Sunday, October 28, 2007

The Trees Are Wise; They Speak To Us

Heed His Wisdom!
As his surface stations project fades, alpha denier Anthony Watts cuts loose with a Tolkien moment:

Trees are directly in touch with the sun, more so than other living things in the biosphere. Our “valiant” dendroclimatologists, like Michael Mann, point to tree rings as a proxy for earths climate. That may be true, but I think in addition to “treemometers” they also act as helioproxies too.

In a nutshell (ahem); I think it’s highly likely that trees have evolved survival strategies that are based on detecting changes in the sun’s output. It stands to reason that over the billion plus of years that plant life has been on earth and the millions of solar cycles they’ve been through, that they can detect changes in their primary energy source, the sun, and adapt accordingly. Producing abundant acorns could well be such a survival strategy.

Wonder when we'll see the peer-reviewed paper.

In general, patrolling the denyosphere has been a lot less fun in recent weeks. After inadvertently confirming GISSTEMP temperature records, Anthony has returned to conversing with trees and recycling tired old denialist arguments; Steve has been schlepping incomprehensible graphs; and this thing seems to have died on the vine (as it were).

PS Interesting to note that Anthony and others in the denial business seem to have coalesced around the theory that we are in for a bout of cooling. Are the warmocaust collusionists so desperate that they have resorted to offering a testable hypothesis? (Not one, mind you, that anyone can confirm or deny for another couple of decades, during which time presumably we can all sit on our asses and emit)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You just keep getting cuter and cuter.