Sierra Nevada snow hasn't been this bad since 1500AD

You'll read it everywhere - there hasn't been so little snow in California's Sierra Nevada for FIVE HUNDRED years. But how do they know? The first people possessing written language to visit the Sierras got there less than two centuries ago. To be sure there will have been native Americans in the area back in the sixteenth …

[Anonymous Coward]

if they felt like doing something about the current problem other than pointless gesturing

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^This a thousand times.

My main argument about the dubiousness of *man made* climate-change is rooted in the fact that all of the "actions" proposed (wind farms for a start) have fuck-all effect on the climate, but a very handy effect on the pockets of certain people.

I am sure the combined talents of all El Reggers could easily come up with a top 10 of effective measures that would *dramatically* reduce the UKs carbon footprint. The fact these never make it to the table speaks volumes.

Oh, and just for confirmation, HMG has no idea what the carbon footprint of a single letter from HMRC is (I asked). You'd think if our planet depended on it (or our leaders believed it depended on it) they would know. Or at least care.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: if they felt like doing something about the current problem other than pointless gesturing

I welcome the negative effect on the pockets of the many unpalatable fossil fuel sale enriched regimes around the world. I'm also pleased it might stop our local military enthusiasts finding so many excuses to go to war over resources.

[tmTM]

Hottest summer for 500 years is on it's way

My tea leaves told me, so it must be right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: if they felt like doing something about the current problem other than pointless gesturing

Really? So if a problem is hard to solve the problem doesn't exist? Yay, my overdraft doesn't exist!

Or is your thesis that because HMG sensibly decided not to waste taxpayers' money answering your asinine questions, that means that global warming doesn't exist?

I can easily come up with ways to reduce our carbon footprint. The problem is that you wouldn't vote for me if I imposed them, and I care more about the next election and the 5 year market in Bordeaux than I care about a load of poor peoples livelihoods being damaged. The fact that I haven't built the nuclear power plant in your backyard is all to do with short term political perspectives and sod all to do with the reality of climate change.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: if they felt like doing something about the current problem other than pointless gesturing

I can easily come up with ways to reduce our carbon footprint.

1) Stop all the climate change junkets to places like Paris later in the year.

2) Remove all wind turbines - that way you can use the spinning reserve generators as full time generators which increases their efficiency.

Do I need to continue?

[Buzzword]

They could solve the drought...

If the good people of California would just stop giving away 98% of their precious water to farmers. It takes about a gallon of water to grow one almond, and California produces 82% of the world's almonds. Yet residents are constantly badgered to cut down on water consumption. Go figure, as they say.

[Ilmarinen]

Re: They could solve the drought...

I think that the greenies are pouring a fair bit down the gills of the Delta Smelt too.

(keep on growing the almonds though - we loves 'em)

[jabuzz]

Re: They could solve the drought...

That's not going to end the drought however. That is no more water is going to fall from the sjy even if every last almond tree in California was chopped down tomorrow. The result is at a minimum that ski resorts in the Sierra Nevada mountains will still be impacted. That is assuming the drought does not end this winter, which seems unlikely.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: They could solve the drought...

"That is assuming the drought does not end this winter, which seems unlikely."

... And this unlikliness is based on the precipitation pattern of the last few years perhaps? You will be right until you are wrong, but pretty much one substantial snow fall will mean the latter.

[cesium]

Re: They could solve the drought...

Heh. I'm sure by spending just a few more dollars per Californian per year we can run that desalinated ocean water up to the mountains and spray them full of snow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Reg hack confused by science again

The amount of snow in California's Sierra Nevada mountains is at a 500-year low, scientists have claimed, leading to puzzlement for some as the first Europeans visited the Sierra less than 200 years ago and actual, proper snow records only go back to the 1930s.

Here in Australia, actual scientists who understand actual science can measure the strength and frequency of historic cyclone activity - and therefore the effects of changes in the climate - going back over 1500 years despite humans only keeping records for a few decades. Clever stuff this science, innit?

[cynic 2]

Re: Reg hack confused by science again

That ain't science. How would you go about checking or falsifying such a claim?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Reg hack confused by science again

That ain't science. How would you go about checking or falsifying such a claim?

Ahh, the first anti-science reply. That didn't take long. I suggest you spend some time reading how actual scientists use stalagmites in a similar way to tree rings. In China there is research going back even further.

You can find more information on the Internet: A communication medium that was also brought to you by actual science.

[Billa Bong]

Re: Reg hack confused by science again

Is it getting a bit hot in here?

[Dan Paul]

Re: Reg commentard confused by hypothesis again @Mahatma Coat

Seems you just can't grasp the fact that if you can't actually MEASURE something, "Science" does not enter the equation. This is where "Hypothesis" takes over.

Otherwise known as a sophisticated wild assed guess, hypothesis do not equal fact; even if you turn them into a religion.

Counting tree rings and making a supposition from something that's hardly gone beyond using a divining rod is hardly "scientific". Since there are no MEASUREMENTS of temperature from those time periods you cannot directly RELATE tree rings to temperature. The best you can expect is to say exactly what us "Deniers" are saying that this whole thing is extraordinarily cyclical and we have been through this before. That's all.

Since hypothesis are the entirety of the AGW argument then remind me again why most of the populace allow entire governments to make decisions entirely based on S.W.A.G.'s?

Oh, that's right; they listen to loudmouth idiots yammering away about something that has not been proved because some lobbying group says it's so. That the entire basis of the AGW religion.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Reg commentard confused by hypothesis again @Mahatma Coat

Wow, just wow! So all science is about direct measurement? Where do you draw that line? Can we measure gravity? Well no, but we can measure acceleration and hypothesise that that acceleration is caused by gravity, so because I can't measure it I must be planted on my chair by faith?

Th environmental geosciences are all about making measurements to establish past conditions, at a whole range of scales. The scientist comes up with a hypothesis - lets say that tree growth in mountain trees is affected by how much snow falls in the previous winter. He correlates tree ring width with 80 years of local data. His hypothesis seems to check out. He checks and finds that similar correlations hold up in places with longer direct measurement (say some monastery in Switzerland?). He publishes a paper and says that the nearest analogy to today's condition happened 500 years ago. That is good science.

Plucking random 'cycles' out of the blogosphere only works if you can show the same correlation with modern conditions? Can you? And if you can what is the scientific cyclical measurement. Please tell, the Nobel prize committee are waiting by the phone.

[Mystic Megabyte]

Re: Reg commentard confused by hypothesis again @Mahatma Coat

Seems you just can't grasp the fact that if you can't actually MEASURE something,

It seems that some boffins actually do measure tree rings to infer previous conditions.

As a non scientist I would imagine that it goes something like this:

Warm year=lots of growth=tree rings are wider apart than in a cold year. This is from a modern tree where temperature records exist. Then for older trees they do this novel thing called extrapolation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_rings#Climatology

[Philip Lewis]

Re: Reg commentard confused by hypothesis again @Mahatma Coat

Warm+dry = n

Warm+wet = o

Warm+wet+low solar = p

Etc ...

Am I making a point about vegetation growth here? Do you see why a single factor is with absolute certainty never acting alone? Tree ring studies are dubious best guesses, an ever will be, which is why LP went to quite some lengths (with links no less) to point out that tree ring studies seem to point in all directions supporting neither side of the AGW discussion

[Lars]

Re: Reg commentard confused by hypothesis again @Mahatma Coat

@Mystic Megabyte

Yes, there is also "The International Tree-Ring Data Bank". Swedes claim they can go as far back as 5407 BC.(Wikipedia)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Reg hack confused by science again

So are you subscribing too the 'if I can't stub my toe on it' it doesn't exist school of science? If so you are going to be working in a fairly small field.

You go about checking by comparing how tree rings correlate with your actual measurements. Then you might back things up by looking at other surrogates, perhaps layers of sediment laid down by annual snow melt events, perhaps you can find a cave or two with stalactites that you can analyse as well.

And at the end of the day you apply Occams razor - if tree rings respond predictably to snow pack today, it's likely that they did so in the past. Of course it is possible that 500 years ago the Great Spaghetti monster sprinkled paraquat on the Sierra Nevada, it's just not likely.

[MondoMan]

Re: Reg hack confused by science again

AC, your simple explanation of science veered into the simplistic -- you left out key steps. For example, you note "You go about checking by comparing how tree rings correlate with your actual measurements". That's fine for an initial step, but to show that you haven't just cherry-picked a relationship that matches by chance, you need to verify it with "out of sample" data. That is, you need to show that the relationship holds up even with data that you and others on your team didn't know when you came up with the original correlation. It's the failure to verify with such out of sample data (typically, by waiting for additional data to come in) that makes much of tree ring temperature reconstruction so shaky.

The "divergence problem" referred to in Climategate was such an issue, where temperatures inferred from many samples of tree rings from the 2nd half of the 20th century "diverged" from actual thermometer measurements from the 1960s until the end of sampling in the 1970s. Rather than heeding this warning sign of a failed correlation (and thus, an unreliable reconstruction method), prominent dendroclimatologists just swept the issue under the rug and continued their work as usual.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Reg hack confused by science again

Scientists verify, criticise each others work and place statistical limits on the confidence of their interpretation. There is no suggestion that this wasn't done here. It is peer reviewed science In this case the scientists actually used two independent data sets and used all available tree ring data in their study region. Your cherry pick fails there.

And the 'divergence problem', which is only a problem if you don't have other datasets to compare contrast and back up tree rings, was about temperature, this is about winter precipitation, and correlating growth with that.

[MondoMan]

Re: Reg hack confused by science again

AC, you seem uninformed as to the actual practices of dendroclimatologists. Rather than describing what IS, you describe what SHOULD BE. In most sciences, there wouldn't be a significant difference, but somehow climate science is "special", and not in a good way.

You claim that [dendroclimatologists] "verify, criticize each others' work and place statistical limits on the confidence of their interpretation". Please provide an example of such proper statistical limits in a dendroclimatology reconstruction of past climate. This would include accounting for errors in measurement of both tree ring widths and the desired climatological variable, accounting for the numbers of samples during different time periods, accounting for the number of tested samples *not used* in the reconstruction, accounting for the variability of tree ring width produced when the climatological variable is constant, accounting for non-linearity in the tree ring width/climatological variable relationship over the range of the climatological variable, and so forth. It would of course, also include out-of-sample testing.

I'm glad to see that we share common ground in believing that the "divergence problem" disqualifies at least many tree-ring-based climatological reconstructions.

This article IIRC is about snowpack, which as I noted above, is very different from "winter precipitation". The link in the Reg article is incorrect, and NCC is paywalled, so I'm unable to verify that myself.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Reg hack confused by science again

It is peer reviewed science In this case

That would be fine if those doing the reviewing weren't palls with those writing the paper. Unfortunately, the peer review process is broken in anything to do with climate science. One of the main criticisms is that where the climate scientists use statistics their data and conclusions are never submitted to a statistician for review and when an independent statistician manages to get the data (the climate scientists are very loath to give it out for some strange reason - fear perhaps) it is generally found to be wanting.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Reg hack confused by science again

And you base your conclusions on what - not getting your paper through peer review? I have colleagues who actively publish on climate change - I haven't noticed that the barrier of quality and peer review is lower than in other areas of science. And climate scientists are amazingly open with their data in comparison with some allied fields of science.

[MondoMan]

Re: Reg hack confused by science again

AC - you wrote that "And climate scientists are amazingly open with their data in comparison with some allied fields of science"

Perhaps you haven't been following tree ring and temperature station data access issues over the last decade, where UK researchers had to be taken before tribunals in order to get their data, and climate scientist Dr. Phil Jones famously responded to a request for data with: "Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?"

A molecular biologist trying a stunt like that would be quickly laughed out of academia; according to Steve McIntyre, a mining promoter trying to stonewall like that would run afoul of anti-fraud laws.

(see e.g. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/13/cru_missing/ )

[Tom 13]

Re: base your conclusions on what

Nope, friends in the business and having once been in the business myself. When I was in the business the usual method for getting the articles peer reviewed was to ask the authors who in the field would be best suited to review them. That was usually who did the reviews. Now in this case while there were often millions of dollars on the line, there was equal pressure from both sides to get the science right so I don't think the reviews were biased. Oh, and once we did have the technical editing phase go so off the rails the paper had to go back through peer review before being published. So the field isn't all nice and pristine like you claim. Even in the case where the peer review doesn't suffer from the obvious defect I just described, I have a friend with an MS in pure math who didn't pursue the PhD because of the issues of peer review even in his non-contentious arena. He said in order to publish a paper your topic has to be so narrowly defined that there will be at most 12 people on the planet qualified to review your paper. Given only those 12 people, when you receive the comments, you'll know who wrote them from the way they are written. This isn't simply a function of it being about math, but about the process by which all papers including physics are published. Which means the whole anonymous review meme is a complete sham and everyone in the business knows it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Reg hack confused by science again

@cynic 2, I think he forgot to use the /sarc identification.

[Tom 38]

Re: Reg hack confused by science again

Lucas Silva

Degrees:

Ph.D. Global Environmental Change and Sustainability -

M.Sc. Terrestrial Ecology and Biogeochemistry -

B.Sc Forest Engineering

If he's confused by the claims, is it OK if we are too?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Reg hack confused by science again

If he was actually confused, yes, but he actually said he was sceptical that the tree ring effect was just about water. As he is a published scientist working in the field I expect he will actually go out and do his own research and probably publish it in due course.

Even if he was confused, why choose him to listen to? There were 5 scientists (apart from the authors of the paper) quoted in the newspaper article, the other 4 commented positively,but good old LP manages to quote the mildly sceptical one.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Reg hack confused by science again

Lewis doesn't do "actual science". He does ranting and anecdotes that fit his personal opinion.

Quite why this site allow this individual who has zero qualifications in any related science subject (sorry Lewis - engineering doesn't count) to constantly pontificate on anything to do with the climate is quite frankly a mystery. He's obviously one of these people who thinks because he's an expert in one field that automatically makes his opinion in everything else carry extra weight. Well bad news - it doesn't.

I have no objection to anti GW copy, but it would be nice to have someone writing it who can get some basic facts right first.

[Triggerfish]

Re: Reg hack confused by science again

Hey even as someone who only did Mech Eng. I can understand data, maths and spot cherry picking by the author thanks. :)

[Stevie]

Quite why this site allow this individual who has zero qualifications in any related science subject

And last I checked he hadn't put out a single rock album.

Like you say, no cred.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Reg hack confused by science again

I would suggest you go read Burt Rutan's 40 odd slide show on YouTube where he looks at climate change from an engineers perspective - you might find it enlightening ( or offensive) or just plain "straight talk" instead of weasel words.

Let me know when you're done

[Anonymous Coward]

My eyes are bleeding

I looked at those 40 slides, and its a mishmash of brightly coloured lines, straw men and assertions, wrapped up in a bow of 'i'm a pragmatic engineer'. He trots out many standard tropes - CO 2 apparently isn't increasing, but if it is it's all good because back in the dinosaur age (which I guess he dates to about 5000 BC), the world was green. Neatly loads of his assertions, eg Arctic ice not decreasing, are easily disproved by observed fact.

I'm pretty sure I'd rather get in a plane designed by Burt Rutan than one designed by a climate scientist, but then again I am prety sure that a climate scientist has spent more time studying, and understands, climate better than a aeronatical engineer.

[Tom 13]

Re: Arctic ice not decreasing,

Ah yes, one of the great lines that ALWAYS identifies a High Pope of the AWG religion. No proper scientist would EVER refer to the Arctic ice as he was shouting about rising sea levels. Hell, even a decent wanna be Junior Scientist wouldn't make THAT mistake.

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: Reg hack confused by science again

Quite why this site allow this individual who has zero qualifications in any related science subject (sorry Lewis - engineering doesn't count) to constantly pontificate on anything to do with the climate is quite frankly a mystery

Here, let me solve it for you: 67 comments on this story, and counting. Admin only knows how many page views.

[MondoMan]

Re: Reg hack confused by science again

MC - I'm curious as to how inferred cyclone records can provide any information about SNOWpack, as snow is normally quite scarce in the warm ocean regions where cyclones form. In fact, since snowpack (as opposed to number/intensity of snow events) is dependent on the full range of wind history, ground temperature history, air temperature history, sunshine/clouds, snowfall intensity and timing in the season, and so forth, any claim to be able to reconstruct it without this information must be quite far-fetched.

Of course, Nature Climate Change is known to publish more than its fair share of papers toeing the alarmist PR line, without worrying too much about the soundness of the underlying data or math.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Reg hack confused by science again

The statement was not that Cyclone = snowpack, it was just another example of using science to infer past climates.

and If I stake you out on a Californian hillside I ma fairly sure that in the spring I could tell whether snow got as high as your nose without knowing how cloudy it was on Christmas Eve.

[c14]

science or opinion?

I don't comment as a rule but I am worried that Lewis is painting himself further into his corner with these articles. I aknowledge the need for scientifc debate, history is full of facts that were disproven through vigorus scienctific methods but Lewis's pieces always read as if they are more personal opinion or religious zelotry. It is amazing to think that you can read historical weather patterns from tree rings but I expect you just need very old trees that lived through those periods and lots of them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: science or opinion?

I wonder where you would find really old trees, do you think there are any growing in Californian mountains, by any chance?

[Dan Paul]

Re: science or opinion?

Yes, there is a type of pine that grows incredibly slowly since it lives in the high mountains where it hardly gets any rain or water. Try getting a good correlation between rainfall/snowpack occurring in a place where it is naturally so dry that mummification occurs and you'll come up with exactly the same conclusions IF you are trying prove there is a drought in the desert. You can take some coal to Newcastle if you'd like too.

Completely missed in all of their eco-glory was the fact that if they wanted to do something beyond crying real crocodile tears and wearing sackcloth and ashes, they could start building de-salinization plants in California and solve the water problem instead of complaining about it.

[Grikath]

Re: science or opinion?

Well, that's probably the point Lewis is making.

Tree ring comparison is a really handy tool to tell you something about past local climates, with a large enough database it can even be corellated to something global-ish, as long as there's actual seasons where you're measuring.

The thing is, tree rings tell you bugger all about the winters. Tree rings tell you about the growing season, which most definitely does not include winter. The most extreme winters may, like forest fires, leave telltale scars if the tree survives, but in general the rings tell you whether or not this particular tree had a good growing year, or not.

To use such a general-purpose tool to make claims about a natural phenomenon that can only be inferred indirectly from the measurements, if at all, makes me raise my eyebrows as well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: science or opinion?

Arm chair science criticism is always fun. Trees need various things to grow, like water and light and a growing season. If the local hydrology depends on snow melt then trees in low snowpack summers are going to experience drought stress and not have a good growing year.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: science or opinion?

"Tree rings tell you about the growing season, which most definitely does not include winter."

Long winter = short growing season. By implication they do tell you about winters.

Also consider the possibility that water supply is melt of the previous winter's snow. If water supply is a limiting factor for growth then again there will be some information about the winter.

[MondoMan]

Re: science or opinion?

DS - you've unintentionally illustrated the fundamental problem of dendroclimatology: how does one identify what fraction of a scalar value (tree ring width) reflects which environmental variable?

Does an especially wide growth ring mean (a) temperatures were warmer, allowing increased growth, (b) temperatures were colder (perhaps shaded by extensive clouds), allowing increased growth (the tree having been too warm for optimal growth earlier), (c) temperatures were unchanged, but additional water was available, and had previously been the limiting factor, (d) temperatures and water were unchanged, but sunlight increased due to fewer clouds, or what? As you can see, an increase in ring width could mean increased temps, decreased temps, unchanged temps, increased clouds, decreased clouds, increased water, decreased water, etc., which makes robust scientific inference quite difficult.

In theory, each tree's data should be accompanied by an extensive evaluation of what factors limited the tree's growth given both today's local environment, and that during the tree's past life. This is normally not done by dendroclimatologists; interestingly, it does seem to be a part of normal varve (lake sediment layer) analysis work.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: science or opinion?

I was being sarcastic - but one tree ring set was actually Oak, not Methusala Pine. And maybe desal is slightly expensive? There aren't many places outside Middle Eastern vanity farms were crops are grown with desalinated water.

Californians water deficit is (number plucked from internet) 50 x 10^12 litres. Desal costs work out at around 1 US$ for 1 x 10^3 litres, so replacing the 'lost' water would involve a spend of 50 billion dollars or 33% of the state budget, and you would still have to pay to pump it uphill from the seaside.. You could buy a lot of $20k hammers and $30k toilet seats with that money.

[Chris G]

Re: science or opinion?

Just wondering, replacing one water problem with another. After desalinating enough seawater to provide the needs of the 37 million odd people in California and that required for its various industries after using all of the conventional supplies, how much brine effluent would there be to get rid of?

California is apparently using 49 cubic kilometers of water(and rising) per year, I'm none too sure that raising salinity without a great deal of research into how well it could be dispersed, would be a good idea. So not so much an overnight solution! ( Excuse the pun)

I read that by 2020 the shortfall will be about 7.4 cubic Km, at 60% desalination that's about 16 million tons of salt looking for a home.

Sombody check my numbers, it's late>

[Tom 13]

@Dan Paul

OT

You can take some coal to Newcastle if you'd like too.

Oddly enough, there's a railroad game out there called EuroRails in which making that exact delivery nets you a fair bit of money. Granted it's nothing compared to the payout you get for taking cork to Cork, but it's there.

I often wonder if the game designers moonlight as climate scientists.

[Lost it]

Re: science or opinion?

I's like to suggest one fact that can be proven.

If the scientists keep cutting old tree's down to count the rings, there might well soon be a dearth of them to use as "proof" of facts.

Not that I believe any of this GW guff anyway. Just another excuse to tax us more.

[MondoMan]

Re: science or opinion?

c14, as a non-specialist, you might think that, but it's easy to show that can't be true: tree ring width is a single type of measurement. Some dendro scientists measure ring wood *density* as well/instead. However, dendro climatologists then try to infer many climate variables from THE SAME type of tree ring width/density measurement. Seasonal temperature highs. Seasonal average temperatures. Yearly average temperatures. Winter low temperatures. Water availability, both seasonal and year-round. Snow cover during the spring. Ocean surface temperatures, both basin-wide and in specific regions. Cloud cover. They try to avoid misinterpreting other influences as changes in the desired climate variable (one typically wants to rule out effects due to number of nearby trees, varying nutrient availability, pest infestations, land cover/use changes, etc).

So, the aspiring dendroclimatologist has a vector of scalars (tree ring widths), each scalar representing some unknown combination of a dozen or more climatological variables and a dozen or more confounding non-climatological variables, some correlated and others not. (S)he also has vectors of scalar climatological variables, typically measured tens to thousands of miles away. How can one, even in theory, hope to tease out a given climatological variable from the ring width?

The original work in the mid 20th century with trees from the desert southwest was an attempt to correlate ring width with seasonal water availability. Since it turned out that the few trees in that region were pretty much only constrained in their growth by water availability, this turned out to work reasonably well.

After that, some dendro scientists went hog-wild and started comparing just about any environmental variable they could find with tree ring data and looking for correlations. I don't know of any that has ever been plausibly confirmed to be correct, for example by returning to a site 15 or 20 years after the original sampling to sample still-growing trees and check if the earlier correlation held up in this "out of sample" new data. The typical excuse is a lack of funding, but many of the sampled locations are easily accessible to anyone with a week's vacation time and the wherewithal to rent a 4-wheel-drive vehicle and hit the Starbucks drive-through on the way to the site. An outsider might be forgiven for suspecting that many dendroclimatologists are unskilled in testing hypotheses (as opposed to practicing purely descriptive science) or are afraid of what they might find if they did so.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: science or opinion?

Except, as usual, loads of people are doing this, and publishing their results. A quick scout round Google Scholar suggests that it is in fact quite a popular pastime for young and not so young scientists.

Do you have a useful contribution to make to establishing how often California has, or may have in the future, serious droughts? It appears to be quite an important question, and worthy of serious study, rather than smugly parroting the line that it is complicated, and thus must be 'opinion'.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this tech site so weirdly politicised?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is just polarized. Needs a good degaussing. lol

[Stevie]

Bah!

Some of you are missing the point. Tree rings say nothing about global climate, they indicate local weather conditions.

Those conditions allow one to interpret the prevailing climate once the database is geographically large enough.

Deniers, of course, will silt chant "need more data" to any conclusions drawn. It's not science to such people, it's a wait-til-the-claimant-dies insurance scam.

[MondoMan]

Re: Bah!

Stevie, exactly *which* local weather conditions are indicated by a given tree's rings? It's like trying to recover the original data from the product of a hash function.

[Stevie]

Re: It's like trying to recover the original data from the product of a hash function.

Um, this seems to spell it out.

http://www.amnh.org/education/resources/rfl/web/essaybooks/earth/cs_tree_rings.html

The science behind this was established as sound when I was at UEA some forty years ago. Real scientists agree it works.

[MondoMan]

Re: It's like trying to recover the original data from the product of a hash function.

Stevie, you know that UEA was at the center of the climate data scandals over the past decade, right? In any case, your link is a non-scientific fluff piece from 20 years ago -- for example, notice the lack of any description on how to tell the difference between a tree that responds to temperature vs a tree that responds to water availability vs a tree that responds to reduced cloud cover. During these past decades, the amount of data and statistical cherry-picking underlying tree-ring-based "temperature" reconstructions has become much clearer.

Jacoby and his colleague D'Arrigo (the subjects of your fluff piece) are infamous for not only massive data cherry-picking, but for actually defending the practice! For example, in Jacoby and d’Arrigo [Clim. Chg. 1989], they sampled tree rings from 36 northern boreal forest sites. After analyzing all 36 sets of data, they cherry-picked only 10 to use in their "temperature reconstruction", and not only didn't include the data from the other 26 (which didn't fit their desired interpretation) in their paper, they refused to release the data to other scientists for independent analysis of their work!

In part, Jacoby wrote "If we get a good climatic story from a chronology, we write a paper using it. That is our funded mission. It does not make sense to expend efforts on marginal or poor data and it is a waste of funding agency and taxpayer dollars. The rejected data are set aside and not archived." This is of course equivalent to a pharmaceutical company running a clinical trial of a new drug writing something like "If we get a good response from a patient, we write a paper using it....It does not make sense to expend efforts on patients presenting marginal or poor responses and it is a waste of dollars. The poor responses to the drug are set aside and not archived."

At the 2006 US NAS panel on paleoclimate reconstruction, D'Arrigo responded to a question about cherry-picking of data with something like "you have to pick cherries if you want to make cherry pie".

If that's what climate scientists think "established as sound" science looks like, perhaps it's just best if they retire.

[Stevie]

Re: It's like trying to recover the original data from the product of a hash function.

"Stevie, you know that UEA was at the center of the climate data scandals over the past decade, right? "

How on earth would I know that? It's not like it was written down anywhere for me to see. Like in a newspaper. Even an E-Paper.

I will certainly go and research more about the authors of the paper that drove you into a rage, but not today because I'm busy and quite frankly I've seen evidence first-hand with my own tired eyeballs that the world is getting alarmingly more warm, that the change is accelerating, and that fallout from fossil fuel burning is at least partly to blame.

I'd have thought the fact that you can now see Antarctica whereas in my childhood everyone just had to guess what it looked like on account of all the ice in the way would be compelling, but apparently not.

Lewis is crowing about colder winters to come being some sort of denialist vindication but those are actually one effect predicted for the UK in a global warming scenario. Another is that the Gulf Stream may shut down entirely.

I've told my kid and her boyfriend to head inland and north. Our house is built on a glorified sandbar and is about 25 mm above current sea level. Actual real world stuff going on in Pakistan suggests my house will soon briefly be super valuable waterfront property, then worthless. By a stroke of good fortune I own it, having paid off the mortgage in March (and have put back the brick wall that fell off it in April).

Like good DBAs say: expect the best, plan for the worst.

[MondoMan]

Re: It's like trying to recover the original data from the product of a hash function.

Stevie, in response to my question "Stevie, you know that UEA was at the center of the climate data scandals over the past decade, right? ", you wrote

"How on earth would I know that? It's not like it was written down anywhere for me to see. Like in a newspaper. Even an E-Paper."

Since you apparently weren't paying attention, here's one of those articles you missed, from The Telegraph (UK) about a scandal from 2010:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/climatechange/7088055/University-scientists-in-climategate-row-hid-data.html

In it, we find that " The University of East Anglia rejected requests for information relating to claims by academic staff that global warming was being caused by man-made emissions."

In fact,

"The Information Commissioner's office ruled that UEA was in breach of the Freedom of Information Act – an offence which is punishable by an unlimited fine. "

The story notes that the "Climategate" emails revealed that:

" In an email, Prof Jones requested that a colleague delete correspondence regarding a report by the ... (IPCC), ..."

"He also told a co-worker he had convinced university authorities not to answer freedom of information requests ..."

You also seem to think that the sea ice surrounding Antarctica has been declining in (summer minimum) amount since your childhood, when instead it has been increasing and is now at record high levels.

I hope these revelations will inspire you to pay closer attention to the *actual* facts of climate change research.

[Jagged]

Re: It's like trying to recover the original data from the product of a hash function.

You know that the UEA was investigated by several organisation including the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, the US Environmental Protection Agency and by a number of other Universities (US and UK) and was exonerated on all charges? The UEAs work is sound and stood firm against more vigorous cross examination than probably any other piece of research in the 21st century.

[Stevie]

Re: You know that the UEA was investigated ... and was exonerated on all charges?

You are wasting your fingers and keyboard on this. The denier mindset is predicated by the standard newspaper ethic: Accuse on page one, retract on page six (in a much smaller font size).

[Anonymous Coward]

it is politics, not a shortage of water

For those of you who haven't lived in the bizarre political landscape of California, I suggest you read this from end to end.

Hint: The facts presented are not in question.

If after reading, your understanding of the issue is not enhanced, then I feel sorry for you.

Hint: The drought is just a sideshow.

http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/061215-757095-california-drought-caused-by-environmental-activists.htm?p=2

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: it is politics, not a shortage of water

Looked at that - it kind of misses two big points. 1) It's a drought, it hasn't rained. and 2) decisions about environmental flows are a decision for democratic societies, environmental regulations are passed by democratically elected governments, and in the good old USofA if a politician though they were unpopular they wouldn't be enacted.

It misses some smaller points too - like assuming that limits on groundwater abstraction are about 'government' rather than realism about a finite resource.

[Martin Gregorie]

Re: it is politics, not a shortage of water

That Congressman also (deliberately?) blinkered himself by considering only the Delta and the Central Valley. To me, what the good burgers of SF are currently doing to the farmers in the Central Valley looks like a rerun of what the inhabitants of LA did to the farmers in Owens Valley back in the 1920s.

Bottom line: Southern California is and always has been at best a semi-arid region and subject to droughts. The sanity of city dwellers demanding unlimited water for parks, lawns and uncovered swimming pools or farmers asserting their right to grow water-thirsty crops like almonds or oranges is, at best questionable. Both groups clearly put "I WANT" far ahead of any consideration for the environmental limitations of where they've chosen to live.

[MondoMan]

Re: it is politics, not a shortage of water

Martin, perhaps you're not familiar with California's geography -- the Central Valley runs from the north end of the state (Redding, up near Mt. Shasta) down to Bakersfield in the lower central part of the state, well north of LA. Thus, it's not in Southern California, which you seemed to imply. Also, the "burghers" of SF have nothing to do with this, as they secured SF's water supply over 100 years ago by damming the Hetch Hetchy valley in the Sierras.

[Martin Gregorie]

Re: it is politics, not a shortage of water

@mondoman

What makes you think that damming the Hetch Hetchy valley and piping the water to SF didn't deprive the Central Valley around Modesto of water? As far as I can see the Tuolumne river used to deliver all the water from Hetch Hetchy to the Modesto area and thence straight into the Delta. I see that SF gets 15% of the Tuolumne's original flow. How does that compare with the reduced flow into the Delta that all the fuss is about?

FYI, I know CA quite well though am not so familiar with the way the terms NorCAL and SoCal are used. Nor do I know if there's any accepted term for the middle bit which includes at least part of Central Valley, or is that whole area simply known as Central California? I know the Central Valley fairly well from Tehachapi up to Williams, particularly the areas around Taft and Sacramento.

[MondoMan]

Re: it is politics, not a shortage of water

Martin, apparently I misunderstood you -- I thought you were referring to modern political intervention by SF politicians, separate from the Hetch Hetchy construction. Had the Hetch Hetchy not been dammed, things would certainly be different; it's hard to know exactly what situation water politics might have produced in the intervening century.

Growing up in the Bay Area, I always thought of the rough boundary of "Northern California" to be just south of San Jose and Sacramento, and the rough boundary of "Southern California" to be just north of the San Fernando Valley, with "Central California" in between. By contrast, I've always thought the "Central" in "Central Valley" referred to its east/west position within the state.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: it is politics, not a shortage of water

I see, so it's OK to piss fresh water into the sea in the hope that 500 salmon might bother to swim back up a river? To thus artificially exacerbate the weather issue (this is not the first or last drought, and not even a long one yet) and subsequent social and agricultural disruption because the people who decided are democratically elected? Gottit.

Come visit CA sometime and learn a bit about the looniness of local politics.

[MondoMan]

Re: it is politics, not a shortage of water

AC, if one were to divert more fresh water away from the sea, salt water would intrude into the Sacramento River delta, damaging the local marshes and farms, and contaminating the local wells.

[cesium]

Re: it is politics, not a shortage of water

@anonymous coward: Ah, right, killing off all the river wildlife in California permanently due to a three year drought in order to keep unsustainable agricultural practices running for a few more years is the obvious solution to our problems.

[Tom 13]

Re: it is politics, not a shortage of water

Yes and no.

Yes, the drought is real.

No, the impact need not be as bad as it has been, but as you note it is Kali so they'd do stupid shit* like watering their lawns in the middle of a drought (to the point that they use as much water for that as the almond tree growers do because of the higher acreage of grass).

Yes, they are working very, very hard at not letting a crisis go to waste.

*Meanwhile, the imposition of ultra-low flow toilets, showers, etc in some areas of the region have created problems in their sewers where the shit literally doesn't flow and they've been debating the desirability of using seawater to augment the sewer system.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't need desalination.

Replace Golden gate bridge with dam, big reservoir, job done.

Might need to re-route some sewage systems if it's to be used other than for agriculture.

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Pipe dream?

Some parts of CA still have water. I could pound a pipe down into my back yard and suck water out of it. Problem is, CA is 770 miles long and 250 miles wide with areas so dry that the forests are dead and burning down. Water conservation and desalinization won't change that. There's no statewide network of pipes that runs like an electric grid.

The strict water conservation efforts are about not sucking salt from the ground in remote areas using wells. For areas that do have water, there's moderate conservation just in case the drought continues for a few more years.

[xybyrgy]

Comment Bait

Title says all....

[Daggerchild]

Waitasec...

Does anyone commenting here actually KNOW that you *can't* tell winter severity from tree rings?

I know you can cross-reference the radiocarbon and other ingredients against sediments and ice cores etc. You can also prove things from omission - when the rings should have data matching their correlation partners, but don't whenever prolonged winter snowthaw delays their ring recording restart. The sceptical professor could be entirely correct, maybe the rings *don't* show it. And maybe that's what proves the claim!

Why aren't we leaving science to the scientists? We don't know sh*t! Scroll back over these comments. Why are we ragging on scientists anyway? Since when have they had any power?

[MondoMan]

Re: Waitasec...

Dagger - not sure what you mean by "cross-reference the radiocarbon and other *ingredients* against sediments and ice cores etc". The only "ingredients" are measured tree ring thicknesses.

Your "omission" argument omits the more likely possibility that a lack of correlation is just due to the correlation being spurious in the first place. If you try to match thousands of pairs of squiggles, some pairs will pass a threshold of similarity just by chance, but the correlation will not continue for out of sample data.

As for knowing sh*t, I was trained as a biologist, and have worked extensively with e. coli, the main component of sh*t.

[Anonymous Coward]

Handy definitions guide, print and keep.

Skeptic = One who evaluates the evidence (aka: the scientific method)

Denialist = One who actively ignores the evidence (aka: not a scientist)

Click-bait = Deliberately provocative headline designed to draw in traffic.

[cesium]

Reg Hack ought to learn something about California before slandering the entire state.

1) The "few dollars a year" per Californian works out to around $40/month (using The Register's figures) per household. A large fraction of the current water bill. This ignores the cost to build desalination plants or pipe the output into city water supplies. This ignores the cost to refill deplenished aquifers.

2) The Register would have California implement a flat tax across all people. Farmers, who use most of the water and need an incentive to use water more efficiently, would be mostly spared. Citizens of Eureka, where water is still plentiful, would be taxed the same amount as citizens of Palm Springs.

3) The Register completely ignores the current use of reverse osmosis in California. Many cities, including the one I live in, recycle their waste water to use it for landscape irrigation. San Diego is close to closing the loop and mixing its recycled water with incoming supplies. Apparently The Register believes you can snap our fingers and hand out a big wad of money and instantly fix all problems.

[Tom 13]

Re: California before slandering the entire state.

Kali can't be slandered anymore. In order to be slandered, one must first have a reputation which can be defended. After electing Governor Moonbeam that condition is no longer met.

[Naselus]

So....

The premise Lewis is putting forward on this one is largely "You can't tell anything about anything unless someone was there to document it". I honestly cannot believe half of you are defending this bollocks.