While researching for one of WUWT’s previous posts by Caleb Shaw, which is a must read essay on the simple things that can explain tree ring records to scientists that have never actually touched the tree or understood its local growth environment, I came across this photo of two larch trees in the Kotuykan river area of Siberia, not far from the Yamal peninsula. The photographer stated that an accompanying scientist who is familiar with the region named the two trees “Tyranny and Freedom” because of the differing situations they had been exposed to.
The question: which of the two trees below is the oldest?
The researchers write:
Forest ecologist Slava Kharuk called this a picture of tyranny and freedom. The trees are growing at the top of a mountain in the Siberian Traps. The climate at the location is near the limit of the coldest temperatures larch trees can tolerate. The smaller of the two trees in the foreground is many centuries older than the bigger tree.
Dr. Kharuk describes the tree on the right as living under the tyranny of colder climates of the past. It grew slowly: its form is twisted, its needles are sparse, the diameter is small, and it is not very tall. The younger tree has grown, he says, under the freedom of recent, milder climates. It is shooting up tall, straight, and full. It grows a relatively large amount each year, which results in a larger trunk diameter. (Photograph by Jon Ranson.)
In the cold Siberian climate, trees reproduce slowly. These larch cones document three years of growth. The lightest, reddish cones in the foreground are this year’s cones, which are forming and have not yet released their seeds. The medium-brown cones are from last year’s growth. The darkest brown cones are fully open and spent, yet still hang tenaciously on the tree. (Photograph by Jon Ranson.)
The harsh climate of Siberia is a challenging one for Larch trees. The photo shows the fates of several trees. A tree without bark or branches leans across the center of the photo. This tree died centuries ago, but the frigid climate has kept it from decaying. In the foreground, a tree that broke at the trunk and toppled managed to survive: a side branch grew into a vigorous new tree. In front and to the right of the “reborn” tree is a small dead tree that still has branches and bark. It is an ancient tree that died recently. In its last years, it put energy into making seed. Pinecones from the previous two years still cling to its branches. (Photograph by Jon Ranson.)
Source: NASA Earth Observatory, Siberia 2008 Kotuykan River Expedition
===
While the notion of temperature differences being the driver for the trees “Tyranny and Freedom” might be valid:
Dr. Kharuk describes the tree on the right as living under the tyranny of colder climates of the past. It grew slowly: its form is twisted, its needles are sparse, the diameter is small, and it is not very tall. The younger tree has grown, he says, under the freedom of recent, milder climates.
Without looking at all of the growth factors, one can’t be certain what is the true reason for growth difference. One tree might have better access to water or more nutrients available to it. We just don’t know, anything pinning a cause without a thorough investigation of the tree health and soil is simply speculation.
The idea posed by Caleb Shaw in this previous post seems to be well illustrated by these photos:
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.
So in the case of larch trees in Siberia, how much of the time are they recording temperature? Without the proper metadata from Briffa telling us where these trees were situated, figuring out the response of trees like the now famous YAD06 is a tall order. Even with the metadata, when you find such wide variations in tree response growing next to one another, it isn’t much help. The only thing that can help is a large sample size so that individual responses like what we see in the core, YAD061, are statistically minimized in total impact.
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OK, let’s accept for a second the whole Hockey Stick and Treemometer ideas. Then, where is the growth spike of the older tree? It apparently grew in the same warm and gentle conditions as the younger tree in the recent past, so it should exhibit the hockey stick shaped increase in growth – which it doesn’t.
Lightining strikes are very common, and the evidence is also plain to see on most trees over 200 years old, in scars , dead branches, and misshapen growth.
Then there are the birds. I have often wondered why single Oak trees tend to have very ‘jaggy’ branches with lots of sharp angles; perhaps idea for knee-timbers for houses and ships. But, nearby Oaks growing in close woodland have lovely straight limbs, ideal for beams and planks.
I found the answer when looking our of my study window observing the behaviour of the rooks in early spring (instead of getting on with my work). The rooks went to the lone Oaks to peck off the first-growth twigs coming out of the terminal buds, to make their nests! So, if the terminal buds are pecked off, the growth will transfer to the next shoot which is at an angle, and ‘as the twig is bent, so grows the tree’ and you can see the jaggy shapes even in the heavy boughs and sometimes in the trunk itself.
What clinched it for me is that the birds make their nests in the top-growth of the nearby Oaks in the close woodland, which they do not ‘vandalise’ for nesting material.
Michael (20:32:35) :
I notice here in SW Florida on random days, planes leaving what looks like long lines of cocaine behind them in all kinds of criss cross patterns which then fan out to ruin what would have been a beautiful sunny day. Surely there cannot be that much airline passenger traffic over our area, we are a 700 mile long peninsula. What then could be the possible cause of all this? We sell Sun here in south Florida, but there really is not that much to sell anymore due to this problem.
Those are vapor trails, Michael — they’re composed of minute ice crystals formed when an aircraft’s engine exhaust (which is *hot*) undergoes rapid cooling at altitude. Water vapor in the exhaust plume is condensed, then frozen. Depending on the amount of water vapor in the air and the winds aloft, they’ll either dissipate rapidly or hang around for hours. You live in SW Florida, so my guess is that you’re around the Fort Myers area — between US airliners heading to and from the Yucatan and Central America, the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands, and South America, there are probably 30 flights per day right over your house. Add the national airlines of our neighbors down south heading to hubs in Miami, Charlotte, Atlanta, Philly and JFK/Newark, and you’ll have another dozen, although not all of them will be directly overhead.
While vapor trails aren’t usually numerous or thick enough to blot out the sun, any ice crystals which don’t sublimate at the lower altitudes could serve as condensation nuclei for cloud formation, especially in air as moist as that in south Florida.
The gnarled tree ‘Tyrany’ was once in a great forrest, shaded by light and stunted in growth, until the loggers came along and destroyed the forrest – so ‘Freedom’ gained its freedom.
.
I have just replaced a beam in the roof of my house, it is oak, placed in the roof when the house was built in 0900, 0918 (documents available on request) in Italy. the diameter of the good pieces left are plus minus 28″ FedEx anyone?
Not all seedlings grow evenly. Some are runts without any good reason.
To me the tree on the right looks like it’s been damaged several times in its life. Perhaps a strong wind or harsh winter soon after germinating stunted it.
The tree on the right in the “tyrrany and freedom” photo has obviously suffered some mechanical damage in the past. Otherwise it would have one central leader, like the tree on the left.
I have a tree in my front yard that is about 10 years old. It went through some stress one year where the main leader died and now it is bushy and spindly. Tyranny looks to me like it either was hit by lightning, or the main leader was somehow broken. Liberty is progressing normally with the main leader intact.
It is just a guess though. The trunk where the branches diverge looks like a stress point to me. All of the trees in the background look like Liberty as well.
I have noticed that the way people look at the same image, (whether it be Alaskan polar bears, Greenland caribou, or Siberian larch, seems to involve more subjectivity than objectivity, and in some ways resembles a Rorshock Test.
Suppose you showed 100 people an ink blot, and 99 said it looked like a butterfly, and 1 said it looked like Dolly Parton. What would you conclude about the one person?
I don’t know about you, but I’d conclude the one person thought a lot of Dolly Parton.
Next suppose the one person said the reason they thought of Dolly Parton was because they were like Galileo and everyone else was ignorant. What would you conclude?
I don’t know about you, but I’d conclude they were closing their mind to what 99 people have to offer.
Last, suppose you turned to get something, but happened to glance in a mirror on the far wall. Suppose you noticed that, as soon as your back was turned, the person whipped out a black magic marker, and made the ink blot look much more like Dolly Parton. What would you conclude?
I don’t know about you, but I’d conclude the person was making what Climate Scientists call “an adjustment.”
If you replace the words “Dolly Parton” with the words “Global Warming,” then I believe the above describes the absurd situation we find ourselves in.
Social Science is lots of fun, but dependes too heavily on subjectivity. If we really want the truth, we need objectivity.
AlexB (00:06:53) :
I can’t believe no one has said it yet:
“How to recognise trees from quite a long way away.
Number 1, the larch… the larch”
That’s all I could think about when I read that they were using “Larches” for treemometers !!! The entire episode from Briffa is akin to a Python sketch !!
Their is obviously something wrong with the tree, Tyranny. If everything about it were identical to Freedom, except it being older, then as soon as the climate changed, it would have taken off and grown much larger. It would have had a huge head start on the Freedom tree and Freedom would have never been able to catch up. Therefore, it’s fairly reasonable to conclude that something is stunting the growth of Tyranny, be it water, nutrients, fungus, previous damage, etc.
DoctorJJ
A nice little write-up in the American Thinker:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/un_climate_reports_they_lie.html
“The Trail of the Lonesome Pine”
From that great comedy duo Stan “The Briffa” Laurel and Oliver “Captain Mann” Hardy.
I thought this would be a good banner headline if you or Steve were able to convince a national paper to run the story, or even the title for an investigative tv program exposing the whole climate sham.
I have it on very good authority from that most esteemed of online encyclopaedias Wikipedia that the Larch is from the family Pinaceae. Wikepedia also states that “It (Siberian Larch) is faster-growing than many other coniferous trees in cold regions, but requires full sunlight,” as you suggested in an earlier post, so that if Yad06 suddenly became exposed to more sunlight at the turn of the last century, perhaps by a large neighbour falling down, then a major inflection could occur on the growth curve.
Colin Porter (Average Joe)
I have seen trees shredded by wildlife while cleaning the velvet off their horns, does this area host caribou?
What about disease or pine beetles?
One big pile of bear crap would be a boon for a tree in such barren soil.
As the tree on the right is many centuries older than the fine specimen on the left, what happened to all of its coevals? If they had all been as healthy as the left one, how big would they be now? And IF we assume that they are now dead and can be found in the bog, what can we possibly learn from the comparison of ring thicknesses between them and the living ‘runt’ … in other words, between trees in the same area?
And having just comeback form a walk in the local woods where a recent felling of a plantation of fifty-year-old corsican pines has been replanted, I was struck by the considerable differences in height among the newly planted saplings in what must be their second year of growth.
And looking at the stumps of the old crop, the radial variance in tree-ring thicknesses of individual stumps, and whole diameters of adjacent stumps, was also huge. And all this in a properly kept crop in a small area, that had ostensibly been managed for homogeneity.
Liberty like grandma is weathered and bent
against the force of decades struggling spent
Freedom stands near her great grandson his
life spans been short in comparison.
He knows all the stories knows all about the
years before when blood was without.
His knowledge and learning are indeed impressive
his world view more progressive.
Liberty is saddened for she knows the truth
True understandings price is your youth.
The younger tree has grown, he says, under the freedom of recent, milder climates. It is shooting up tall, straight, If this were true, why didn’t the dwarfed tree benefit from the same enhanced environment, warmer. It was more mature, and should be just waiting for optimal conditions to shoot up when ‘better’ growing conditions arrive.
Okay, I can weigh in on this one. I, too, have cut many thousands of trees. I worked my teens and twenties for the power company in the Ozarks of Northern Arkansas. I cut new 30 foot (and sometimes 60 foot) right-of-ways through the middle of virgin oak forest. I can attest that sometimes 50 year old red oak trees were notably smaller than 20 year old oak trees nearby. Looking at the rings for recent years, those rings nearest the outer edge, sometimes trees shared width and sometimes they did not. I was taught in school that tree rings could tell the story of climate. But I’d debunked that theory long before I ever came to WUWT or ever heard about “global warming.”
Among a variety of growth hazards trees have pests, and they react differently to these pests from one tree to the next. For instance I have two magnolia trees in my front yard. They have both been badgered by a yellow-bellied sap sucker, they bear the telltale rings of holes everywhere. But one magnolia is suffering badly whereas the other is flourishing. I’ve never seen a magnolia with so many blooms! The “ugly” tree has not grown at all in the years that I have owned this home, it is about one third the size of the healthy tree. The sap sucker is long gone and one tree is recovering – the other is not. The trees are approximately 100 feet apart. Are you ready for this? Keep reading…
I recently got in contact with the previous owner of my home. He had pictures of my house and when he built the adjoining garage (where the healthy tree is growing) Well, the ugly tree is evident, the same size and shape as it is currently. The healthy tree? Not there. It hadn’t sprouted yet. So I can assert that the healthy larger tree is younger than the smaller unhealthy tree. Is it the warmer climate bringing about a more ideal environment?
Here’s my assessment. The sap sucker butchered the older magnolia, stunting it’s growth and degrading it’s health while it was still quite a young tree. Meanwhile the younger magnolia took root 100 feet away. As it grew the sap sucker (or an additional one) began to feed on it. Then Gary moved in WITH HIS TWO LOUD AND BOISTEROUS DOGS and the sap sucker (or suckers) went away before the second magnolia could be greatly damaged. The younger now flourishes whereas the older is on it’s way to a slow and silent death. I wish I could show a picture. The younger tree’s trunk is many times as thick as the older’s trunk.
Surely it was environment that effected these two trees. My guess is that temperature took a back seat to birds in this instance. And there many other pests besides mere birds: beetles, ants, fungus, worms, moths, and… uh… what’s the other one? Uh… yeah, termites!
The photo seems to show a clearing. If this type of tree has been growing nearby for centuries, why is there a clearing? Anything which can force an open space can slow or damage a tree. Or maybe conditions here are fine for these trees, but the surrounding forest was recently destroyed and Tyranny is merely a crippled old survivor.
supercritical (03:04:31) – I suspect the birds fly into a lone oak because it’s easier to fly into a tree which doesn’t have another tree blocking the flight path.
Fred Lightfoot (04:04:40) – Check if there is a dendrochronologist in Italy that would like part of your old beam. A couple of quick looks reveals there is an Italian Institute of Dendrochronology, Verona, Italy. You might try looking for papers involving your part of Italy (tree rings central Italy, etc) to try to find an active researcher who’s working on material in your area.
“Hmmmm. Weather/climate from afar eh? ”
If I were sitting in Lansing, I would have looked up exactly the same weather records. It wouldn’t matter where I was physically accessing them from.
“Lake Superior is large, deep, and cold. Why not monitor that?”
It is monitored. I just can’t remember where to locate the information right now. Water temperatures, clarity, lake levels, etc. are monitored.
This winter’s ice cover will be interesting to watch on the Great Lakes too. The Canadian Ice Service has the best data on that front.
Another indication of a constraint on “Tyranny” is the angle at which the main trunk is growing below the first branches. That tilt may be due to a struggle for light in the early stages of growth. The manner in which it leans suggests that it was shaded early on. I’ve a Chinese Elm in my front yard with a similar inclination due to light competition early in life from a red plum. It quickly outgrew the red plum but by that time the entire tree’s structure had been distorted. While it is now of respectable size, the branching growth tends to result in odd branches shooting off in long straight lines away from the inclination of the trunk. These apparently help offset the structural problems of earlier growth by relocating mass to reduce mechanical strain in the root system.
I have three arborvitae grouped 7’oc in my yard which I planted 26 years ago. They are still of the exact same height relative to each other as when I planted them and are very well and estimate they have quadrupled in height. I also have three red cedars grouped 8’oc in my yard which I planted — 12’+/- in height when I did — 24 years ago and they are doing poorly due to recurring disease but also due to the propensity of a “wet feet” and heavy soil problem and they have less than doubled in size but all have the same relative height.
I have four larches I planted. One is the original I planted 23 years ago and three are replants. They are all 25′ oc almost exactly east to west. When I replanted five years after, the original was 15′ and the replants were 6′. They’ve all been watered and fertilized the same as it relates to maintaining the lawn. Two of the replants (one was topped by about two feet by either a kid or deer and two leaders took over) are now about 5′ taller — the topped one the tallest) than the original and the other is just slightly shorter.
The difference — they are all in heavy silt — as far as I can tell is that I had to take a lot of rocks out of the hole for the original and there were still several large ones at the perimeter and bottom that were too large to bother with. The largest two are very near utility trenches with gravel backfill.
Anyway, I find it interesting that the tree on the right hasn’t re-established a leader since the tree to the right began to grow. I can’t tell if the one to the right had lost it’s leader before but the way the lowest branches leave the trunk hints to me it might have way back when. Is it growing on seriously deficient ground? Are there such a thing as mutant trees? Do trees lose their natural affinity for the way they grow after many years of strife — no resumption of a main leader and no springing back to normal growth that other nearby trees exhibit?
And another thing, in my noting my limited and isolated experience with larches, the thought occurred to me that the difference between my original and the replants might be the variety of the species, in other words, they might be of a better strain of tree. What is the history of the area? Was there a fire, a harvesting or something else that might account for there not being a lot more trees in the field behind? Might the tree on the right been planted and not of the indigenous stock?
There are a lot more questions for which answers are needed before one can just assert the difference in the tree growth is just age and temperature changes.
fishhead (18:58:06) :
Wouldn’t you think that if the main problem of ‘tyranny’ was that it began its life in cooler climes, then why did it grow so distorted looking? To me, with all the branches growing off to the right of the tree, it looks more like what has been brought up before on wuwt (growing under a much taller tree, on its left in this case) or perhaps starting life out with in some very windy conditions. Tyranny kind of reminds me of some of the trees you see on the coast, with most of the branches on the aft side of the winds. Are winds a big factor in this part of Siberia?
If necessary, I can produce evidence that all external factors influence plant growth. To wit:
CONCLUSION
This article presents the effect of a single controlled
bending on the diameter growth of young poplars
and on the expression of a mechanosensitive gene,
PtaZFP2. The results showed that a single transitory
bending was sufficient to modify plant diameter
growth for several days. Bending first stopped diameter
growth, the diameter growth rate then increased for
several days, and finally it returned to basal values.
http://www.plantphysiol.org/cgi/reprint/151/1/223?
Maybe there were more earthquakes years ago?
Influence of Seismic Stress on Photosynthetic Productivity, Gas Exchange, and Leaf Diffusive Resistance of Glycine max (L.) Merrill cv Wells
Thalia Pappas2 and Cary A. Mitchell
Department of Horticulture, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907
Relative growth rate (RGR), leaf water potential (w), transpiration rate (Tr), photosynthetic rate (Pn), and stomatal and mesophyll resistances to CO2 exchange were measured or calculated to determine how periodic seismic (shaking) stress decreased dry weight accumulation by soybean (Glycine max [L.] Merrill cv Wells II). Seismic stress was applied with a gyratory shaker at 240 to 280 revolutions per minute for 5 minutes three times daily at 0930, 1430, and 1930 hours. Fifteen days of treatment decreased stem length 21%, leaf area 17%, and plant dry weight 18% relative to undisturbed plants.
Tyranny has government health care.