Thompson’s Dunde ice core is an extremely important proxy in multiproxy studies. There has been an increase in dO18 levels in the 20th century. Whether this is a proxy for temperature is not at all obvious on physical grounds. The relationship between dO18 and temperature in monsoon ice caps is opposite to that of polar […]
Just as an experiment, I plotted up all the ring widths for the Gaspé and Polar Urals sites, with each core displaced a little. What I was thinking of the type of graph that you see in seismic surveys. The look is interesting, given how much weight is placed downstream on these data sets in […]
Miller et al. [2004] studied fossil evidence of forest levels in 9 locations in the western U.S. over the past 3500 years, including Whitewing Mountain and San Joaquin Ridge, Inyo Craters Chain in the eastern Sierra Nevadas, near the bristlecones of the White Mountains (about which I’m going to post an interesting graphic on their […]
I’ve recently run across an article on changing water use efficiency in bristlecones, which pretty much put the nail in the coffin on any lingering ideas that 20th century bristlecone ring widths might be a temperature proxy. Tang et al. [1999], "The dC13 of tree rings in full-bark and strip-bark bristlecone pines in the White […]
Science has recently weighed in with an editorial in which the editor of Science, Donald Kennedy, stated that he is “outraged” by the Barton Committee inquiring into processes for due diligence and disclosure in connection with science being applied for large-scale public policy. I thought that people might be interested in an account of my […]
John Hekman has posted up a couple of comments on the possible effect of Owens Lake desiccation (due to diversion of Los Angeles water supply) on bristlecones. His notes and link are extremely interesting.
One point that intrigued me about the Muscheler vs Solanki dispute was to see what the underlying data looked like. Here’s a graph and some comments. I don’t purport to know a lot about this; I just wanted to get a feel for the data.
realclimate has posted up a discussion of a recent Brief Communications Arising in Nature by Muscheler et al., commenting on Solanki et al. [2004]. They haven’t posted up the Solanki et al. reply, which argues that Muschelerr et al. have screwed up their normalization. However here it is . There are two points of interest […]
I’ve written on a number of occasions on Briffa’s Polar Urals reconstruction, which is used in nearly every multiproxy reconstruction, no doubt because of its uniquely cold MWP. It’s one of the key series in Crowley and Lowery [2000] and Jones et al [1998]; it’s not as important in MBH98-99 (which is more or less […]
I was collating information on Thompson’s archiving of ice core information and noticed something interesting on the Puruogangri glacier in the Himalayas drilled in 2000 and still unarchived. (Thompson is one of the 20 wise men who recently weighed in with the Barton Committee on behalf of MBH.) In addition to not being archived, I […]
Climate Audit 
Science Editorial
Science has recently weighed in with an editorial in which the editor of Science, Donald Kennedy, stated that he is “outraged” by the Barton Committee inquiring into processes for due diligence and disclosure in connection with science being applied for large-scale public policy. I thought that people might be interested in an account of my […]