Ian,

I responded to this post as there was a gathering, seemingly inexorable tide of bad conclusions arinsing from misperception of dendro. as my wording in 45 made explicit. I contextualized and provided reading material toward re-directioning the way off-target conclusions being rapidly made. That was the implicit topic and I responded to it.

There may well be confounding environmental factors behind what you relate, but that is beyond my skill level to analyze, hence my not commenting on them. I will follow how the differential analyses fisticuffs play out in the places where the currency of scientific knowledge is exchanged, the journals. If I see someone other than one guy start talking about these concerns, then you’ll have my (and others’) attention.

But as your topic is a small subset of a larger issue ['what are the indicators of a rising global temperature?' ], the answer to your concern may be a quiet footnote unless someone hops on it, starts making their own hypotheses, gathers their own data, and says “See! told ya so!”. Because that is how it works; when someone didn’t like geological uniformitarianism, they didn’t post flyers on horse’s butts, they got a rock hammer and slept in a tent until they had an answer. However, I’m sure Aristotle and Plato occasionally called each other names (“…and how about that idiot Pliny? hohoho! How’s he expect to do a T-test on that finger now? Slave, more grappa!”) like what’s going on here, so let’s at least keep our perspective.

Best,

D

This thread is a bunch of people with no experience in the field trying to question the science of dendrochronology. Next thing you know, there will be important-sounding chattering about “there are serious questions about the discipline’s methodology because blablabla!!!!!” and then there will be spam on listservs and blog comments, then it will be a talking point.

Dano, calm down. I’m not questioning the venerable science of dendrocronology. Just a little portion of it. BTW, thanks for the references on the effects of CLIMATE on trees.

The best correlation with sensor temperature he found from the actual data (and we are talking the best out of 70 separate series) was 0.2. From a signal processing point of view (which is the way I like to think of data) a correlation of 0.2 is equal to a signal to noise ratio of 1/4. In other words the noise power was four times higher than the signal power in the ‘best’ matching series out of 70. That is pretty horrible. This does not even get into the whole issue of negative responders, dubious age corrections, fertilization effects, use of ancient trees for which correlation quality cannot be checked or calibrated by comparison to modern instrument data, and on and on. Most of these problems you can find explained in detail on this site.