Now it's climate change to be killing the Joshua trees

PS looks like Ken Cole will not have a job in a few years time with science like this

I think I worked it out, these must be the ghosts of the previous Joshua trees, when it was much warmer in the Minoan warming, the Holocene Climatic Optimum and Medieval Warming they all died.
The ones we see today are not real, they are just ghosts….

And Joshua trees don’t look very yummy to me. The sloths probably all died of hunger. They should have eaten the pack rats instead; I hear they taste like chicken.

This continuous drivel about the desert is monotonous. Has anyone noticed the contiguous United States hasn’t warmed in the last 15 years?
Annual 1996 – 2010 Trend = -0.01 degF / Decade
Last 15 for the West Region(includes the Mojave), Annual 1996 – 2010 Trend = -0.26 degF / Decade
Last 15 for the SW(includes Arizona and N.M.) Annual 1996 – 2010 Trend = -0.31 degF / Decade
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/regional.html
Yes, very scary, I think the Joshua trees have cooling to worry about, not warming. Can’t these imbeciles do a study based on reality rather than a model?

Its Friday, the brain is burning out, so I can contribute nothing but a humorous observation – stitching together some descriptive gems from two WUWT commenters today. (one piece from Latitude in this post above – the other somewhere else today)
New description for AGW alarmists….”Carbophobes suffering from irritable climate syndrome.”

“fossil sloth dung”
It’s just not for breakfast anymore!

“climate change to be killing the Joshua trees”
So!?

The problem, obviously, is that the rodents that we are using to disperse the seeds need to be replaced by faster rodents. What worked for the last 12,000 years is simply not good enough anymore.

I thought that the biggest danger to trees like Joshua Trees or Bristlecone Pines are Climate Scientists themselves!

“On 6th August 1964, one of the greatest crimes against Nature was committed when the oldest living inhabitant on Earth was unwittingly killed. WPN-114, previously known to its affectionate admirers as Prometheus, was a bristlecone pine tree that, posthumously, was discovered to have been at least 5000 years old.
In the summer of 1964, Donald R. Currey, a graduate student in geography at the University of North Carolina, was undertaking dendrochronology investigations to establish climatic change patterns during the Little Ice Age – the period of cooling that occurred for approximately 400 years until the mid 1800s. Dendrochronology, the method of dating based on the analysis of patterns of tree-rings, can date the time at which tree rings were formed to the exact calendar year. So, to facilitate his investigations, Currey went in search of the oldest living trees.
In 1957, a grove of bristlecone pines in the White Mountains above California’s Mojave Dessert stunned the scientific world when they were discovered to be the world’s oldest living trees. But while the California Bristlecone Pines captured the media’s imagination, another grove of bristlecones in the Great Basin at Wheeler Peak in eastern Nevada, not far from the Utah border, had slipped under the radar of all but few. And it was Wheeler Peak’s colossal bristlecones that Donald R. Currey chose for his investigations.
Currey began taking core samples from several trees, and took particular interest in the 114th sample – “one of the larger living bristlecone pines” – which he labelled WPN-114. After several attempts, Currey’s 28-inch coring tool broke. Without it, he was unable to obtain the continuous series of overlapping cores necessary to determine weather patterns. He therefore decided to ask the United States Forest Service to fell WPN-114.
National Forest District Ranger Donald E. Cox received the request. He consulted his superior, Slim Hansen, who was stationed some 250 miles away and consequently asked Cox to look at the tree and report back. Cox declared the tree to be “very common” and is reported to have said, “no one would have walked more than a hundred yards to see it.” Hansen replied, “Cut ‘er down.”
Robert Jacobsen, superintendent of the Great Basin’s Lehman Caves, attempted to intervene and wrote that cutting the tree “would be a loss to the world.” And at least one Forest Service sawyer is known to have refused to participate in the felling on moral grounds. Nevertheless, the felling was scheduled for 6th August.
It took the whole of the day to cut down and section WPN-114. In the process of his subsequent investigations, Currey discovered that WPN-114 had been alive for at least 4,862 years.
He had killed the world’s oldest known non-clonal organism.”http://EzineArticles.com/4812103

“Death of Prometheus
The cut stump of Prometheus
In 1963, Currey was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Under a fellowship from the National Science Foundation, Currey was studying the climate dynamics of the Little Ice Age using dendrochronology techniques.
Bristlecone pines in the White Mountains of California and elsewhere were discovered to be older than any species yet dated, and in 1963 Currey became aware of a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine population in the Snake Range and on Wheeler Peak in particular. At the time he visited the area, in the summer of 1964, he did not know that previous researchers had examined the area. Based on the size, growth rate and growth forms of some of the trees he became convinced that some very old specimens existed on the mountain and, using the scientific methods of the time, Currey began taking core samples to check. He found that some exceeded 3000 years in age, taking particular interest in a tree he designated WPN-114, the previously named Prometheus.
Currey was unable to obtain a continuous series of overlapping cores from WPN-114: he had tried at least four times with a 28 inch long borer, breaking two borers, but to no avail. He decided to ask for permission from the United States Forest Service to fell the tree. He was already acquainted with Forest Service officials at the nearby Lehman Caves National Monument (now a part of the much larger Great Basin National Park which includes the area Currey was working in), and made a request with Donald E. Cox, a district Forest Service ranger for permission to cut down the tree in order to examine the whole trunk in cross-section. Cox felt that the request was scientifically sound and, after convincing superiors that the particular tree was not a notable landmark, gained approval for felling it.
After securing permission, Cox informed Currey and assigned a Forest Service crew to join the young researcher and bring back the samples. The tree was cut and sectioned on August 6, 1964, and several pieces of the sections hauled out to be processed and analyzed, first by Currey, then by others in later years. To their surprise, the tree was not only old, but older than any other non-clonal organism ever known.
[edit] Aftermath
It took a few years for the information about the felling of Prometheus to reach the public, but once it did there was great controversy. Most criticism centered on the U.S. Forest Service’s decision to permit the tree to be cut. However, some critics questioned how the cutting of such an old tree was necessary given the topic Currey was studying. Since the Little Ice Age started no more than 600 years ago, many trees could presumably have provided the information he was after for that time period. However, in Currey’s original report (Currey, 1965) he refers to the Little Ice Age as encompassing the period from 2000 BC to the present, thus defining the Age over a much longer time period than is currently accepted. Whether this was the common sentiment at the time is not known. In the article, Currey indicates that he sectioned the tree as much from the question of whether the oldest bristlecones were necessarily confined to California’s White Mountains (as some dendrochronologists had been claiming) as from its usefulness in regard to studies of the Little Ice Age.
The incident led to a tighter restriction on the felling of old trees, the eventual creation of Great Basin National Park (now overseen by the National Park Service), and the decision to hide the exact location of Methuselah, the tree believed to be the current oldest. Currey personally took part in lobbying efforts to get Congress to designate the area a part of a national park.” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Rusk_Currey

Yikes. So many claims of doomsday, so little time to squash them all.