With apologies to the Geico caveman, paleoclimatology isn’t just for grant enabled scientists anymore.
Priceless Climategate email 682: Tom Wigley tells Michael Mann that his son did a tree ring science fair project (using trees behind NCAR) that invalidated the centerpiece of Mann’s work:
‘A few years back, my son Eirik did a tree ring science fair project using trees behind NCAR. He found that widths correlated with both temp and precip. However, temp and precip also correlate. There is much other evidence that it is precip that is the driver, and that the temp/width correlation arises via the temp/precip correlation’
From email 682.txt
h/t to Tom Nelson
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Maybe David Suzuki will threaten to have the kid jailed.
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=290513
imagine that, trees grow faster if they receive more water and slower if less water.
i wonder if that explains why trees are so stunted in growth in arid areas?
I think I was in first grade when we did an experiment on how water impacts growth of plants…
Engineers tend to keep things, like sheared bolts, left hand thread taps, front silvered mirrors etc , one thing I kept for many years was a humble piece of structural (C24) timber (lumber) about 100mm (4 inches) wide cut across the grain, just over 50% of its width the growth rings were widely spaced, the remainder were very tightly packed. It always reminded me that either the climate had changed very rapidly over 1 year and stayed there for about 35 years consequtively or that tree ring data simply indicated availability of moisture give or take a bit of something else.
Its just too easy to prove the effect, but then who would listen, believe and accept it amongst the AGW group
regards.
The best snippet about tree growth was the way Ray Bradley plagiarised all of the list of factors affecting tree growth except co2 from a figure caption in a 70’s textbook.
So, when a kid points out an inconvenient truth, it really is a case of the The Emporer’s New Clothes.
“It’s so simple, so very simple, that only a child can do it.”
Talking about kids invalidating theories with experiments; for a Science Fair, my daughter grew bean plants in 3 “biospheres” . Each biosphere was made from two – 2 litre pop bottles with the tops cut off where they tapered, then taped together at the open ends where they were cut. This created a tall, skinny growing chamber. One bioshpere was completely sealed (= low CO2) one had small holes to let in a bit of CO2 from the house (= moderate CO2), and the third had large holes (= high CO2). It was winter and parents and a number of kids and a dog occupied the house, so indoor CO2 was higher than the great outdoors.
The low CO2 plant sprouted but eventually withered away once it used up all the CO2, the moderate CO2 plant grew long and spindly, and the high CO2 plant was lush, green and grew much more extensive roots. My daughter even corresponded with the Idzo’s of the CO2Science website (where we got the idea for the experiment.)
Compared to the usual fare, I thought it was a unique and delightful experiment. We don’t know why (and I didn’t make a big deal of it), but it didn’t advance to the next round. One thing I do know; there was a well-known “warmist” (activist) on the team of judges!
I hope Tom Wigley’s son made it out of that incident unscathed since Mann doesn’t react well to people criticizing his work. We’ll probably find more email whereby The Team conspires to get a paper fast-tracked into the Science Fair to rebut the experiment and maybe even get some pressure on the principal and school board to have the science teacher removed from his post. Sounds about right.
Two things are needed to restore justice:
1. A witness protection program in climate science, which includes corrupt journals and media.
2. An organization to support the victims in legal matters.
Maybe Eirik wad a friend of this little scientist?
I guess they are both on the Black-List now. Remember the Black-List, folks?
jono says:
December 1, 2011 at 10:11 am
“…one thing I kept for many years was a humble piece of structural (C24) timber (lumber) about 100mm (4 inches) wide cut across the grain, just over 50% of its width the growth rings were widely spaced, the remainder were very tightly packed. It always reminded me that either the climate had changed very rapidly over 1 year and stayed there for about 35 years consequtively or that tree ring data simply indicated availability of moisture give or take a bit of something else.”
More likely this was simply a board cut from a tree that grew in an unmanaged stand, and had reached the point where competitive effects from the other trees in the stand started to slow radial growth. Many tree species can hang on for years in such overstocked stands, growing very little each year and thus, laying down the very tight growth rings you observed. Similar growth patterns are seen in stands that have been attacked by defoliating insects for multiple years running.
This statement buy Kevin Trenberth I take exception to: “Maybe we can say womething like this:
It is well established in current climate studies that warm conditions tend to accompany
wet conditions in the extratropics in winter owing to the dominant role of the
atmospheric circulation so that southerlies are warm and moist in the northern
hemisphere while northerlies are cold and dry. But in summer, the weaker atmospheric
circulation means that moist thermodynamics is more important so that dry conditions
favor warm spells and heat waves, as heat from the sun no longer evaporates moisture and
instead increase temperatures.”
Sorry but that is just false. Temps and precip just don’t correlate like that. You can look at any climate map from the past and falsify this statement. The only truth here is dry conditions in summer do lend themselves to a greater likely hood of heat waves. But you also have to define a heatwave for a particular region. And that region may experience one with higher humidity as well.
Mann knew exactly what he was doing. He believes that rainfall follows temperature, so that tree growth should likewise follow temperature. When it doesn’t, that data is excluded. He cut off the Briffa data after 1940 because the local temperature in the Urals started falling at that time, and didn’t rise again untill well after 2000. (See the Ostrov Dikson and Dudinka temperature records.) This didn’t match his world view so got excluded. The whole hockey stick is a huge example of cherry-picking. The Tiljander series part of it is just another huge inverted cherry. The whole thing has now been SO thoroughly falsified that this writer can’t see how Michael Mann can still have ANY scientific standing.
@dp: ‘It is truly a tree-ring circus, then.’
Good one!
I don’t really see how anyone can get past this:
“By chance SB03 may have got some of these precip things right, but we don’t
want to give them any way to claim credit.”
Hopefully, Sam The First will not be the last to catch Briffa in a fox pass.
So Keith; just which Guild were you contemplating elevating that Lily too; and what is the occasion for such recognition.
Just don’t go Gold plating anything during that august ceremony.
Hugh Pepper says:
December 1, 2011 at 9:02 am
“Are you serious? Dr Manns work does not rely on tree ring data, which at most would allow a backcast of a few hundred years […]”
You’re saying MBH 98 is bogus? Oh, nice that you’ve seen the light.
How much did Exxon pay that kid?
obviously the kid is bought and paid for by Shell or Petrocan …poor boy ..oh well every one needs a few shekels to get a bit of bread .
Ed Caryl @1135: agree completely. Ural Bristlecone Pines made the cut for Mann because they correlated to the statistic profile he neededfor his “reconstruction”. That correlation was all but random based on the rainfall, cloud cover, temps, drought history etc etc in that location, but the profile fit up until 1940 — then came Mann’s fraudulent exclusion of data to keep his chart going. Climategate II has moved this from opinion to fact.
PhilJourdan says: “It is getting bad when school science projects refute your magnum opus.”
It’s getting even worse when Bill Nye, The Science Guy, confirms it. It’s like being praised by Al Gore.
Jimmy Haigh says: “Global Wetting…” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, does it?”
Global Inundation?
How odd……
….plants in arid places grow when it rains
and the PDO shifts
Who’d a thunk it……….
Hugh Pepper says:
December 1, 2011 at 9:02 am
“Are you serious? Dr MAnns work does not rely on tree ring data, which at most would allow a backcast of a few hundred years and would not in any way allow a measurement,”
Hugh, your ignorance of Dr, Mann’s work is astonishing in light of the enlightened and detailed dissection of his work available on the web. The climategate emails even show some of those devoted to the “cause” have concerns about Mann’s reconstructions. The caliber of trolls parachuting into the skeptical sites is in precipitous decline. Alas,it even makes one yearn for the posts of R Gates who at least tested our knowledge and reasoning.
Look, I am an out-and-out skeptic, however, even I can’t stomach this simplistic argument.
It is true that people have used generic tree-ring widths as temperature proxies without thinking a about the fact that the width of tree rings are often controlled by multiple factors. So point taken
when this is the case.
However, it is possible to chew gum and walk at the same time. There is absolutely nothing wrong with using specific tree species that are located in environments that ensure that only one of the many factors controlling tree-ring width dominates over all of the others.
For instance, this true of the mountain hemlock which are located along the Pacific coasts of Canada and Alaska. This is a species whose tree-ring widths are very temperature sensitive. The mountain hemlocks get all the precipitation that they need to grow. However, there location near the tree-line of the coastal Rocky Mountains means that that their growth is severely limited by seasonal variations in marine air temperature. This means that that they are ideal for studying long-term variations in the pattern of seas surface temperatures (SST) in the North Pacific such as the PDO.
This is confirmed by the fact that SST’s that are derived using the Sr/Ca ratios measured in corals at Rarotonga in the South Pacific, show essentially the same long-term variations in the PDO proxy record as those derived from PDO reconstructions based upon the tree-ring widths of mountain hemlock along the coast of the Gulf of Alaska (D’Arrigo et al. 2001).
So there is a place for tree rings widths to be used a temperature proxies if care is taken to think about the factors controlling tree-ring width.