Comments on: Kaufman's "Classical" Log Regression

By: cdquarles

cdquarles — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:09:02 +0000

It has been quite a few years since I studied biology, but I thought that is was commonly acknowledged that many of the world’s most successful living organisms were compartmentalized, segmented, or both.

By: cdquarles

cdquarles — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:03:56 +0000

Indeed. I may be wrong, but much of the reality of biological organisms is presented as its inverse. Whenever I see a vast conclusion that seems to have been made from half-vast data, invert the relationship and the premises and see if the logic works.

By: Steve McIntyre

Steve McIntyre — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 04:11:24 +0000

THank you for commenting. We cited one of your articles in McIntyre and McKitrick 2005 (E&E) on the theory that, if bristlecone strip bark widths were supposed to be a magic thermometer, the authors should survey the relevant botanical literature – which they hadn’t done. Regards, Steve Mc

By: Ron Lanner

Ron Lanner — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 04:01:51 +0000

We think of a tree as a unitary organism whose roots bring up water and distribute it to all parts of the tree. This is oversimplified. There are numerous examples known of water being transported only straight up into a spatially well defined trunk sector from which emanate several limbs. Think of this tree as being made up of several partial trees, each represented by a major lateral root, a trunk sector, and that sector’s limbs, with limited or no tangential diffusion of water into the neighboring sectors. Now kill a major root by exposing it through soil erosion to dessication, rolling-rock impacts, cooking of its cambium through its thin bark, or rot subsequent to injury. No water flows up its sector, so the sector then dies. After a while the bark covering the dead cambium of that sector flakes off, exposing the wood surface. We now have a strip of bare wood with dead limbs coming out of it. Now do that again to another big root. That gives us two dead strips (cup half empty interpretation) or a living bark strip between them (cup half full interpretation). Since soil erosion takes time, we notice that “bark-stripping” (ugh!) is found on trees that have been around awhile (= old); and very often on downhill sides of trees. As long as there is an unkilled sector, and the rest of the tree is sufficiently rot-resistant to support it, the slowly dying tree will still stand.
This can be tested empirically using a shovel or saw. It requires no wisdom on the part of the tree, calculating how much foliage it can afford to make given its metabolic needs, and no special behavior of hormones.

By: bender

bender — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 01:22:50 +0000

Thank you for your comment, Ron.
.
We are all open to being educated on this very interesting topic, so fire away! Any comments you have to add would be appreciated. You are also more than welcome to list publications of yours relevant to the issue. (If they’re all relevant, list them all!)

By: Ron Lanner

Ron Lanner — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 23:55:10 +0000

Reading the largely illogical and uninformed comments about those seductive bark strips of bristlecone pine is kind of annoying, since I have published unrebutted mechanistic explanations of them since the 1980s, yet have not been able to penetrate any minds in the so-called “dendro” community (to a forester “dendro” has meant dendrology since before the first dendrochronologist was birthed. Most recently in my book “The Bristlecone Book — A Natural History of the World’s Oldest Trees” (Mountain Press, 2007). LaMarche, not a biologist, was clearly putting the cart before the horse in attributing old age to death of vital tissues. It’s the other way around, guys.

By: Reference

Reference — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 21:53:31 +0000

bender, You are looking for possible forms of environmental stress affecting the biota of the Yamal Peninsula? How about:- Radionuclides in the moss-lichen cover of tundra communities in the Yamal Peninsula Don't forget that it used to get quite warm in the adjacent region of Novaya Zemlya in the 1950s.

By: cdquarles

cdquarles — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:49:34 +0000

Re: bender (#61),

Hi bender,

This is a bit OT.

Here in the US southeast, you probably couldn’t easily measure the stress induced ethylene (fruit growers use ethylene to induce ripening after harvesting early so that you get less spoilage) because the photolysis occurs too rapidly (Apr to Oct), but you sure can smell pinene and the ground level ozone and see the photochemical haze. I think that you could (at least for pines) measure the volatile terpenes released concomitantly as a result of the stress response. Hmm, need to do a google search re southern pine species such as the loblolly pine pyrolysis oil project I worked on in the late 1970s.

Thanks for the research project.

By: bender

bender — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:08:11 +0000

Re: Steve McIntyre (#92),
Can you read that idiosyncratic Tucson format ok? Lemme know if you want a standard rectangular file.

Steve: How do you think that I emulated Mannian tree ring principal components? My Tucson conversion is a very old script and one that I would do better nowadays.

loc=”http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/melvin/PhilTrans2008/YamalADring.raw”
download.file(loc,”temp.dat”)
source(“http://data.climateaudit.org/scripts/utilities.treering.txt”)
tree=make.rwl_new(“temp.dat”)

By: bender

bender — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:04:37 +0000

Re: Steve McIntyre (#92), I wonder why Briffa and Bradley don't just work together publishing ...[snip] Has there ever been a strictly B&B paper? Steve: Jones is Briffa's patron. Bradley and Jones worked together in the first CRU temperature history (the 1985 project for the DOE Oak Ridge nuclear lab.) Bradley and Jones, 1993 was the first multiproxy study (not MBH98, though its supposed "firstness" has been used an excuse.)