Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Anthony highlighted a study called “Recent Plant Diversity Changes on Europe’s Mountain Peaks” (paywalled here , hereinafter Pauli2012). The Supplementary Online Information (SOI) is here.
The study concluded that the plants had moved vertically up the mountain by 2.7 metres, and Anthony was justifiably amused by the accuracy of the number, calculated to the nearest tenth of a metre. But that hardly begins to touch the oddity of the study. Here is their Figure S1, from their SOI:
Figure 1, from the Supplemental Online Information from Pauli2012. ORIGINAL CAPTION: Fig. S1. Basic design of a study summit, divided into eight summit area sections (SAS) that were used as sampling areas; the upper four areas extend from the summit point down to the 5-m contour line, the four lower from the 5-m to the 10-m contour line.
See what I mean about the oddity?
The crazy thing to me is, that they are only studying the area right at the very tippy-top of the summit of the mountains. They are solely and only looking at the top ten metres (33 feet) of vertical elevation of the mountain … and from that tiny vertical slice off of the mountaintop, they profess to be able to tell if the plants are moving uphill …
Now, I’ve spent a bit of time at the tops of mountains. They are subject to many variations in weather. The biggest one is the wind. Wind is a huge factor up at the mountaintops, and even a slight change in the average wind direction can turn a warm spot into a cold spot, or turn a wet spot into a dry spot.
So when (not if but when) there is a change in the composition of the plants eking out a living at the very mountaintop, my first suspect would be a change in the prevailing wind.
So, what do they have to say about the wind as a confounding factor in their study? Well … nothing. The wind doesn’t even get mentioned.
Next, the claim is made that a change in the warmth is allowing or encouraging the plants to move uphill. This presumes, of course, that the plants are near the top of their temperature range.
But these suckers are living at the very top of the mountain. Are we supposed to believe that somehow, in the mere ten vertical metres of the mountaintop that are being studied, the top limit of plants’ ability to resist cold temperatures just happens to fall in that very narrow range?
Next, we have to consider the difference in temperature due to a vertical move of 2.7 metres. The adiabatic lapse rate is 1°C per hundred metres vertical movement. That means the inherent temperature difference would be about 0.03°C …
Let’s be realistic. Plants that live on mountaintops live in cold, windy, dry conditions. Even the slightest change in any of those can easily stunt or kill off the plants that have a tenuous foothold there. Their range is constantly shifting and changing as those factors shift and change.
As a result, the only way to study the question would be with lots of temperature and wind and humidity and precipitation sensors scattered all around the mountaintop. The downwind side of the peak will be different from the upwind side. The sunrise side will be different from the sunset side. The side that gets the mist and clouds will be different from the dryer side.
Without those kinds of detailed measurements of those variables, any study done on this basis, of the top ten metres of mountain summits, will show us exactly nothing. There are too many confounding variables, and we cannot account for them without the necessary measurements.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that this kind of rubbish gets published, but hope springs eternal … and in climate science, hope gets frustrated about as often …
In any case, I have long held that the quality of a scientific paper is inversely proportional to the square of the number of authors. This study, which is about four pages long, has 32 authors … just sayin’ …
w.
PS—Did you notice in Figure 1 that this is the gang that couldn’t draw straight? The inner box doesn’t line up with the outer box. So many authors … so few artists …
PPS—In researching this, I looked at a number of photos of mountain summits … many of them are steep, up to about 30° or so. The slope of many of them seemed to be somewhere around 10°. If the slope is 10°, the total study area is about 1,600 square metres. That’s less than a fifth of a hectare, or less than half an acre, a tiny area for such a study … so figuratively they are arguing not only about how many plants can dance on the head of a pin, but about just exactly where on the head of the pin they happen to be dancing this year, compared to where they were dancing seven years ago …
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Further topics for investigation and a government grant:
1. The wieght of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is causing the mountain range to sink 0.4m per year.
2. The troposphere is growing in volume, equivalent to 0.4 m height per year, as the atmosphere warms.
They’re hoping that at 0.4m a year, and starting only 10m. from the top, they’ll soon be able to say ‘models show that these plants will become extinct in certain locations within 10 years. It’s worse than we thought’.
” I agree, something else is moving the plants around, not the temperature.”
I believe Willis’ argument is just the opposite. Without a complete complement of measuring many different factors he argues that one cannot say with certainty which factor among many is the principle driver. Arguing, from little information that is is NOT temperature is as tenuous as arguing that is soley due to temperature.
Next, the claim is made that a change in the warmth is allowing or encouraging the plants to move uphill. This presumes, of course, that the plants are near the top of their temperature range.
But these suckers are living at the very top of the mountain. Are we supposed to believe that somehow, in the mere ten vertical metres of the mountaintop that are being studied, the top limit of plants’ ability to resist cold temperatures just happens to fall in that very narrow range?
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A couple points. First on the wind. They studied 66 different summits. I imagine one could argue that the wind changed the over the 7 year period of study on some of the summits.
It might be a stretch to make that argument for all 66.
You might consider how the summits were selected. I dunno.
http://www.gloria.ac.at/?a=3&b=10&c=4
We surveyed 66 summit sites of 17 mountain regions, distributed across Europe from the northern boreal to the temperate and to the Mediterranean zone (Fig. 1). Mediterranean mountain regions were defined as those lying within the Mediterranean biome according to Olson et al. (28). Sites were first recorded in the European Commission’s FP5 project GLORIA-Europe in 2001 and surveys were repeated in 2008.
Next they focus on particular plants
Endemic taxa: As generally defined in biogeography, an endemic species is restricted to a particular geographical region of variable extension, sometimes of a very
restricted range (narrow endemics). In this study we considered those species as endemics that are exclusive to a single mountain system: i.e., from north to south: the
Scandes, Urals, Carpathians, Alps, Pyrenees, Greater Caucasus, Apennines, or the Baetic Cordillera of southern Spain. In the case of the Mediterranean island sites: Corsica and
Sardinia or Crete and the Aegean region (compare Fig. 1). Most of the endemic species are, in fact, narrow endemics having a very limited distribution within the respective
mountain system. In addition, their vertical range is restricted in many cases to the upper part of the mountains (30). Hence their distribution is highly fragmented and comparable
to geographic islands. However, a narrow endemic may not be particularly rare within an observation site.
Next: with regard to the number of authors. You have to consider that there were several field teams bothin 2001 and 2008. Its not like 1 guy visited all 66 summits. So the comments about the number of authors is a little off base.
Finally, you probably should have commented on what the 2.7 meters represents and how it was calculated.
And folks can see the program here
http://www.gloria.ac.at/?a=5
It could be fun to check out the data loggers for hourly temperature
Anybody wanna guess what the the trend is for 2001 to 2008 at the mountain tops?
barnacle bill says:
April 25, 2012 at 11:08 pm
With sea levels rising at an alarming rate you could be on to a nice piece of research there, I’m only sorry I didn’t think of it first;-)
A ridiculous burst of noise. However, the subject itself is interesting, and it would be unwise to dismiss everything written under a similar title as pure noise. it has been very difficult to publish any work during the past decade (or get funded, to begin with), without linking it to climate change or to “green energy” (somewhat similar to the lack of success we experienced when we couldn’t link our research to cancer treatment during the previous decade).
Some works are good, despite the corrupt titles, and represent true efforts to find out how things work.
http://www.wmrs.edu/projects/cerec/pdfs/BeissingerCEREC.pdf
http://station-alpine-joseph-fourier.ujf-grenoble.fr/IMG/pdf/Kammer_al_JournVegSci2007.pdf
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080811195317.htm
I’d have transplanted a few at each of the summits. Conditions might have been OK at the summit right from the beginning of the 7 years of the study – heck! maybe even since 1944 – but it’s just a real booger to march uphill. Just like any other living thing, the hike down the hill is always easier than the hike up the hill.
I think the first comment by Russell really nails it. Just an increase in CO2 could account for greater hardiness. That is the confounding factor, plant hardiness. Hardiness changes would account for changes in range that could include better growth in certain soil types, etc. This study is full of fail.
So vegetation crawled up the mountain by 1.7 meters because of a supposed global warming. Has the report said that the vegetation below that line remained static so the net effect of the warming actually caused an increase in the net mass of the mountain vegetation? Warming means more vegetation which means more life and is therefore good. Cooling means less vegetation and is bad, less life.
Mr Mosher, would you place you CAGW reputation on this study? and what if the plants only moved 2.6 is this better or worse for CAGW what about 2.8. They also state that they will go back in 2 years and check again, 2.7/7 = 0.38571428571428571428571428571429 so 0.38571428571428571428571428571429 *2 = 0.77142857142857142857142857142857 so the plants in the next 2 years should off moved 0.77142857142857142857142857142857m, rough guesstimate anyway.
As the other side keeps telling us there is a mountain of peer reviewed evidence to support global warming,It is all stuff like this though.When did species stop increasing habitat range through evolution and only respond to changes in temperature?
Plant’s moving (whether inside or outside of accepted range) – hmm, I believe I heard a little known theory about why that might happen once. It was called something like evolution…
There might be an argument whether this can happen in seven years, but the fact that the plants in questions will presumably be constantly subject to evolution, and are in the sort of marginal environment where evolution is generally accepted to be more noticable, might be an issue in all of this.
The most valuable result of the study may be the entertainment of WUWT readers. Surely that is a worthy endeavor.
Such bloody nonsense.
The whole study is a farce. If and it’s a tiny if, if plants have moved around, be it up or down, it is as likely that the human interference in the measurement has caused the movement, be it it seed carried under foot or on the clothes of the researcher as they move about and beyond the field of study.
This ain’t science, this is miniscule observation and bias from people who know that if they get the “right results”, they will be funded for a lifetime of similar jaunts. These people are killing science, the scouts could have done better.
It is also necessary to measure the lower bounds. Did they attempt that? It is entirely possible that the plants might be growing more at lower altitudes too, especially if they were benefiting from higher CO2 concentrations.
Further possible causes of increased fertilization at mountain summits:
Mountain tops are places where you often meet other humans. Sometimes those humans consume and discard food at the summits. Sometimes humans leave….ahem…..the metabolic end products of food at the summit.
Sometimes wild animals frequent the summit to see if the humans leave food. Those animals will, in any case, inevitably bring fertilizer with them.
If the animals [sheep, deer] are farmed, then their numbers will also increase as farming spreads due to growing human populations=more fertilization.
Did any of these mountains sport a telecommunications mast? =more human activity. Birds also like to sit/roost on many human constructions, and often defecate while doing so.
Did the researchers take a ski-lift to any of these previously-unfrequented summits…….?
Willis … how did you get 1600 sq metres with a 10° slope? The top area of a cone at that angle with a centre height of 10m is 10427 square metres! The study area was a bit less than this but not much!
In addition .. they surveyed 66 summits … not just one!
How many grad student’s got their PHDs working on this study? Does this paper reflect the quality of present day higher education? Has a publish or perish motivation fueled a scientific publishing bubble that will soon burst?
I didn’t see a reference to the altitude of the study. Perhaps the researchers were suffering from hypoxia.
Frankly, it would be much weirder if the distribution of any short-lived plant (ie not a Californian Redwood or Australian Snow Gum) had not changed over 7 years. Do these people think that all annuals and perennials just pop up in the same spot every year?
There are numerous factors that determine when and where plants germinate in the wild, even in fairly stable environments. On a mountainside, with wind and water affecting both microclimate and seed dispersion, animal/human activity, soil movement etc, etc, the conclusions of this ‘study’ are just plain silly. One glaring omission is that they made no effort to establish whether distribution of these plants had changed in any other direction, like sideways or downwards. Nor are we told whether the overall density of these plants has changed, and if so why/why not.
In any event, 7 years is meaningless in the natural world. After a prolonged drought, or a series of wet years, plant profiles can change dramatically almost anywhere. And this isn’t even a dramatic change.
What a waste of money to produce rubbish.
4 pages, 32 authors? This is a 5th grade science class project, right? It probably got a “C” at best.
I’m quite certain that had the study shown the opposite, it would not be published.
Steven Mosher says:
April 26, 2012 at 2:00 am
A couple points. First on the wind. They studied 66 different summits. I imagine one could argue that the wind changed the over the 7 year period of study on some of the summits.
It might be a stretch to make that argument for all 66.
Immaterial. Let me remind you what my fifth grade science teacher taught us for the science fair. It is the scientists job to seperate out other variables and not use number of repetitions to get rid of your compounding factors.
For instance, if you are studying plants and number of hours of light, and you have actual sunlight coming in to ruin your science experiment, adding to the number of plants is not going to get rid of this compounding variable. Take CO2, or wind patterns that are constantly changing everywhere, not just some places, and then magically staying the same in others. Or precipitation.
How is adding subjects to your experiment going to get rid of your compounding variables when you ignored them in the first place? They did not even think to take into consideration some of what we said here. One would think that they need a refresher course from my fifth grade teacher on science…..
There are so many compounding factors to biological growth to plants that are not taken into consideration by these people that its just plain stupid. You can’t hide a skunk of a study by adding more sites and just more money into the skunk. A skunk is still a skunk. And a computer program with all of these compounding factors built into it is going to be accurate to the nearest meter let along tenth of a meter?
Are you seriously talking about the elegance of this thing? I am rather shocked.
barnacle bill says:
April 25, 2012 at 11:08 pm
Could it be the mountain is actually sinking by that amount with the plant life just maintaining the same relative elevation?
With the cause of this sinking being global warming.
I’m sure I could knock up a research paper before lunch time to show that.
————————————-
Easy bill, not so fast. You need to get the process in the correct order.
1. Secure grant from EPA.
2. whatever.
With 31 authors tripping over each other I am surprised they were able to conclude anything they might all agree with. This paper (which I have not read) sounds to be much like the drawing of a camel; being a horse designed by a committee.