The Warmists are struggling

We’ve had Briffa’s “One tree” proof of global warming, now we have a “One lake” proof of global warming!

And the one lake could be as atypical as Briffa’s solitary Russian tree. But Warmists are great cherry-pickers. Amusing that the front-page lead-in to the article below was: ‘Proof’ humans cause global warming — with quotes around “Proof”. Even some mainstream journalists are getting skeptical. The whole article is a laugh, however. They have produced possible evidence of warming but NO evidence of what caused the warming. They have not considered variations in solar output as a cause, for instance

SEDIMENT cores from a small Arctic lake in Canada stretching back 200,000 years show unprecedented gains in global warming since 1950, indicating human activity is the likely cause. “The past few decades have been unique in the past 200,000 years in terms of the changes we see in the biology and chemistry recorded in the cores,” University of Colorado glaciologist Yarrow Axford said. “We see clear evidence for warming in one of the most remote places on Earth at a time when the Arctic should be cooling because of natural processes.” Mr Axford is the chief author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For thousands of years, environmental changes in a remote lake on Canada’s Baffin Island closely matched natural, cyclical climate changes such as those caused by the Earth’s periodic wobble as it swings around the sun, the researchers said. However, lake sediment cores dating from 1950 show that expected climate cooling was overridden by human activity like greenhouse gas emissions.

Researchers were able to reconstruct the local climate over the past 200,000 years by analysing algae, insect fossils and geochemical traces in sediment cores extracted from the 40ha lake. The cores stretch back 80,000 years further than existing Greenland ice cores, revealing environmental conditions prevalent during two earlier Ice Ages and three interglacial periods.

Researchers found that several types of mosquito-like midges that for many thousands of years thrived in cold climate surrounding the lake suddenly began declining at around 1950; two midge species adapted to the coldest weather disappeared altogether. And they further discovered that a species diatom that was relatively rare before the 20th Century, has made unprecedented gains in recent decades, possibly due to the thinning ice cover on the lake.

Another study published September in Science magazine that reconstructed 2000 years of Arctic temperatures from ice and lake sediment cores and tree rings, found that the recent global warming trend is overriding a natural cooling trend caused by Earth’s periodic wobble.

The Earth is now some 966,000km further from the Sun during the Northern Hemisphere summer solstice than it was at the time of Jesus Christ, causing an overall cooling of the Arctic until recently, explained the researchers.

SOURCE

IPCC CONSENSUS LOOKING SHAKY: UK TREE RING PATTERNS REFLECT SOLAR ACTIVITY ONLY

The IPCC “consensus” is substantially reliant on assumptions that have now been shown to be false in a new study. How amusing it is: “the correlation with the climatological variables was barely visible”. Sad news for Briffa, Mann and all the other Warmist tree ring devotees. It looks like we have a lake and a stand of trees contradicting one-another! It should be fairly easy to see if the pattern is repeated in other dendrochronologies. Clearly, however, all climate reconstructions based on dendrochronology must now be regarded as suspect. With regard to the apparent contrast between the tree data and the lake data above, one is reminded of Einstein’s saying: “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong”. We now seem to have that single experiment as far putting any confidence in the dendrochronologists is concerned

The growth of British trees appears to follow a cosmic pattern, with trees growing faster when high levels of cosmic radiation arrive from space. Researchers made the discovery studying how growth rings of spruce trees have varied over the past half a century. As yet, they cannot explain the pattern, but variation in cosmic rays impacted tree growth more than changes in temperature or precipitation.

The study is published in the scientific journal New Phytologist. “We were originally interested in a different topic, the climatological factors influencing forest growth,” says Ms Sigrid Dengel a postgraduate researcher at the Institute of Atmospheric and Environmental Science at the University of Edinburgh. To do this, Ms Dengel and University of Edinburgh colleagues Mr Dominik Aeby and Professor John Grace obtained slices of spruce tree trunks. These had been freshly-felled from the Forest of Ae in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, by Forest Research, the research branch of the UK’s Forestry Commission. The trees had been planted in 1953 and felled in 2006.

The researchers froze the trunk slices, to prevent the wood shrinking, then scanned them on to a computer and used software to count the number and width of the growth rings. As the trees aged, they showed a usual decline in growth. However, during a number of years, the trees’ growth also particularly slowed. These years correlated with periods when a relatively low level of cosmic rays reached the Earth’s surface. When the intensity of cosmic rays reaching the Earth’s surface was higher, the rate of tree growth was faster. The effect is not large, but it is statistically significant.

The intensity of cosmic rays also correlates better with the changes in tree growth than any other climatological factor, such as varying levels of temperature or precipitation over the years. “The correlation between growth and cosmic rays was moderately high, but the correlation with the climatological variables was barely visible,” Ms Dengel told the BBC.

Cosmic rays are actually energetic particles, mainly protons, as well as electrons and the nuclei of helium atoms, that stream through space before hitting the Earth’s atmosphere. The levels of cosmic rays reaching the Earth go up and down according to the activity of the Sun, which follows an 11-year cycle. Every 11 years or so, the Sun becomes more active, producing a peak of sunspots. These sunspots carry a magnetic field that blocks and slows the path of energetic particles.

When the researchers looked at their data, they found that tree growth was highest during periods of low sunspot activity, when most cosmic rays reached Earth. But growth slowed during the four periods of cosmic ray-blocking high sunspot activity, which have occurred between 1965 and 2005. “We tried to correlate the width of the rings, i.e. the growth rate, to climatological factors like temperature. We also thought it would be interesting to look for patterns related to solar activity, as a few people previously have suggested such a link,” explains Ms Dengel. “We found them. And the relation of the rings to the solar cycle was much stronger than it was to any of the climatological factors we had looked at. We were quite hesitant at first, as solar cycles have been a controversial topic in climatology.” “As for the mechanism, we are puzzled.” ….

SOURCE

Posted by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here