“Air pollution may cause short-term (acute) damage, which is immediately visible, and long-term (chronic) damage, which can lead to gradual tree decline. Long-term damage may predispose trees to other disorders, making diagnosis difficult.” http://pubs.ext.vt.edu/430/430-022/430-022.html

More links to research here:

http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2011/07/profound-negative-impacts.html

As happens too often, Ford is simply repeating an absurd talking point that has been too readily accepted by the credulous “community” … It’s not a point that’s been claimed by Mann himself, Wahl and Ammann or by the NAS panel or IPCC.

It’s theatre of the absurd, climate style. Somehow I can’t help linking this with my face to face encounter with Lord Acton after I’d watched him being questioned by the Parliamentary committee on science and technology on 27th October last year. Soon after I got talking to Professor Calculus in the corridor some UEA media relations expert felt the need to interpose himself and ‘deal with my query’. But by then I’d done what I’d came for – reminded Acton of what he’d said publicly when face to face with Steve in the wine bar after the Guardian debate in July. Had he found the facts Steve had ‘got completely wrong’ on Climate Audit, as promised? Er, no. He’d looked, been unable to locate them and, surprise surprise, not contacted Steve to tell him this. “Are things deleted on the website?” he asked slyly. My time to say, firmly, “No.” And then the PR man was upon us.

The point throughout is that Acton was never meant to be face to face with Steve McIntyre. It’s a vital part of the plan: that Steve only gets to meet the online timewasters peddling the absurd urban legends of climate. A very mediocre Vice Chancellor of UEA having personal interaction with Him Who Shall Not Be Named – that was way out of bounds for the PR gurus of Consensus HQ. We’d all just seen how badly Calculus came off in open debate with McIntyre, with Fred Pearce, Doug Keenan and even George Monbiot helping out.

Thus R. Drake in the privacy of Portcullis House was too much for the good Lord three months later. It’s this inability to face the music at any level that has done such damage to UEA and the Team generally. Thanks gentle host for maintaining dignity and focus despite all of it.

As I recall, the McIntyre processing produced vague hockey sticks of miniscule amplitude from red noise

You recall this incorrectly. Teh red noise hockey sticks were of eh same magnitude as the tree ring hockey sticks

Steve: as happens too often, Ford is simply repeating an absurd talking point that has been too readily accepted by the credulous “community”. In a singular value decomposition, the PCs (left matrix) are constrained to have a sum of squares of 1. Since there are 581 values from 1400-1980, the “amplitude” is necessarily very small in the PCs from red noise (as it is for PCs from tree ring data.) MBH methodology re-scales these to a standard deviation of 1 and then uses them in a regression scheme (the rescaling is actually redundant). Thus it is the shape that matters. I’ve shown that you can “get” similar reconstructions from red noise as from tree ring data.

” cave deposits. ”

Perhaps you do not mean speleotherms here, but I have filed this quote about stalgmites on my computer under the filename ‘Good Grief!”

quote
A USEFUL STARTING POINT FOR SPELEOTHEM CLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION
IS TO ASSUME THAT:
· every sample has a different response to climate, and that even two stalagmites ten cm apart in the
same cave will have different climate signals.
· that non-linear responses should be expected due to the inherently non-linear hydrology of karst
· deeper, slower dripping samples will show more linear responses, but will also be lagged and
maybe even have no response to surface climate. In contrast, shallow and fast dripping stalagmites will be
very responsive to climate but will be more difficult to calibrate and understand.
· Most climate proxies preserved in stalagmites are a complex mixture of soil, vegetation, rainfall,
evaporation, hydrological and geological processes.
unquote

Lots of wiggle room with those when a quick foray through the different deposits will show teleconnected signals from… well, anywhere you’d care to name. A fitting substitute for tree rings?

Sometimes, when we have no information, it is better to act in accordance with that lack (or not act at all), rather than assume bad information is correct for the sake of something, anything, to excuse our actions.

JF

On matters of scientific practice and principle, pleading ignorance due to lack of technical expertise is a canard. Purporting to provide a comprehensive, objective overview by spinning verbalisms acceptable to clunking ideologues wastes everybody’s time.

Snip away if you feel its necessary but please don’t mischaracterize what was said to those who can’t read it.

Simplest example is found in the stripbark BCP’s (bristlecone pines for newbies). Go review the Almagre story again (categories on the left).

With stripbarks, we showed the ‘signal’ varies by 300%+ depending on exactly where you take the core sample. And there is plenty of visual evidence that maybe, just maybe, the measured high-growth pulse might be related to trees’ response to the mechanical bark stripping: no surprise that when most of a tree’s bark is stripped away, all its growth is focused on the narrow remaining strip.

Even more interesting: the nearby non-stripbark trees don’t show the “signal.”

Bottom line: the surmise that those trees are responding to temperature is quite shaky.

Back to your analogy: to make the comparison more valid, let’s make it a whole set of cameras (multiple tree samples), located in a public place, and you don’t get to watch them (trees were growing under unknown conditions over the centuries). During the month of shooting, the cameras are sometimes adjusted or moved by forces unknown (stripbark, landslides, lightning strikes). Some cameras will likely be broken (trees downed and not sampled).

To follow the analogy, when you go to pick up the cameras, the only ones you get to use are the ones that have clearly been interfered with (stripbark). The more extreme the interference, the better. Any camera still in its expected/normal place is ignored.

That’s what has been happening with the focus on stripbark and other anomalous trees.