[click image, CROSS-SECTION OF TREE RINGS... (Alaska's very harsh summer of 1783... and not great one of 1780....)]I have been vexed by all the blather about "climategate" going around, and trying my hardest to pay the least amount of acute attention as possible. The diffuse spray of headlines is quite bad enough. I did take the time out to actually read some of the emails everyone's screaming about, and the gripes about the deniers taking them out of context, but I don't even know whether the guys engaged in the exchange were dendroclimatologists or from some other discipline or guys trying to make all the data from various disciplines line up into a usable model for making predictions of future climate conditions. It matters only if you are interested in discrediting dendroclimatology, hitherto used only for confirming assumptions about the past, as a predictive tool for global mean temperatures, and you don't have to bother with the emails to do that.
I have been pissed off because I'm something like what you might call a lay expert in forestry, and, more loosely, how it bears on climate, macro-climate, conditions. The notion that they can make statements about
TEMPERATURES, except in the very broadest strokes, from tree rings is messing with my head big time. A fool's errand. I will state that they might be able to make some really broad predictions based on what they can glean from confirming past events, because, after all, the temperature does have to be, mostly, within a certain range for a tree to stay alive at all, but that's as far as it goes. I don't rule out the possibility that they might even be able to narrow it to something more respectable if they manage to do better than hope the measurement of water isotopes in the wood would act anything acceptably like it does in ice core samples, aka
paleothermometers, but, well that is fraught with complications... as you might expect from a life form when put up next to an ice cube. Maybe there are other chemical properties they might someday be able to identify as definitely temperature related, and dendroclimatology can become respectable for purposes of predicting climate change.
Right now, not so much.
Actually, right now, not at all.
Until very recently it has been about archeology, and
really can work fine for that, for confirming historical assumptions, though not, as you can see, infallibly. But, if you've read the image-linked pitch, you might see that I have chosen the description that does the best job of making pure wishful thinking sound scientific. This is acceptable on one level because, with a lot of work, and a number of brilliant kids going for PhDs in this new twist on this field, it might turn into something that can actually measure what it wants to say it can measure right now. It seems to be saying it right now, despite the fact that it can't, not even with all this dazzling computing power to synthesize all the staggering numbers of variables one has to have noted upon data collection and cross-checked with records which might exist, vaguely apply and mostly not exist at all for each of those variables...
just for ONE tree species, in one general area, let alone a bunch of them.
Hell, the
tap root length for each tree
alone would throw you wildly off from stand to stand.
Have I been clear? You can't separate out tree growth factors from ring size, or density, except in the broadest, too broad for temperature predictions, terms. You can see where the wet years and dry years were. You can see where fires were. You can't say anything about the temperature effects on the growth rings except, possibly, if you have the most minutely detailed records of prevailing conditions in a stand, down to the smallest clump of trees in each stand where you are measuring. The topography features and soil conditions vary hugely in just one stand, and these affect the hardiness of each tree and what is reflected in its rings in relation to its neighbors. Nothing about those rings that we know, or even yet conceivably might be able to come to know, comes from something distinctly measurable from the material itself, except as I've stated. It doesn't show how much sunlight the tree got in any given year of its life. It doesn't talk about the soil nutrients. It doesn't talk about the soil types, which can vary even more than the nutrient load in any given stand. It doesn't account for the variations in nitrogen fixing commensals. It doesn't talk about the individuals' varying ability to get enough water in dry years. It doesn't say anything about how much carbon dioxide the tree breathed in from year to year.
And here we need to stop and take in the folly of using a CO₂-breathing organism as gauge for climate predictions made urgent precisely by the very noticeable increase in anthropogenic CO₂ production globally. What's wrong with this picture?
Maybe you can extrapolate loosely the total CO₂ deposition, the sink, from each given annual growth ring?So I hope I've given you a vague idea of how preposterously difficult it has to be to do all the statistical manipulations and analysis even to come up with information that almost certainly says nothing approximating what you started out hoping to say. They're not giving up... and goofy as they sound to me, I'm glad of that, because there
MIGHT be a way, now that we have such astonishingly good computational power, even though we literally dirt certainly do not have the records to produce
SCIENCE from this mêlée right now.
Their best shot at turning this archeological discipline into a predictive tool is
NOT from taking [dangerous to trees] ring samples from ancient and pristine stands, and trying to extrapolate forward. Au contraire, mes amies. They should be measuring from trees grown in controlled conditions, but failing the time needed to sort that all out, they should be doing things like measuring from young douglas fir at the extremes of their range in places like industrial tree farms in the north and people's yards in the south, etc. They
HAVE to start with trees where there exists the absolute best information about the conditions of their growth so as to be able to separate out even sort of plausibly for all the other factors beside temperature that have an effect on annual growth. Of all of them, temperature is likely to be the
LEAST important, the needle in that haystack, and only remotely conceivably something that can eventually be shown through the application of chemistry to the discipline.
In fact, this whole polemic has grabbed the global population because this "science", they
say has held beautifully for every past year up until 1960, veered off at that point and they don't know why. This isn't a secret. Nobody's trying to fool anybody about this 1960 boil on the face of all this wishful thinking... maybe just hoping it will go unnoticed till they can rectify the numbers... but the numbers don't hold after 1960 and they do not know why.
I know why. It didn't hold for the past. It got made to conform to the past by scientists looking in the mirror instead of at the trees. This is completely evident on the face of it if you know about trees, and, obviously, pretty opaque if you know about statistics and math but not the trees. Talk to some foresters, you idiots!
To conclude, climategate is only horrible if the scientists involved were trying to fudge the data to make dendroclimatology look predictive, but it seems they might not have been doing
that. It seems they were merely trying to enhance the accuracy of interdisciplinary climate modeling by substituting the known accurate temperatures in from 1960 forward. This
STILL leaves the gaping wound of the data purporting to tell the temperatures from years before thermometers were recording, but since scientists are so science-centric and pressed to perform on the climate crisis, this probably isn't anything they would have figured out before some forester reads this crap and goes and beats them over their egg heads.
We
know there's suddenly intense pressure on this once-sleepy little discipline, but, er, however laudably you are trying to oblige, this isn't obliging. It's dangerous.
JUST KICK OUT THE DENDROCLIMATOLOGY RESULTS FROM THE OVERALL MODELING AND YOU'RE BACK TO DEALING WITH SOMETHING MORE CLOSELY APPROXIMATING ACTUALITY.Simple as that.
Won't even necessarily mean the discipline loses funding because it still
MAY get to the point where it can do this to within acceptable margins for error. But for right now, pfeh, get
out of here! Quit screwing with us. This is an emergency. This is not a drill!
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UPDATE, 10pm Pacific: IT SEEMS THE CLIMATOLOGISTS ARE PRECISELY IN THE PROCESS OF KICKING DENDROCLIMATOLOGY FROM THE MODELS.
Thanks to Big Dan for the link, and please excuse the appalling use of Beavis and Butthead in the video, but THIS is the basis for a sudden flood of relief on the other side of this cyberspace from you just now. I feel much better, and maybe I'd've felt much better if I'd've forced myself to read through everything pertinent, but, well, as you know, I couldn't face it.I'd lost too much vitality from all the trolls yonder....
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Even later: Wow. I'm really, really getting some relief here. Sometime late afternoon or early evening yesterday, Saturday, it was put to me that this was an established scientific discipline and that they weren't trying to be dishonest. I knew the not trying to be dishonest part of it, but somehow the "established scientific discipline" part rattled my cage. Whuuuuuhut-t-t-t?
I know my stuff, here, and that piece of information threatened to send me off to the Alzheimer's experts because I couldn't find it in my mindscape. Figgered it had to be new from when I had to leave off with my forest activism, but, no, I was told, it was not new. I was right in the middle of one of my long nerve movies pertaining to matters completely else while these bits were sliding under my nose and it was really throwing big blots up into the middle of my screen.
Shortly it managed to snap off my movie and consume me with draft pontifications about how ever this could be, when it suddenly came to me to start googling this stuff. Holy shit. Well, yes, it ended up that I had known about guys running around after tree core samples, and assumed it was to gather historical data for inventory projections and applications of weather to local history... that sort of thing... but somewhere in there they had made, or tried to make, this archeological and commercial practice into something a lot more than that, tried to make it say stuff that freaked me more after learning more and thinking more than the mere notion of it had to begin with... and that was bad enough.
Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions from the tasteless YouTube scold that has set me free, but it really sounds now to me as though the guys in the climategate email exchange were feeling about this sort of like I am feeling about this, that the tone and the choices of words were driven by the exasperation of people working for truth to be known and to prevail in the shaping of our future course. And, if the whole discipline were not already being kicked out of our modeling, it will be now. This is really, really a relief. I had begun to feel something like despair that everyone, on both sides, had devolved to the work of substituting the survival of their inclinations for the survival of our planet.
We really
are so close to completely losing it.
Sometimes I think I could just drop from bewilderment about the way sentient beings deal with vital things.
[click image]
