Arctic Seal&Iceberg Hoax; Tree Ring Truth

Things that ‘go around’ frequently ‘come around’ and disingenuous “Climate Change”, now “Climate Disruption”, previously “Global Warming” contains no exception.  Consider a 2 November 1922  Washington Post article titled “Artic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish And Icebergs Melt” based on a U.S. State Department October 1922 Monthly Weather Review item provided by the Norway Consul.  While Snopes considers it neither proof nor fraud in the global scope of the Climate Change discussion, it is relevant in that this debate has deep roots and frequently false predictions, false basis and can only be about ‘money from the citizens pocket’ as no change is incorporated by any seaport city on either coast from the 1920’s to today - perfect example follows:

 Arctic Ocean Getting Warmer; Seals Vanish And Icebergs Melt -Washington Post 2 November 1922

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters, and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes.

Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.

Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds. Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable.

 “The fact that there were greater hot-to- cold/cold-to-hot temperature swings prior to the Industrial Revolution period (when CO2 concentration in air was much lower and less variable than subsequently) suggests the past centuries increase in atmospheric  CO2 content is tending to have next to no effect on the planet's air temperature.   Given the instrumented record of temperature is unable to provide information on the natural variability of past temperature, an investigation was undertaken on "high elevation tree-ring widths from Great Basin (USA) bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) which are a particularly useful temperature proxy prior to instrumental record because tree-rings are annually dated and extend for millennia according to a recent study - Salzer et al. (2014 )

Working with samples of bristlecone pine living trees and remnant wood located in the upper tree line zone (within 100 m of known tree lines or estimated past tree lines) in three discrete western North America mountain ranges - Sheep Mountain (SHP) in California, Mt. Washington (MWA) in Nevada, and the Ruby Mountains' Pearl Peak (PRL) in Nevada, Salzer’s team  were able to reconstruct a 4,582-year regional ring-width index chronology spanning the period 2575 BC-AD 2006.   The four researchers report that "the inferred temperature of the modern period was exceeded twice in the Common Era:

• +1.69°C in the mid first century AD (centered on AD 33) and

•  +1.58°C in the mid seventh century (centered on AD 634),"

"consistent with these results and suggesting that some of the departures from mean conditions are at least hemispheric in scale," the four researches say that "estimates of northern Scandinavian summer temperatures indicate nearly identical dates for their warmest and coldest 30-year periods over the last ~2,000 years, at AD 21-50 and AD 1451-1480 respectively," citing Esper et al. (2012).”

Other paleo-temperature proxy archives, "such as lacustrine and meadow sediment cores, packrat middens, and glacial moraine dynamics (Thompson et al., 1994; Clark and Gillespie, 1997; Smith and Betancourt, 2006; Reinemann et al., 2009) are in general agreement with the results, recording higher temperatures during the middle Holocene."

In the words of Pretzsch et al. (2014), "nearly one and a half centuries ago, far-sighted Central European forest scientists established a network of long-term observational plots, many of them being under observation up to the present day." Taking advantage of this foresight, Pretzsch et al. "used the records from 14 fully stocked observational plots in oak stands which date back till 1900" in order "to detect long-term stand growth changes in Central Europe." More specifically, they say they compared "the observed development of growth and standing volume over age with common yield tables which represent the historic stand dynamics," after which they statistically analyzed "whether stand development over age (course of mean diameter, top height, current annual stand growth, standing volume, tree number, tree mortality and other stand characteristics) changed within the last century."

The four researchers report that "compared with the past, the stands presently grow quicker and accumulate a defined standing volume earlier than a century ago," also noting that "they grow along modified self-thinning lines and move quicker through such trajectories than in the past." In fact, they determined that certain threshold sizes are reached decades earlier compared with the past, and that the level of tree growth rate vs. tree size allometry "increased significantly."

Conclusion by Salzer and associated scientists: “It has been demonstrated repeatedly, by a variety of means employed by a host of different researchers, late 20th-century and early 21st-century temperatures were neither unusual, unnatural nor unprecedented.”   In their concluding paragraph, they “suggest that with higher growth rates "rotation periods might be reduced and sustainable felling budgets might be increased," In addition, they say that "carbon sequestration by forests might increase as well," and that "on top of that, the increase of site fertility may pave the way to multi-species, complex-structured forests which are more resilient than pure stands in the face of future environmental changes."

If we just look at CO2 for the important gas that it is,  recognize that it is every breath we take, carbonated sodas, sparkling water we consume, and dry ice for shipping and food preservation.  We breathe in 400 parts per million followed by out exhaling 40,000 parts per million – no ill effects result.  

• From a medical perspective, we insert 40,000 ppm CO2 into victims through life saving CPR;  such safes lives and causes no death.

• From my experience on US Navy submarines, monitoring systems sound an alert when CO2 levels rise to 8,000 ppm, higher than natural Earth CO2 levels have been in the last 540 million years.

• CO2 is a great airborne fertilizer which, as concentrations rise it causes additional plant growth and while reducing the plants need for water.

Without CO2 there would be no life sustaining food on Earth. The 120 ppm of CO2 added to the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution has caused an average increase in worldwide plant growth of over 12 percent and of 18 percent for trees.  Contrary to EPA and Judicial rulings, there lacks a single instance of CO2 being a pollutant.  If you took chemistry, it should be obvious; if not, ask  any chemistry professor you might know.  The single entity being polluted is your mind or the minds of your children – exercise some common sense and a little study – there is much subterfuge to be understood.

References

Salzer, M.W., Bunn, A.G., Graham, N.E. and Hughes, M.K. 2014. Five millennia of Paleo-temperature from tree-rings in the Great Basin, USA. Climate Dynamics 42: 1517-1526.

Clark, D.H. and Gillespie, A.R. 1997. Timing and significance of late-glacial and Holocene cirque glaciation in the Sierra Nevada, California. Quaternary International 38/39: 21-38.

Esper, J., Frank, D.C., Timonen, M., Zorita, E., Wilson, R.J.S., Luterbacher, J., Holzkamper, S., Fischer, N., Wagner, S., Nievergelt, D., Verstege, A. and Buntgen, U. 2012. Orbital forcing of tree-ring data. Nature Climate Change: 10.1038/NCLIMATE1589.

Pretzsch, H., Biber, P., Schutze, G. and Bielak, K. 2014.

Reinemann, S.A., Porinchu, D.F., Bloom, A.M., Mark, B.G. and Box, J.E. 2009. A multi-proxy paleolimnological reconstruction of Holocene climate conditions in the Great Basin, United States. Quaternary Research 72: 347-358.

Smith, F.A. and Betancourt, J.L. 2006. Predicting woodrat (Neotoma) responses to anthropogenic warming from studies of the palaeomidden record. Journal of Biogeography 33: 2061-2076.

Thompson, R.S., Whitlock, C., Bartlein, P.J., Harrison, S.P. and Spaulding, W.G. 1994. Climatic changes in the western United States since 18,000 yr B.P. In: Wright, H.E., Kutzbach, T., Webb, T.I., Ruddiman, W.F., Street-Perrott, F.A. and Bartlein, P.J. (Eds.). Global Climates Since the Last Glacial Maximum. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, pp. 468-513