I would be interested in any comments that you care to make as I really don’t know whether I am right in my speculations or where to go with my thoughts on the subject.

“faithfully recording the bad years alongside the good”

Faithfully? Hmmm.

link

Here is a story that look to me like researchers walking around the stumps of bristlecone pines that are above the current tree line and looking for evidence of global warming but not asking why there are dead bristlecones above the treeline.

Researchers kept one eye out for lightning strikes and thunderstorms as they scurried among the gnarly bristlecone roots, often dropping to their hands and knees to record every plant growing within a carefully marked grid.

The plant census will be recorded in a central archive and repeated every five years, always using the same methods.

Eventually, the data may show how plants at similar altitudes all over the world are responding to the same global signal of rising temperatures and higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The project is known as “GLORIA,” for the Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments. Based in Vienna, operating mostly with volunteer staff and donated funds, organizers have set up about 40 research sites so far, including two in the White Mountains, one in the Sierra Nevada and one in Glacier National Park. A site at Lake Tahoe is planned.

This location was chosen partly because of the University of California’s White Mountain Research Station, which includes dormitories, laboratories and one of North America’s highest-elevation weather stations on the White Mountain summit.

The station, designated as the first North American master station in a network that also includes stations in South America, Europe, Asia and Australia, is sponsoring climate-related research that goes well beyond the plant census.

The first intensive field sampling in this expanded effort was carried out last week, when about 25 scientists and field assistants fanned out from the UC facility’s Crooked Creek Station, at 10,200 feet amid ancient bristlecone forests.

Such ecosystems may be among the earliest bellwethers of climate change. Rare high-altitude plants, well adapted to a colder climate, may not take long to succumb as rising temperatures pull other species higher and rearrange species interactions at the summit.

“Everything’s on a real climatic knife edge already, so small changes can make big differences in what you see,” said Stuart Weiss, a freelance consulting ecologist from Menlo Park.

The famous bristlecones have endured countless challenges over the millennia, yet always seem to muster one more burst of life when spring warms the rocky dolomitic soil. Growing seasons may expand and shrink, but the trees carry on, their growth rings faithfully recording the bad years alongside the good

D’Arrigo, R, Mashig, E, Frank, D, Wilson, R.J.S. and Jacoby, G. 2005. Temperature variability over the past millennium inferred from Northwestern Alaska tree rings. Climate Dynamics 24: 227-236.

http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/homes/rwilson6/Publications/DArrigoetal2005c.pdf

I’m not saying that it’s primarily an insect signal they’ve extracted, but aren’t those Alaskan spruce currently being destroyed by spruce beetles? Don’t spruce budworms cycle every ~30 years? How can these authors prove that insects are not the major factor limiting growth?

The 2006 hurricane season is getting off to a good start

Here is ace reporter Jerry Petree on the hurricane that never was, Hurricane Alberto, and the devastation it inflicted upon Myrtle Beach.

Hurricane Alberto Video