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2009-10-01 Home Front: Politix

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Posted by Wholurt Snuling4001 2009-10-01 08:18|| || Front Page|| [3 views ] Top

#1 Lysenko lives.

Posted by Richard of Oregon 2009-10-01 10:51|| 2009-10-01 10:51|| Front Page Top

#2 Perhaps the biggest damnation of the MMGW theory is that it has *no* negative case. That is, *everything* proves MMGW, and *nothing* disproves it. Change in any direction or no change in any direction proves MMGW. Gravity proves MMGW. Peach cobbler proves MMGW. Even vacuum proves MMGW.

Posted by Anonymoose 2009-10-01 14:11|| 2009-10-01 14:11|| Front Page Top

#3 The most interesting thing to come out of this latest iteration of the Hockey Stick is this, in my opinion. What Anthony Watts calls "Liebeg's Barrel" is something I was sort of aware of - my day job involves customer support for a system which generates fertilizer application prescription files for VRA equipment, based on soil sample analysis & other inputs - but hadn't thought about in the context of using tree ring records for temperature proxies.

"Liebeg's Barrel" is basically a visualization of how botanical yield is derivable from environmental & nutritional resources. The growth yield of any given plant is dependent, roughly speaking, on the most scarce resource required for that plant's growth. If the plant's not getting enough water but enough nutrients, than nothing you can do in terms of dumping more fertilizer on it is going to produce another inch's worth of growth, or grain of corn.

Similarly, if the tree's got enough water, enough nutrients, and enough degree days, then it's going to grow like gangbusters, even though it might be technically cooler than it was twenty years previously, when a drought during a warm period stunted the tree's growth rings.

In short, dendrochronological use in temperature proxies runs up against a massive problem with uncontrolled multiple variables, and I don't quite understand why they think it's at all useful.

Posted by Mitch H.">Mitch H. 2009-10-01 21:06|| http://blogfonte.blogspot.com/]">[http://blogfonte.blogspot.com/] 2009-10-01 21:06|| Front Page Top

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