Climate alarmists tell us that the Earth has never been warmer, and that we can tell by looking at tree rings, treelines, and other proxy indicators of climate.
Climate scientists claim the warmth is unprecedented.
We’ve been told it is warming so fast, we have only 12 years left!
Yet nature seems to not be paying attention to such pronouncements, as this discovery shows.
This photo shows a tree stump of White Spruce that was radiocarbon dated at 5000 years old. It was located 100 km north of the current tree line in extreme Northwest Canada.
The area is now frozen tundra, but it was once warm enough to support significant tree growth like this.
If climate was this warm in the past, how did that happen before we started using the fossil fuels that supposedly made our current climate unprecedentedly warm?
There has also been research published in New Zealand on the elevation of Podocarpus Totara in Westlands forests that shows the climate is cooler than it was around 500 years ago.
Stumpy
April 12, 2019 at 12:30 pm
That’s very interesting…do you know just where that was and do you have a reference? Were other South Island trees involved? Very interesting because 500 years is not all that long ago!
Scientist i Norway have recently concluded that temperatures during the Holocene Optimum, some 5-9000 years ago, were 3-6 degrees Celsius higher than present in the norwegian mainland and further north. Logs from that period can still be found i marshes much higher than the present tree line…
STOP WITH THE FAKE NEWS. That tree grew in an Ojibwe sweat lodge with elevated levels of CO2 due to heavy consumption of cannabis! 😉
Please comment on this for me….I was looking for information on Allan Villiers and clipper ships and got this (includes Judith Curry references). Climate change in a Full and By periodical, please !
https://www.shf.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/FullBy_Feb06.pdf
It could easily be argued that moisture has a natural variability around a mean. Tree rings at higher elevations or Arctic tree lines are used because it’s believed that shorter growing seasons make tree growth in those places more sensitive to the length of the growing season and less sensitive to soil moisture or soil nutrients. But where ADJUSTED temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentrations show steady increases it’s a different story.
There are several issues mixed in this article.
The Holocene Climatic Optimum was warmer than the present, and ended about 5000 years ago. Then the Neoglacial period started and has been interrupted by Modern Global Warming.
To that we must add the change in Milankovitch insolation that has been huge. After the ice sheets melted completely ~7000 years ago, summer insolation was much higher than it is now at northern high latitudes, and summer temperatures 4 °C warmer than now have been recorded by proxies from Scandinavia. Under those conditions trees had it much easier.
One has to be very careful and don’t extrapolate from local or regional conditions to global conditions.
For the sake of argument… How many years did this tree live? Was its life brutal and short? Was its lifespan long and luxurious?
This kills the Hockeysticks: http://www2.nau.edu/ScottAnderson/docs/131.pdf
Anyway, they don`t exist without the Bristlecones from nearly the same area as the study above.
This photograph looks to be “spruced” up and doesn’t “ring” true, it “stumps” me why anyone would accept physical data over data made up in a model. It just doesn’t “resin-ate”. We need to get to the “root” of this problem. “Wood” someone “Mann” up and explain it to me? 🙂
6000 years old arolla pine stump, about 8m lenght and 1,7 metric tonnes found at austrians biggest glacier the ‘Pasterze’ in 2014:
https://kaernten.orf.at/news/stories/2718069/
So what to think of Steig’s latest faithfully reported here in Canada?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/arctic-warmest-in-10000-years-1.5094392
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09622-y
You just have to read a few earlier posts here. There is plenty of proof that the Arctic was warmer during the Early Holocene. A short summary:
– Beach ridges in places where there is never open water now
– Tree stumps well above and far north of the northernmost trees today
– Tree stumps revealed by retreating glaciers
– Whale skeletons and driftwood on coasts where there is never open water today
These are all much more reliable proxies than isotope measurements on pore water of uncertain age and even more uncertain provenance (isotope ratios are strongly affected by the temperature of the ocean where the water evaporated, probably thousands of kilometers away).
At they didn’t show a polar bear that was skin and bones..
What bugs me is the way the so called scientists throw around numbers/dates.. They all agree with mutual hypocrisy
There’s the problem, right there. The “warming” he detected was from local land-use changes.
Its obvious that stump was placed there … and they didn’t even bother to hide the shovel!
Historical Aspects of the Northern Canadian Treeline HARVEY NICHOLS
This is an older document, about 1970 +
http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic29-1-38.pdf
ABSTRACT From palynological studies it appears that northernmost dwarf spruces of the tundra and parts of the forest-tundra boundary may be relicts from times of prior warmth, and if felled might not regenerate. This disequilibrium may help explain the partial incongruence of modern climatic limits with the present forest edge. Seedlings established as a result of recent warming should therefore be found within the northernmost woodlands rather than in the southern tundra.
Given that Herr Doktor Professor Mann’s hockey stick only goes back 1,000 years, this article doesn’t provide a good reason how a 5,000 year old tree stump factors into the analysis. It might be more relevant to speak about the Marcot et al cartoon featured in XKCD.
If we took a slice through Michael Mann do you think we could find rings of varying thickness based on the amount of grants awarded over time?
[humor. not malice.].
“Climate alarmists tell us that the Earth has never been warmer”
SNIP do better than a strawman in the first sentence SNIP
The unprecedented claim is apparently limited to the last 2000 years only – an arbitrary and brief interval in the glaciation – interglacial time scales such that the known much warmer conditions in the prior interglacial does not count. But even that doesn’t work.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/09/30/arcticwarming/
Magic!
And here’s another example from the Arctic…
https://www.watoday.com.au/environment/as-the-ice-gives-way-a-great-arctic-mystery-may-be-solved-20080803-3pa9.html
Is Mann in jail or is he still trusted by some?
It is obvious to me that he is a false prophet.
Is he trusted buy 97% of the science community?
The World Data Center for Paleoclimatology, Boulder and NOAA Paleoclimatology Program archive dozens of ice core reconstructions of past temperatures. Many of these are Arctic reconstructions and, from what I can see anyway, they pretty much all indicate that there were periods of warmer than ‘present’ (where ‘present’ usually means 1950) temperatures in the Arctic in the past, including ~ 5,000 years ago: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo-search/?dataTypeId=7
I would imagine that those who made these reconstructions and wrote the many associated papers could loosely be called ‘climate scientists’, as opposed to “climate alarmists”.
The ncdc link on paleo climate data is temporarily unavailable. They must be making more adjustments to the data.
“The area is now frozen tundra, but it was once warm enough to support significant tree growth like this.”
Stop with the logic and science. You’ll make their heads explode. They BELIEVE BELIEVE BELIEVE and you are messing with that.
I live on the shore of a lake that expanded somewhat in the 50s when a dam was built on the next downstream lake. The lake expansion was enhanced by wave damage from boats, causing my wooded shoreline to slowly cede itself into the lake. I recently removed the trees that fell into the lake. At least two had over 100 rings. The rings on these were quite odd. The first several decades had nice round bull’s eyes. However, after that, the side of the trees on the lake side had rings that kept getting smaller and smaller until individual years could not even be distinguished. On the land side, the ‘rings’ kept up a seemingly normal growth – at least until the tree fell into the lake.
I guess the tree ring shamans would declare that the trees had a climate on one side that was different from the climate on the other side.
Tilted conifers have broader rings on the “low” side. Were the trees possibly affected more by stronger winds off the lake and bent as they grew taller?
Perhaps as tty suggested, the wind off the lake is trying to bend the trees (they were more subject to the wind as they got taller) and they responded by building up on the lee side to resist the bending & remain straight.
It is entirely correct to point out some of the puzzles and inconsistencies in the CAGW meme and its ‘unprecedented warming’. This cliche bears repeating:
“There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
How are tree rings affected by an increase in CO2? If CO2 increases but temperature and moisture do not, do rings get wider?
Yes.