://www3.hi.is/~oi/siberia_photos.htm
…-
Pics/captions of interest from the above website to this reader:
1. “Scene from an abandoned Russian military post, Yamal.”
2. “A stump of birch from the Betula horizon. This shows early Holocene tree limit 200 km north of present. 1997.” (More)
Yamal was one of the many Islands of Stalin’s GULAG Archipelago*.
H/T Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn*.
*”Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
From 1945 to 1953 he was imprisoned for writing a letter in which he criticized Joseph Stalin – “the man with the mustache.” Solzhenitsyn served in the …
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/alesol.htm“
Does anyone really think the past climate of the earth can be determined from a dozen trees in Siberia? How about 1 tree?
The data behind Briffa’s hockey stick can’t stand up to scrutiny in a well-lit room. Thank you to Steve McIntyre for turning the lights on. And thank you to Caleb for illustrating that there are other explanations for the unusual growth of YAD061.
One tree!!! WTH!
I would like to add that rings do not grow symmetrically. One will find wider ringson one side of a tree for a few years, and then 30 to 180 degrees away for a few years. .Conclusions about when growth occured are highly dependent on where the cores were taken. Murray
The movement of the northern treeline limit southwards over the last few millennia is widely known. Here is a picture from Hubert Lamb (founder of the Hadley CRU:
http://www.sturmsoft.com/climate/forest_grassland_limits.jpg
Sorry about the poor quality of the scan. The four inch hand-scanner I used cost several hundred dollars at the time I made it.
It was the movement of the treeline that largely underpinned the classic Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstruction that was used prior to the Mann hockeystick in IPCC AR1.
This reminds me of a story I saw on TV about the infamous Galveston hurricane of 1900. This was about the only time I watched the History channel (because it was about a hurricane). The chief meteorologist of Galveston was a man by the name of Isaac Cline. He was a smart man, famous for some of his advancements in weather knowledge. Yet he was bested by someone who was uneducated. In 1900, Cubans gave the warning that a hurricane was heading into the Gulf of Mexico. This violated everything Isaac Cline knew, so he ignored the warning. The result was thousands lost their life. Cline, being the arrogant know-it-all that he was, later claimed he warned the city. But that was just to cover his rear so he wouldn’t have to admit he was wrong.
I’m also reminded of real-life experiences. There is a difference between book knowledge and real-world knowledge. There is no substitute for experience. I fix computers for a living. I am A+ certified. That is book knowledge. There are many things I had to learn to because certified that I have never used. In contrast, I had my first computer when I was 6. That was back in the DOS days when Tandy was still around. Yes, my dad bought a Tandy from Radio Shack. I do use my experience everyday. Sometimes I have to fix a problem when my competition did the book answer. My experience has given me an intuition: even if I don’t know what is wrong, quite often I can fix it anyway, but not always.
Being educated does not mean you are smart or wise. The wisest people are the ones with the most experience in one particular field. Those who focus on everything cannot get enough experience in one thing to be an expert on anything.
cbullitt (14:33:56) : The data you refer to (p720) is subfossil data, so there is nothing recent. Also, the dashed line (Distance 0) is the current tree line. So the trend over the past few hundred years seems to be warming. But for the Middle Holocene and earlier the treeline seems further north. So I think we can say that the claim that current temperatures are unprecedented is incorrect for this site.
You can observe a lot just by watching. — Yogi Berra
I think Briffa would have been better off using the rings on turtle shells instead of the rings on trees. McIntyre would have had a harder time finding them.
We need more contributions from people who really know something and have been there, even PhDs. How about asking Dr. Schweingruber for a comment ?
Lets give Caleb millions in grant money to study AGW and see what he comes up with. Now this is what the world needs is common sense and class. Thanks for amplifying Caleb’s comments and thanks Caleb for having the guts to simplify what some scientist said in 150 word run-on sentences with big four letter words that basically said: I was given bad data but the story is true.