Tom Nelson has another Climategate 2 email well worth reading
Dendrochronologists get spanked by guy with expertise in tree physiology and wood anatomy
“However, there are bounds to dendrochronology, as there are to every field of investigation, and the discipline has spilled over way outside of those bounds, to the point of absurdity.”
“What troubles me even more than the inexactness attending chronological estimates is how much absolute nonsense — really nothing but imaginative speculation — about the environment of the past is being deduced from tree rings and published in dendrochronology journals.”
“…but dendrochronology has persistently rejected walking the hard road, that of understanding the fundamental genetic and environmental factors controlling wood formation. As I see it, the peer review process in dendrochronology must be fundamentally flawed to allow such publications. Physiologist remain to build any real confidence in their ideas of how environmental factors influence tree ring formation, and dendrochronologists therefore are not at all justified in pretending that they do.
The bounds of dendrochronology will be extended, as will confidence in dendrochronological reports, when your group stops pretending that it knows the answers before it has done the needed research. Again, I am troubled by your group that it shows little humility, no genuine desire to discover the truth.”
The writer of this email:
UNB | Faculty of Forestry and Environmental Management | Rod Savidge
Areas of expertise
Tree physiology
Wood anatomy
Plant
cell biology
==================================================
This, IMHO, is why Mann’s rendition of the hockey stick is unsupportable, its all speculation based. Anyone who knows Liebig’s Law understands this.
Mann’s tree reconstructions are known to be statistically crap, and even if they weren’t, the assumption that these trees primarily measure temperature is an absurd speculation.
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@Patrick Guinness Frank 9:16 am
Thanks for the info on that, Pat!
But one thing has me stumped then. If Fritts is the father of dendroclimatology, why do all of his arguments to Rod Savidge only talk about dating [see saltspringson at 9:50 am – re http://foia2011.org/index.php?id=5582%5D and not reading climate out of the tree-rings? One can only guess that Fritts knew he had no foot to stand on. Fritts did, though, acknowledge that someone in dendro work should be doing the work that Savidge said needed to be done to transform dendroclimatology into a real science. Other than that, Fritts only talked about dating, which was a straw man argument, since it wasn’t Savidge’s point at all.
So, Fritts is the man we should all be questioning! Interesting…
Dr. Hathaway of NASA (actually it is his aunty with her crystal ball) has moved the January’s SC24 sunspot max prediction to around 100.
See how he does here:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NFC7a.htm
and compare with the planetary pseudo-science astrology, which could have been two millennia ago by Ptolemy of Alexandria.
On things that do last millions of years.
Rocks.
They need to study rocks.
Temperature seems sure to be important in cracking rocks over time.
Rocks do not move around. Rocks do not need or care for water, Rocks come in pebbles and in mountain sizes. Easy to study seems.
Therefore Mann etal need to set up studies of temperatures effects on rocks, of all sizes, types, locations on the earth. They should report these studies back to us via their decendants not sooner than 100,000 years from now.
In the meantime we should pay the taxes about like we do now for thing things we pay taxes for now.
kcom says:
January 3, 2012 at 3:40 am
“Here’s my question: Did Rod Savidge ever say any of this out loud? Did he make his views known publicly?”
Quote:
Consider also the frustration of Rod A. Savidge Ph.D. Savidge is a professor of tree physiology/biochemistry, Forestry, and Environmental Management at the University of New Brunswick. He vented the following interesting comments regarding the science of dendrochronology, published in a Letter to the Editor in the New York Times, November of 2002:
“As a tree physiologist who has devoted his career to understanding how trees make wood, I have made sufficient observations on tree rings and cambial growth to know that dendrochronology is not at all an exact science. Indeed, its activities include subjective interpretations of what does and what does not constitute an annual ring, statistical manipulation of data to fulfill subjective expectations, and discarding of perfectly good data sets when they contradict other data sets that have already been accepted. Such massaging of data cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered science; it merely demonstrates a total lack of rigor attending so-called dendrochronology ‘research’ . . . It would be a major step forward if dendrochronology could embrace the scientific method.” 25
http://64.91.228.42/~rational/showthread.php?s=50a0a88275113f8785947ee098981abb&p=1478262#post1478262
Cool app just waiting to be applied to climate.
http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/eureqa
The above link is to a free software download from Cornell that is just aching to have climate data fed into it. It searches for a function that describes your input data up to 255 variables with a simple user interface.
For example, and if I wsn’t working on a novel, I would do this myself, you can load the solar insolation data and ice core data over the past couple hundred thousand years and see if it can rediscover Milankovitch.
They claim it rediscovered Kepler’s laws of motion, when fed observational data. A million climate apps come to mind to hand over to a dispassionate piece of software that doesn’t even care what the numbers mean.
A E Douglass was an astronomer whose major work involved showing the correlation between tree rings, precipitation, particularly midlatitude drought cycles, and sunspot cycles.
http://ltrr.arizona.edu/sites/ltrr.arizona.edu/files/bibliodocs/Douglass, AE_Evidence of Climatic Effects in the Annual Rings of Trees_1920.pdf
I used his work to compare with the 22 year drought cycle that showed up through spectral analysis in the almost 200 hundred year precipitation record for York Factory on Hudson Bay.
It was an alien idea even then (1982) as my doctoral committee initially rejected its inclusion. Landscheidt later found similar correlations.
http://www.john-daly.com/solar/US-drought.htm
I distinguished between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ midlatitude droughts in a peer-reviwed paper;
“Climatic Change, Droughts and Their Social Impact: Central Canada, 1811-20, a classic example.” In C.R.Harington (ed) The Year Without a Summer? World Climate in 1816. 1992, National Museum of Natural Sciences, Canadian Museum of Nature, Ottawa
I like the parapraxic typo Hal Fritts made in the PS to his Wed. 13 Nov 2002 email to Ron Savidge: “understanding plant processes often takes secondary impotence in the eyes of many dendrochronologists. (my bold)”
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Of primary impotence in dendrochronology, of course, is the extraction of bogus temperature numbers from tree rings.
Steve G, I don’t know the answer to your question, either. Ron Savidge is clearly worried about the pulling of highly specific climate information out of tree ring series, when no one knows how specific aspects of climate affect the production of tree rings. Hal Fritts seems to be talking past Ron Savidge, and possibly doesn’t realize that Ron’s criticisms are not an attack on Fritts’ methods, but on the modern abuses that pretend dendrothermometry is a branch of physics.
A. E. Douglass was an astronomer whose main interest was dendroclimatology, particularly the relationship between midlatitude precipitation patterns, especially drought cycles.
http://ltrr.arizona.edu/sites/ltrr.arizona.edu/files/bibliodocs/Douglass, AE_Evidence of Climatic Effects in the Annual Rings of Trees_1920.pdf
I used his work because I found a similar 22 year drought cycle in a spectral analysis of approximately 200 years of precipitation data for York Factory on Hudson Bay that appeared correlated with sunspot activity. It was an alien idea even then (1982) as my doctoral committee initially rejected that portion of the work. I risked failure but insisted on its inclusion, which, to their credit, they approved.
Theodor Landscheidt later developed the relationship between solar activity and midlatitude droughts.
http://www.john-daly.com/solar/US-drought.htm
In a later peer-reviewed paper I explored the distinction between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ droughts.
“Climatic Change, Droughts and Their Social Impact: Central Canada, 1811-20, a classic example.” In C.R.Harington (ed) The Year Without a Summer? World Climate in 1816. 1992, National Museum of Natural Sciences, Canadian Museum of Nature, Ottawa
Continuing my occasional meta-commentary: Firstly, it seems to me that the biggest problem we are having in this debate is that we are arguing facts with people for whom facts are secondary. This is a daily problem and a source of much frustration in the world in general. We’ve seen it directly in the quote from Fritts, not to mention several other pull quotes from Climategates 1 & 2.
Getting the facts out is not only difficult, it’s also not sufficient in itself because that’s not how a lot of people are making their decisions, and that includes the scientists involved who have emotional / financial investments in “the cause,” to the extent that they’re willing to “cheat on the homework” to “win.”
Secondly, as I have been trying to point out (again occasionally) scientists are not magically different from other people, no matter how much you may talk about peer review or the process. These e-mail exchanges have been as rancorous and petty in their own way as any teenage popularity contest.
Scientists are as human and flawed as anyone else, and must not be allowed to shut down debate by waving the “science flag.”
Duster says:
January 3, 2012 at 9:15 am
“The point here is that these data are generally published. Has anyone bothered to look at the other isotopic data associated with tree rings and C-14 data? The width:temperature argument used by Mann was simple minded at best, and reflected profound ignorance of the available associated data, which if submitted for C-14 dating work would be returned with other potential climatic data attached.”
There have been efforts to use O18 in tree rings as a proxy for temperature, but they took a big hit with the paper discussed in this post
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/13/surprise-leaves-maintain-temperature-new-findings-may-put-dendroclimatology-as-metric-of-past-temperature-into-question/
The paper is here.
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/earth/pdf/nature07031.pdf
The proxy method was based on the notion that the tree canopy,where photosynthesis was occurring, was at ambient temp. Since apparently it isn’t, the isotope ratios in tree rings don’t necessarily track the trees environment.
I think Orr’s theory of hockey sticks is infinitely more believable than Mann’s Hockey Stick theory. And Orr’s went through significant and really tough peer review for many years.
Tim;
Hm. Wonder what a d-ist would project as the t-ring outcome of a hot vs. cold drought.
It seems to me that very detailed micro and chemical examination of the rings, vs. just measuring them with calipers, would add to their value as diagnoses of various conditions. It stands to reason that while various combos of factors can result in the same width, there may/must be other distinctions within the rings, as the tree achieved the growth volume/mass using different resources.
Merovign,
Emotional to the power of 10.
Mann the cause not man.
tim in vermont;
Yes, that’s a very intriguing tool. I’ve been really wondering what such a totally objective pattern-finder would come up with, vs. the confirmation-bias pattern picking of the current disputants. Seems to me that a data-pattern-fiend like Bob Tisdale would be all over it.
Where, pray, are the trolls?
Infestation by troll normally appears quite rapidly.
They, obviously, concede defeat.
Treemometers? Pah!
But, but …isn’t Mann Lord of the Rings?
One would need to be able to quantify the rate of false Hockey Sticks.
Absolutely amazing. We don’t care how these treemometers work, we’re just interested in their results.
GISS = 0.1656 + 0.6833*RSS + 0.0005592*Time
The above is a formula with a .99+ R^2 to find the GISS from the RSS where time is in elapsed months discovered by the tool.
Brian H, the tool is a piece of cake. Go for it.
ChE says:
January 3, 2012 at 1:52 pm
“Absolutely amazing. We don’t care how these treemometers work, we’re just interested in their results.”
Absolutely. Unfettered self absorption and arrogance: their “interest” in a topic justifies their scientific production on that topic.
Blinding stupidity: we are not interested in how the tree works.
This was a parody, right?
DCA Jan 3 @ur momisugly 7-37am and Latitude Jan 3 @ur momisugly 8-10am on “other proxies”.
As always, John L Daly provides a valuable and clearly explained insight accompanied by multiple well-researched references in this article:
.
The “Hockey Stick”: A New Low In Climate Science.
http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/hockey.htm
Savidge is right, you need hands-on, feeling, commonsense understanding of all the factors at work – if not the biology itself. But he refers to “dendrochronology” where he should say “dendroclimatology” or “dendrothermometry“. Fritts raises a straw man, not noticing.
Steve McIntyre launched a dangerous (/sarc) expedition into the fastnesses of these terribly remote forests to show how easy it was to take samples. Heck, Mann used all the bristlecone series for his hockey stick, but Graybill had collected them to prove – via the 20th century – that CO2 fertilization overrode temperature signals. Mann was IMHO making nonstop fraudulent claims right from the start.
I think the Idsos’ website goes into a lot of the real science – is the species sensitivity for CO2, moisture, temp? etc. Graybill worked with them.
I looked at lots of bristlecone pine pics until I could show their leery ruggedness and extraordinary individuality in my “no AGW” presentation (slides 41-46).
Tallbloke, that beauuuuuuuuuuuuuutiful. Tell Minnesotans 4 GW.