Here is just one more indication that despite what some would like you to believe, the MWP was not a regional “non event”.
From a University of Arizona press release,
Giant Sequoias Yield Longest Fire History from Tree Rings
California’s western Sierra Nevada had more frequent fires between 800 and 1300 than at any time in the past 3,000 years, according to a new study led by Thomas W. Swetnam, director of UA’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.
A 3,000-year record from 52 of the world’s oldest trees shows that California’s western Sierra Nevada was droughty and often fiery from 800 to 1300, according to a new study led by University of Arizona researchers.
Scientists reconstructed the 3,000-year history of fire by dating fire scars on ancient giant sequoia trees, Sequoiadendron giganteum, in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park. Individual giant sequoias can live more than 3,000 years.
“It’s the longest tree-ring fire history in the world, and it’s from this amazing place with these amazing trees.” said lead author Thomas W. Swetnam of the UA. “This is an epic collection of tree rings.”
The new research extends Swetnam’s previous tree-ring fire history for giant sequoias another 1,000 years into the past. In addition, he and his colleagues used tree-ring records from other species of trees to reconstruct the region’s past climate.
The scientists found the years from 800 to 1300, known as the Medieval Warm Period, had the most frequent fires in the 3,000 years studied. Other research has found that the period from 800 to 1300 was warm and dry.
“What’s not so well known about the Medieval Warm Period is how warm it was in the western U.S.,” Swetnam said. “This is one line of evidence that it was very fiery on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada – and there’s a very strong relationship between drought and fire.”
Droughts are typically both warm and dry, he added.
Knowing how giant sequoia trees responded to a 500-year warm spell in the past is important because scientists predict that climate change will probably subject the trees to such a warm, dry environment again, said Swetnam, a UA professor of dendrochronology and director of UA’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.
During the Medieval Warm Period extensive fires burned through parts of the Giant Forest at intervals of about 3 to 10 years, he said. Any individual tree was probably in a fire about every 10 to 15 years.
The team also compared charcoal deposits in boggy meadows within the groves to the tree-ring fire history. The chronology of charcoal deposits closely matches the tree-ring chronology of fire scars.
The health of the giant sequoia forests seems to require those frequent, low-intensity fires, Swetnam said. He added that as the climate warms, carefully reintroducing low-intensity fires at frequencies similar to those of the Medieval Warm Period may be crucial for the survival of those magnificent forests, such as those in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.
Since 1860, human activity has greatly reduced the extent of fires. He and his colleagues commend the National Park Service for its recent work reintroducing fire into the giant sequoia groves.
The team’s report, “Multi-Millennial Fire History of the Giant Forest, Sequoia National Park, California, USA,” was published in the electronic journal Fire Ecology in February. A complete list of authors and funding sources is at the bottom of this story.
To study tree rings, researchers generally take a pencil-sized core from a tree. The oldest rings are those closest to the center of the tree. However, ancient giant sequoias can have trunks that are 30 feet in diameter – far too big to be sampled using even the longest coring tools, which are only three feet long.
To gather samples from the Giant Forest trees, the researchers were allowed to collect cross-sections of downed logs and standing dead trees, he said. It turned out to be a gargantuan undertaking that required many people and many field seasons.
“We were sampling with the largest chain saws we could find – a chain-saw bar of seven feet,” he said. “We were hauling these slabs of wood two meters on a side as far as two kilometers to the road. We were using wheeled litters – the emergency rescue equipment for people – and put a couple hundred pounds on them.”
To develop a separate chronology for past fires, co-authors R. Scott Anderson and Douglas J. Hallett looked for charcoal in sediment cores taken from meadows within the sequoia groves.
“We can compare the charcoal and tree-ring fire records. It confirms that the charcoal is a good indicator of past fires,” Swetnam said.
Such charcoal-based fire histories can extend much further into the past than most tree-ring-based fire histories, he said. The charcoal history of fire in the giant sequoia groves extends back more than 8,000 years.
Increasingly, researchers all over the world are using charcoal to reconstruct fire histories, Swetnam said. Many scientists are analyzing the global record of charcoal to study relationships between climate, fire and the resulting addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
Swetnam’s co-authors are Christopher H. Baisan and Ramzi Touchan of the University of Arizona; Anthony C. Caprio of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in Three Rivers, Calif.; Peter M. Brown of the Rocky Mountain Tree-Ring Research and Colorado State University in Fort Collins; R. Scott Anderson of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff; and Douglas J. Hallett of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.
The National Park Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, Mountain Home Demonstration State Forest and Calaveras Big Trees State Park provided funding.
h/t to Dr. Leif Svalgaard
Mr Lynn
Caleb (03:19:17) and D. Patterson (03:47:28) have effectively countered Mr. Hoffer’s generalizations.>>
Sure, my generalizations are well, general, and I have accepted the exceptions pointed out. That doesn’t mean the exceptions should be accepted as the general rule.
Consider Canada. Even with modern technology, the vast bulk of Canada’s population live in the southern few percent of the country, AN
Mr Lynn
Caleb (03:19:17) and D. Patterson (03:47:28) have effectively countered Mr. Hoffer’s generalizations.>>
Sure, my generalizations are well, general, and I have accepted the exceptions pointed out. That doesn’t mean the exceptions should be accepted as the general rule.
Consider Canada. Even with modern technology, the vast bulk of Canada’s population live in the southern few percent of the country, AND ITS WARMER NOW THAN IT WAS THEN. Most of Canada is empty of population now, and it was empty then. Consider the vast stretches of desert in the United States. Nevada went into the gambling business because you can’t generate much economy from sand. If you want to accuse me of generalizing, then fine. Start by taking the vast chunks of continent that could not (and still can’t) support intense agriculture out of the equation. Then take the vast chunks that could, but show no sign of that having happen. Now you are left with the exceptions.
Ryan Stephenson (03:10:19) :
I was not referring to climate. I was referring to drought. That is why I used the word drought. A change in climate that causes an increase in lightning does not mean a decrease in rain. In fact, quite the opposite. I may not be a climate scientist, but I am well versed in the scientific method and have mastered field well outside my normal domains. I grew up in Phoenix so I am pretty familiar with lightning. The most dangerous time for forest fires is at the start of the monsoon, before the rains really start to kick in. I would assume that an increase in temperature means more energy for dynamic weather, e.g. thunder storms with lightning. The other point I was trying to make is that California has a dry season that has nothing to do with drought. Dry conditions and drought are two different things.
Is the popular notion of “an increase in hot means an increase in dry” contaminating the interpretation of this study? Because as i understand it, an increase in hot is usually accompanied by an increase in wet, not dry.
Also that often stated figure of 90% of fires are anthropogenic is suspicious considering the agencies that promote it. In Arizona, most fires are started by lightning! (I have even seen a lightning strike start a fire along Bee Line Hwy in the late 80’s. It was pretty cool thing to witness!)
I wish you guys would read my entire posts before criticizing.
1DandyTroll (07:34:13) : Here you can find Walter Fairservis’ page on Quipu knot writing:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/28563723/quipu
Curt (22:37:26) :
Thanks. This gives me a place to start looking when I get home.
Ed Murphy (22:08:42) :
Thanks a lot. I was looking at this last night after my post. I thought that maybe the ring density could indicate drought, but I was not sure if I was looking at things correctly.
D. Patterson — Then remember the New World has more than 42 million square kilometers of territory, and even at the bragain basement population density rates, the Old World would still have had tens of millions of people whenever those populations were not already reduced some 90% and more by catastrophes such as the New World and Old World diseases.
I have no issue with the concept that indian populations could reach into the millions range in optimal conditions; that number would be consistent with archeaological and written evidence. But **57 million** people hanging about and doing laundry and hunting turkeys etc the day columbus landed is too much. I’m all for scholarship and even reasonable conjecture. This isn’t it.
Re sequoia fires, this is a simpler issue that we’re making it out to be. There have been people mucking about in any size number in that region since when? There’s precious little evidence of substantial human settlement before say 14 or 15k years ago. Meanwhile as another poster pointed out these trees REQUIRE fire to propagate. OK, so quickie genetics study shows that this species existed before, or after humans? If before then it’s safe to say that for whatever reason fires were almost certainly natural, and while fire frequencies may be somewhat altered by humans doing things for their own reasons, the idea that the fires are *mostly* human seems rather silly.
Ockham’s razor.
First of all, I am not sure which graph you are looking at but both graphs have the same Y axis values – with a maximum deviation of 2 degrees in the top one and 1.5 degrees in the bottom. The difference in temperature between now and MWP in that graph is ~ 0.7 degrees not 7.
And second:
This second graph is from the IPCC. Actually both are – and both were considered by the IPCC as the most accurate view of historical temperatures at the time. The top graph is from IPCC 2001 report and the bottom IPCC 1990 report.
While you can argue that the more recent one is more “accurate” because it was newer that doesn’t automatically make it so. It is also considerable different – so much so any sane person would be asking “why?”.
This link http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=http://www.science-skeptical.de/blog/beispiellose-erwarmung-oder-beispiellose-datenmanipulation/001195/
Has a nice little discussion on these two specific graphs and considering the amount of reseearch and data that shows the bottom one is “closer” to being right then the small amount that went into the top one – and the issues of splicing different temperature sets – and the data originating from an incredibly small region demographically, common sense would suggest you view the top one with more skepticism. But hey, common sense doesn’t seem to play a large part in this issue.
Anecdotally, doesn’t this proposed drought period fit with the Anasazi indian society destruction?
Veronica (03:19:44): If the fires were man-made then it would be interesting to know why people were clearing the brush under the trees – it is plain that the trees themselves were not the target, as they survived – although they suffered collateral damage.
Some scholars have listed over 70 reasons why Indians burned. Here are a few:
Reduce fire hazards
Drive game
Promote food crops
Promote fiber crops
Promote browse
Create and cure firewood
Attack enemies
Defend against enemy attack
Note: a lot of the comments above are poorly informed. There has been a huge amount of study and scholarship in anthropology, landscape geography, history, etc. The literature is deep and available. Which is why I am so disappointed in Swetnam. I don’t expect lay people to have reviewed the literature, but I DO expect scientists like Swetnam to have done so. But he is famous, or should I say infamous, for his total denial of historical human influences on the environment.
Denial of the existence and basic humanity of people is the worst form of denial — right? Denial of American aboriginal populations and influences is equivalent to denial of Hitler’s Holocaust. It is an evil thing.
That’s what is so disturbing about the climate Alarmists’ use of the term “denier” to describe climate realists. The Alarmists are trying to paint climate realists as evil, comparing them to those who are so racist and bigoted as to be blind to mass genocide and the humanity of the Holocaust victims.
I am a climate realist but I am not a denier — I do not deny the Holocaust, and I do not deny the existence and humanity of people anywhere, including in the pre-Columbian Americas.
I hope that none of you fall into the trap of such extreme skepticism and/or bigotry that you would deny the existence and humanity of your fellow man.
Wren, R. Gates and anyone I missed
I don’t know who put together the graphs at the beginning of this article, but
the portion of the graph showing the MWP as it appears there can be found on page 202 of the 1990 IPCC Assessment
J T Houghton, G J Jenkins, J J Ephraums, Eds,, “Climate Change; The IPCC Scientific Assessment”. 1990 . Cambridge University Press
which does not appear to be online anywhere. I got the reference from the
late John L. Daly’s site,
http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/hockey.htm
and I located a copy in a research library using Worldcat to verify his
information. (so shoot me, I’m a librarian by training and couldn’t help
myself).
There are historical records in south america, which were studied, at least regarding Maunder and Dalton minimums:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/m11m129238u61484/
RR Kampen (02:16:00) : because the Article is also very much about the “Medieval Warm Period” which was removed form the Temperature History in the first graph for the IPCC whereas history showed it in the lower graph.
Steven Pinker debunked the noble savage and all this other PC social science nonsense years ago in his book The Blank Slate.
In his new book A History of Violence, a review here: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html
It is clear left-wing ideology plays an important role in the characterizations we read above about ridiculous so-called research suggesting fifty-five million in the 1400,s, right.
An excerpt:
Some of the evidence has been under our nose all along. Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.
At one time, these facts were widely appreciated. They were the source of notions like progress, civilization, and man’s rise from savagery and barbarism. Recently, however, those ideas have come to sound corny, even dangerous. They seem to demonize people in other times and places, license colonial conquest and other foreign adventures, and conceal the crimes of our own societies. The doctrine of the noble savage—the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like José Ortega y Gasset (“War is not an instinct but an invention”), Stephen Jay Gould (“Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species”), and Ashley Montagu (“Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood”). But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.
D. Patterson — Then remember the New World has more than 42 million square kilometers of territory, and even at the bragain basement population density rates, the Old World would still have had tens of millions of people whenever those populations were not already reduced some 90% and more by catastrophes such as the New World and Old World diseases.
Please read what you have written, you really think that the Native Americans covered the Whole of the North Americas, 42 million square kilometers of territory without Horses?
You mean they didn’t just group around where there was Water, Food, Shelter and more temperate jones?
Perhaps we should ask some Native Americans.
“Jimbo (18:01:22) :”
Sadly the giant Sequoia’s are doomed as a result of NPS’ mismanagement. NPS regime prohibits removal of the shade tolerant understory of trees that provide a fuel bridge from the ground into the crowns of these magnificent trees.
Prior to settlement, a combination of natural ground fires and those regularly set by Indians gave the sequoia stands their cathedral-like setting. No understory of trees could be established. The thick sequoia bark protected the trees from the frequent but low intensity (lack of high fuel loading) ground fires. Crown fires that can kill sequoias were rare.
After settlement, the fire protection prescription allowed the Sierra forests to evolve into their current hazardous situation. It is only a matter of time before a fire gets into the tree crowns of these ancient trees and kills them.
Tree Rings, CO2 levels, local temperature records from thermometers, sea shells, ocean floor deposits, and a thousand other things, give us “data” which we then attempt to decipher and make some sence out of. Sometimes, someone actually succeeds, and after 20-30 or more years, more and more people look at their work and say: “They were right!”
There doesn’t seem to be anything fast about a life’s worth of research or the ‘recognition’ for good work and new findings. More often than not, historicaly, the ‘finder’ of the something ‘new’ dies before he/she is ever properly acknowledged.
Anytime someone starts jumping up and down and screaming “The Sky Is Falling!” you can pretty much put that person in the category of a flake with a problem. If .01% of the population is a little off their rocker at any given time, that means that there are about 650,000 walking around talking to themselves and shouting strange things to everyone they pass on the sidewalk. (I am not speaking of those with real medical or psychiatric problems.)
There does however seem to be an increasing trend line for flakes (as with everything else these days). I personally believe it has something to do with sugar, plastics, detergents, and/or food additives –perhaps it’s genetic modification of foods.
DesterYote — Also that often stated figure of 90% of fires are anthropogenic is suspicious considering the agencies that promote it. In Arizona, most fires are started by lightning! (I have even seen a lightning strike start a fire along Bee Line Hwy in the late 80’s. It was pretty cool thing to witness!)
Nice point, which brings to mind one final thought on this silliness. I find is a little suspicious that fires that are supposedly anthropogenic in nature seem to somehow correlate to the temperature record as we understand it.
Surely it’s occured to someone by now that the claim of anthropogenic fires ought to follow a pattern that is a pattern of its own sake for its own reason, and not necessarily a reproduction of the temp record. A bit convenient.
That notion stretches credulity to the breaking point. Ockham’s Razor certainly applies here.
AC osborn — Please read what you have written, you really think that the Native Americans covered the Whole of the North Americas, 42 million square kilometers of territory without Horses?
Of course. Homo Erectus walked from Africa and covered much of southeast Asia in a relatively short time.
If someone already pointed this out and I’ve missed it I apologize (but
sometimes redundancy is good). If we look at Mann’s latest version of
his reconstruction, wherein he allows that “The Medieval period is found
to display warmth that matches or exceeds that of the past decade in
some regions, but which falls well below recent levels globally”
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/MannetalScience09.pdf
and examine fig. 2 on page 1257, we see that his reconstruction shows
the area of the Sequoia National Park as having a surface temperature
anomaly of -.1 C for the period 950-1250.
Ian McLeod (09:27:06) : You are absolutely right. Nobody has been able to find ANY kind of weapons or war defenses at the City of CARAL, a five thousand years old culture, archelogists have found, instead, musical instruments, amphitheaters, places of cult, quipus (knot writings), etc.
http://www.caralperu.gob.pe/civilizacion/intro.html
Your are also right when you say that leftist invented and changed world history to make believe “social justice” was imposible to find under any other form of government but under theirs “social paradise”. Justice was found, as history (now a forbidden subject to be taught at schools as UNESCO recommends) shows under every form of government. So the “new age”, post-normal archeological and settled science presents old cultures’ people, as savages and ignorants. They and their settled science are the real ignorants. Thanks God knowledge it is still out there for those who seek the truth.
Jim Berkise (09:13:55) :
Wren, R. Gates and anyone I missed
I don’t know who put together the graphs at the beginning of this article, but
the portion of the graph showing the MWP as it appears there can be found on page 202 of the 1990 IPCC Assessment
J T Houghton, G J Jenkins, J J Ephraums, Eds,, “Climate Change; The IPCC Scientific Assessment”. 1990 . Cambridge University Press
which does not appear to be online anywhere. I got the reference from the
late John L. Daly’s site,
http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/hockey.htm
and I located a copy in a research library using Worldcat to verify his
information. (so shoot me, I’m a librarian by training and couldn’t help
myself).
=====
Mann maps the MWP in North America in his paper.
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/MannetalScience09.pdf
Unesco recommends only “continental” history to substitute national history (in every country):
In this perspective, the creation of the African Union (AU) offers new hope for addressing history teaching within the continent as a whole. The AU Member States have already expressed strong support for the renovation of history education on the basis of the General History of Africa
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001840/184049e.pdf
If this is not conspiracy, the same as climate scam and from the same source, what is it?
The woodlands of N. America, especially east of the Mississippi, were an incredibly rich environment which supported large, but unknown numbers of distinct tribes existing in loose contact with one another, sometimes at war, sometimes at peace, often moving from one area to another, but always in harmony with the land and the seasons.
To state that these people didn’t have agricultural is absurd. Many Algonquian and related tribes relied on the Three Sisters – Corn, Beans, and Squash – in addition to meat, berries, roots and tubers. In fact, food was so abundant for the Illiniwek tribes, they didn’t even bother to fish, even though they used large dugout canoes for transportation. Further north, tribes that did fish often used birch-bark canoes, and not without peril.
When they went out onto the prairies to hunt buffalo, the Peoria, Tamaroa, Kaskaskia, Miami and other woodland tribes started grass fires to trap the large herbivores, and then slaughter sometimes large numbers of them with the beautifully finished flint weapons crafted by these men.
The Peoria recognized only two Great Spirits: Sun and Thunder
The virtual disappearance of the native populations in (especially) Eastern North America is one of the great human tragedies of all time.
Ryan Stephenson (03:10:19) :
“Fires, by themselves are not an indication of drought. They could indicate an unusual amount of lightning”
” Since we can assume there has been no great increase in altitude in California over 3000 years, we can say that any increase in lightning frequency was due to lightning.”
————————————————————
Did you mean, any increase in fires was due to lightning?
“If you assume that the forest fires were linked to temperary climate change then there are two possibilities that become obvious. One is that the forest fires were a regular occurence but became more extensive due to the forest floor being tinder dry. The second is that the warmer climate caused the food supply to diminish resulting in more numerous failed attempts to deliberately clear the Sequoias to permit more farming.”
————————————————————
There are a few things wrong with the second assumption that would render it unlikely. First of all, the high altitude and very rugged terrain of the Sierra Nevada would have made access to the Giant Sequoia forests very difficult, making produce transport problematic. There were no beasts of burden until much later on. Secondly, the rocky terrain features nutrient-poor soil of little depth, very little sunlight reaching the forest floor and a very short growing season; not exactly ideal farming conditions. Thirdly, the early inhabitants of the western US were not farmers; they were hunter-gatherers. Even the non-nomadic coastal tribes were hunter-gatherers. Had they been farmers like some of the eastern tribes, why on Earth would they leave the most fertile farmland in North America, California’s vast Central Valley?
As someone who minored in Pre-Colombian Anthropology, I am familiar with the early inhabitants of the western US. As a native Californian who has spent a considerable amount of time in the Sierra over many decades, I can tell you from first hand observation that lightning strikes are a very common occurrence and can pose a real hazard to backpackers No doubt there were fires started accidentally by ancient hunters from time to time. They also likely never lived to tell the tale, given the nasty habit of Sierra winds to reverse direction and swirl about. To suggest that most of the ancient fires in the areas studied were anthropogenic in nature defies logic to anyone truly familiar with the terrain and the food gathering practices of the tribes that inhabited those areas in ancient times. Frankly, I find the notion absurd.