Promoted Comment: Global Warming

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[From Richard (High Praise!)]

When the thermometers in my car, in front of the banks, in front of the pharmacy, on the news, on the weather channel, and on the internet government weather site all report different temperatures, why should I suddenly believe the average temp has increased half of a degree in the last twenty years?

3 Comments

    • Yeah . . . tree ring data
      .

      this extraordinary essay on Briffa’s lone tree core known as YAD061, which has a pronounced 8 sigma effect on the set of 10 tree cores Briffa used in his study [after discarding others that he had gathered] . . . . While we may never know the true growth driver for YAD06, this is one possible explanation.

      …

      The bristlecone records seemed a lousy proxy, because at the altitude where they grow it is below freezing nearly every night, and daytime temperatures are only above freezing for something like 10% of the year. They live on the borderline of existence, for trees, because trees go dormant when water freezes. (As soon as it drops below freezing the sap stops dripping into the sugar maple buckets.) Therefore the bristlecone pines were dormant 90% of all days and 99% of all nights, in a sense failing to collect temperature data all that time, yet they were supposedly a very important proxy for the entire planet. To that I just muttered “bunkum.”

      But there were other trees in other places. I was skeptical about the data, but until I saw so much was based on a single tree, YAD061, I couldn’t be sure I could just say “bunkum.”

      YAD061 looks very much like a tree that grew up in the shade of its elders, and therefore grew slowly, until age or ice-storms or insects removed the elders and the shade. Then, with sunshine and the rotting remains of its elders to feed it, the tree could take off.

      I have seen growth patterns much like YAD061 in the rings of many stumps in New Hampshire, and not once have I thought it showed a sign of global warming, or of increased levels of CO2 in the air. Rather the cause is far more simple: A childhood in the under-story, followed by a tree’s “day in the sun.”

      Dr. Briffa should spend less time gazing at computer screens, and actually get out and associate with trees more. At the very least, it might be good for his health.

      — wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/02/a-hands-on-view-of-tree-growth-and-tree-rings-one-explanation-for-briffas-yad061-lone-tree-core/

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