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"It was suspected that a harsh drought from about 2000 to 2010 that killed tens of thousands of livestock was unprecedented in the region’s history and primarily the result of human-caused climate change. But the tree ring data show that the dry spell, while rare in its severity, was not outside the realm of natural climate variability, researchers report online March 14 in Science Advances."

Enlarge Image Preserved. Climate changes recorded in tree rings correlate with important events in European history, such as the Black Death. Credit: Wikimedia When empires rise and fall and plagues sweep over the land, people have traditionally cursed the stars. But perhaps they should blame the weather. A new analysis of European tree-ring samples suggests that mild summers may have been the key to the rise of the Roman Empire—and that prolonged droughts, cold snaps, and other climate changes might have played a part in historical upheavals, from the barbarian invasions that brought about Rome's collapse to the Black...

The entire grove of trunks is in fact one plant, a newly discovered Palmer's oak (Quercus palmeri) that researchers estimate is over 13,000 years old, making it one of the oldest plants on Earth... none of its 70 stems get more than a few feet tall, and it grows in a boulder pile that doubles as shelter from the area's buffeting winds. At first glance, the scientists thought it was an isolated grove of trees, but something didn't add up: None of them produced fertile acorns, so the plants couldn't reproduce... Genetic analysis confirmed their suspicion. Each of the 70...

The best summation of the UN climate circus in Denmark comes from Andrew Bolt of Australia's Herald Sun: "Nothing is real in Copenhagen – not the temperature record, not the predictions, not the agenda, not the 'solution'." Just so. Reuters, for example, carried a moving account of the speech by Ian Fry, lead negotiator for Tuvalu, the beleaguered Pacific island nation soon to be under water because of a planet-devastating combination of your SUV and unsustainable bovine flatulence from Vermont farms.

Global Warming: Russian analysts accuse Britain's Meteorological Office of cherry-picking Russian temperature data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures. Is Copenhagen rooted in a single tree in Siberia? Michael Mann, a Penn State meteorologist, wrote in Friday's Washington Post that "stolen" e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit still don't alter the evidence for climate change. Mann, a creator of the discredited hockey-stick graph used in reports from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show man-made warming, attacks climate skeptics, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, saying they "confuse the public." Chutzpah has been...

While I appreciate the efforts of the President, Al Gore, and all of Hollywood to save Earth from its “fever,” I do have one question: What SHOULD the Earth’s temperature be?

“A 538-yr tree-ring chronology and reconstruction of June temperatures were developed from living and dead Larix dahurica trees. The samples were obtained near the lower Lena River in northern Siberia. Dendrochronological techniques were used to estimate the ages of establishment and mortality of Larix dahurica on the presently treeless uplands and to determine the establishment dates of living trees in the lowlands. ………………………………… It was during the 19th century that the uplands lost much of their tree and soil cover. Recruitment of trees occurred in the lowlands during the 20th century, but trees have not been able to recolonize the...

Odd things are going on at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Widely available data, existing in the public view for years, is now disappearing from public view. For example this link to Keith Briffa’s Yamal data: Keith Briffa’s Yamal data

ClimateGate Research Unit Disables Its Website By Noel Sheppard Created 2009-12-14 10:03 The Climatic Research Unit at the heart of the ClimateGate [0] scandal has taken down most of the information previously available at its website. Prior to November's release of controversial e-mail messages and documents from Britain's University of East Anglea, there was a separate website for the institution's CRU that allowed readers to review articles and studies created by and for the Unit. Now, no matter what link one tries to access via a Google search, it directs you to a page that reads: "Due to the present...

Al Gore and other anthropogenic global warming believers claim the Climategate emails are taken out of context. Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit has blogged an excellent article that puts the Climategate "Hide the decline" email in context and it doesn't help the AGW position. In a nutshell, the IPCC wanted to use the historical proxy temperature change data in their Third Assessment Report, but they were concerned about the chart showing the wrong message since it declined in the late twentieth century. A proxy diagram of temperature change is a clear favourite for the Policy Makers summary. But the current...

Coming to light in recent days has been one of the most extraordinary scientific detective stories of our time, bizarrely centred on a single tree in Siberia dubbed "the most influential tree in the world". On this astonishing tale, it is no exaggeration to say, could hang in considerable part the future shape of our civilisation. Right at the heart of the sound and fury of "Climategate" – the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia – is one story of scientific chicanery, overlooked by the media, whose implications dwarf all the rest... To appreciate its...

Leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit show how the world's weightiest climate data has been distorted.

Both Steve McIntyre and I are mentioned in this comprehensive summary. I’ve posted some excerpts below, with a link to the full report in PDF form. It is well worth a read. – Anthony Cold facts about the hot topic of global temperature change after the Climategate scandal THE WHISTLE BLOWS FOR TRUTH The whistleblower deep in the basement of one of the ugly, modern tower-blocks of the dismal, windswept University of East Anglia could scarcely have timed it better. In less than three weeks, the world’s governing class – its classe politique – would meet in Copenhagen, Denmark, to...

Warming Scandal: The architect of climate fraud steps down, the creator of the infamous "hockey stick" is investigated, and Australia's parliament defeats cap-and-trade. We love the smell of truth in the morning. As the high priests of what Czech President Vaclav Klaus has called a "religion" prepare their pilgrimage to worship the earth goddess Gaia in Copenhagen, complete with humanity being sacrificed, the heresy of climate truth is finally being heard. The gospel of climate change, once expressed with the messianic fervor of an Elmer Gantry by Al Gore, is now expressed with the stammering incoherence of an Elmer Fudd...

Beginning in 2003, I worked with Stephen McIntyre to replicate a famous result in paleoclimatology known as the Hockey Stick graph. Developed by a U.S. climatologist named Michael Mann... ...Steve and I showed that the mathematics behind the Mann Hockey Stick were badly flawed, such that its shape was determined by suspect bristlecone tree ring data. ...a series of other studies published since 1998 had similar shapes, thus providing support for the view that the late 20th century is unusually warm. The IPCC also made this argument in its 2007 report. But the second expert panel, led by statistician Edward...

Have you been keeping up with this Climategate story? If you limit your information gathering to The New York Times, you may have missed it. Let’s start at the beginning. Where did this global warming nonsense come from in the first place? See how this fits: The international community, working through the basically anti-American United Nations, starts dreaming of world-wide wealth redistribution. Well … actually wealth isn’t distributed, at least not here in the United States. Here, for the most part, it is earned. Even the poor, poor pitiful poor in this country earn whatever wealth they have. They don’t...

No apologies for revisiting Climategate, for this is the exposé of the can of worms that is the AGW mindset that just keeps giving. Now, what would you say if I were to tell you that the BBC News website is running a story on Professor Michael Mann, of Pennsylvania State University, one of the boys in Phil Jones’s gang hut at CRU East Anglia? “B****r me!” you would probably respond. “Don’t tell me the BBC has finally caught up with Climategate.” Relax. I’m not telling you that; and it hasn’t. Instead, the BBC “News” site is running a story...

As the evidence of fraud at the University of East Anglia's prestigious Climactic Research Unit (CRU) continues to mount, those who've been caught green-handed continue to parry their due opprobrium and comeuppance, thanks primarily to a dead-silent mainstream media. But should the hubris and duplicity evident in the e-mails of those whose millennial temperature charts literally fuel the warming alarmism movement somehow fail to convince the world of the scam that's been perpetrated, certainly these revelations of the fraud cooked into the computer programs that create such charts will. -snip- One can only imagine the angst suffered daily by the...

A scientific scandal is casting a shadow over a number of recent peer-reviewed climate papers. At least eight papers purporting to reconstruct the historical temperature record times may need to be revisited, with significant implications for contemporary climate studies, the basis of the IPCC's assessments. A number of these involve senior climatologists at the British climate research centre CRU at the University East Anglia. In every case, peer review failed to pick up the errors. At issue is the use of tree rings as a temperature proxy, or dendrochronology. Using statistical techniques, researchers take the ring data to create a...