Comments on: Yamal and the Decline

By: Ray Tomes

Ray Tomes — Wed, 19 May 2010 12:54:33 +0000

Hi Geoff

I am not a climate scientist. I am a cycles researcher with considerable statistical experience. In my experience interpolation works a lot better than extrapolation. That is why IPCC is in so much trouble.

What I really want is someone to give me a link where there are a decent set of tree ring chronologies from around the world and hopefully some corresponding climate records overlapping them for the last century or so. If there is sufficient diversity in the nature of the regions then I think it may be possible to extract some sort of global temperature from the data at least.

I am working on the assumption that different tree types and different regions will have different shaped non-linear responses to temperature.

Regards
Ray

By: Elite Events

Elite Events — Mon, 17 May 2010 04:35:52 +0000

Trees can give us a great indicator of climate change. I’ve heard of studies being done that study various aspects of tree ring growth and the changes in our climate over time.

By: Ray Tomes

Ray Tomes — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:04:20 +0000

Thanks Craig and Alan for your comments. I have had the experience more than once of “accidentally” finding two independent factors when analyzing a lot of economic data, that when plotted were in a horse-shoe shape. A single factor would suffice if a non-linear basis was used. It may be that similar things will apply for temperature, it may be that they will not. But it is well worth a try.

Well, upside down data will turn a smiley into a frown.

By: David Longinotti

David Longinotti — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 21:30:34 +0000

The “teleconnection” postulate of the Hockey Team is totally without scientific foundation, since it implies some sort of mysterious action-at-a-distance. The locality priciple of physics (from Einstein’s special relativity) is basically that any event in spacetime depends only on collocated events. At any instant, a tree is only affected by the temperature at its location. Analogously (for illustrative purposes), there is no “teleconnection” of soil moisture content. In that regard, a tree’s growth is only influenced by what its roots can touch.

As suggested by Mr. Murphy, some micro properties (e.g. spins of electron pairs) appear to defy locality, but I doubt that there is any evidence that a macro-property like tree-growth is subject to the phenomenon of quantum entanglement.

By: cdquarles

cdquarles — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:33:45 +0000

Phil,

A better question is how many Otzis did appear and rot in the MWP because there weren’t any archaelogists around to find them and preserve them .

By: Jeff Alberts

Jeff Alberts — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:43:35 +0000

Because glacier retreat and advance has more to do with precipitation than minor changes in ambient air temperature.

By: John Murphy

John Murphy — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:30:17 +0000

Two comments.
snip – policy

2. On the “divergence problem:” In an email to me about 6 weeks ago, Osborn CRU fame told me that the famous “fudge factor” program in the Climategate files was part of a project that he had in relation to the divergence, which project involved fitting data to parabolas. I diagnose that to mean that the world renowned experts at the CRU have just discovered that tree growth responds to variables other than temperature – be that local temperature or regional temperature by “teleconnection.” On that subject, the “teleconnection” thing (Mann) reminds me of quantum entanglement. I didn’t think they were up to quantum mechanics.

By: Tom Gray

Tom Gray — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 12:37:38 +0000

Of course, the real question is how he ended up under a glacier in the first place. How did he go from walking around alive to being dead under a glacier? Did the corpse burrow under the ice?

By: LearDog

LearDog — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 11:34:03 +0000

Another consideration is that the Soviets started exploration for natural gas in the area in the 1960′s. And some of the worlds largest natural gas fields were discovered in the Yamal-Naidym region in the ’60s and ’70s.

It would be interesting to look into possible environmental impacts from these efforts on Professor Briffa’s trees.

Point is: they’re running with the assumption that these Unesco trees are untainted. To my mind – it should be proved that they aren’t unique.

By: Phil Brisley

Phil Brisley — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 11:10:52 +0000

OT, sorry, EW you might be the person to ask: Why did Otzi the 5,200 year old iceman (recently discovered in the Alps) not appear and decay during the MWP?