Replies

"...today's "unprecedented" temperatures are simply the result of examining temperature change over too short a period of time."

This is the point I've been trying to make about this for a while, myself. I mean, tree-rings and all are very nice, but how many 500 year old trees are there, in Europe, especially. And you have to cut the tree down to study its rings, no? I mean, really, when was the thermometer invented, anyway? When did we start keeping regular records of weather, accurate or not? Were there monks who kepts logs, even without measuring devices, "it's hot today, it's cold today, it snowed today, etc."? My understanding is that weather "records" go back about 125 years at this point. I'm happy to be enlightened by any knowledgable freepers out there.

I mean, tree-rings and all are very nice, but how many 500 year old trees are there, in Europe, especially. And you have to cut the tree down to study its rings, no?

You can examine the grain of wood in old buildings and ships. I saw a TV show where the matched up the average ring size in various wood samples in a region. For example, they would have one piece of wood which covered 1640-1670, which they matched with wood from a different tree which grew from 1660-1700, etc., to get a multi-century string of samples.

Back in 1966 my 9th grade Science teacher talked about the interstellar dust clouds, and one (of many) "moving" through our solar system would reduce the sunlight hitting the Earth would cause a "little ice age". Has there been any work on that theory since then?

I mean, tree-rings and all are very nice, but how many 500 year old trees are there, in Europe, especially. And you have to cut the tree down to study its rings, no? I mean, really, when was the thermometer invented, anyway? When did we start keeping regular records of weather, accurate or not? Were there monks who kepts logs, even without measuring devices, "it's hot today, it's cold today, it snowed today, etc."? My understanding is that weather "records" go back about 125 years at this point. I'm happy to be enlightened by any knowledgable freepers out there.

You don't have to cut down a tree to examine the rings; it can be cored.

Weather-station (thermometer) records commence about 1850, but wide-scale stations don't show up until the late 1800s.

Though monks didn't log temperatures, there is an interesting record in Europe that logged winter freeze dates. An icon of the Virgin Mary was carried across the lake at the earliest possible time, and retrieved the next time it was possible the next year. This record, and others similar to it, show that winter freeze arrives about 10 days later (on average) than it did 150 years ago.

the tree rings are almost exactly the same thickness in the same years. In other words, after crosscutting a tree that has been dead for 400 years, but was 500 years old, you can line up the thickness of the individual rings to match the rings on a tree that died 700 years ago, and was 300 years old in a different country because the climate that created the thickness of the individual ring also has a match in the other tree in the other country. The tree rings tie together an endless chronological map of what the world was doing at any given time. There are some variances, depending where you're looking at the rings, but there are telltale rings that are mutually consistent no matter where you are looking at them from that allow the aligning of the rings within the different trees. The same hold true for ice cores. They're done the same way. for instance, if a meteor struck in one certain year, you could align the ice cores to that strike and go from there. Pollen differences one year compared to another, etc.