Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Trees and glaciers
The seemingly lefty LiveScience reports that Canadian glaciers have retreated to the point that they have exposed the stumps of trees that have not seen the light of day in 7,000 years:
Melting glaciers in Western Canada are revealing tree stumps up to 7,000 years old where the region's rivers of ice have retreated to a historic minimum, a geologist said today.
Johannes Koch of The College of Wooster in Ohio found the fresh-looking, intact tree stumps beside retreating glaciers in Garibaldi Provincial Park, about 40 miles (60 kilometers) north of Vancouver, British Columbia.
Radiocarbon dating of the wood from the stumps revealed the wood was far from fresh—some of it dated back to within a few thousand years of the end of the last ice age.
"The stumps were in very good condition sometimes with bark preserved," said Koch, who conducted the work as part of his doctoral thesis at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. Koch will present his results on Oct. 31 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting in Denver.
The pristine condition of the wood, he said, can best be explained by the stumps having spent all of the last seven millennia under tens to hundreds of meters of ice. All stumps were still rooted to their original soil and location.
This bit of evidence is held to prove that humans are behind rapid climate change:
"It seems like an unprecedented change in a short amount of time," Koch said. "From this work and many other studies looking at forcings of the climate system, one has to turn away from natural ones alone to explain this dramatic change of the past 150 years."
Wait a minute. I think he's trying to inch a slow one by us. These are fresh stumps in "very good condition" with bark and such. Does that not imply that advancing glaciers overwhelmed them in a period of even more rapid advance 7,000 years ago? What caused that?
Will somebody please explain why the revelation of these stumps is not evidence that the climate can change very quickly without the influence of humans?
12 Comments:
By 
GreenmanTim, at
Wed Oct 31, 11:14:00 PM:
Yeah, I read that one too. But TH, give LifeScience a second look, even if the researcher bias in this case was offputting. There is a nice story about rare coins there that made me think of you
http://www.livescience.com/history/top10-rare-coins.html
and also a myths, taboos and bizarre facts sex quiz that is far more interesting than O'Reilly's (and I carpet bombed that one with an 8 out of 10).
http://www.livescience.com/php/trivia/index.php?quiz=sex
By Purple Avenger, at
Wed Oct 31, 11:16:00 PM:
Does that not imply that advancing glaciers overwhelmed them in a period of even more rapid advance 7,000 years ago? What caused that?
I'm pretty sure it was those UFO's a certain unhinged democrat presidential candidate claims to have seen.
By Escort81, at
Wed Oct 31, 11:19:00 PM:
If the tree stumps in question showed evidence that they had been cut by a saw (especially a chain saw), then I'd be highly skeptical that the trees date back 7,000 years!
As it is, pre-Industrial Revolution climate change is not relevant to modern day climate change lobbyists, because a) it's in the past, and there's nothing that can be done about it prospectively, and b) the fact that climate change can and has occurred without humans having anything to do with it potentially dilutes the urgency of their message -- that humans are destroying the climate and the earth, and that radical measures must be taken to prevent that.
I agree that we should conserve resources, be more energy efficient, and not dispose of toxic products in our back yards -- that's just informed common sense. But if humans are really destroying the earth (any a portion of the climate change lobby believes we are already past the point of no return), then it seems to me that the only way the earth can survive in the near term (if that is the objective) is for there to be many fewer humans, certainly less than the 6.6+ billion people we have now.
Even if you convinced all European and American countries to stop their population growth -- and many have done so already without prompting (see: Russia) -- that leaves the other 80% of the world still creating lots more people, and much of that part of the world is where the most rapid industrialization and commercialization is occurring. Can you see western climate change lobbyists telling China, India, as well as Asian, Muslim and African countries to shrink their populations? That would be possibly the most racist piece of lobbying ever done by a progressive organization -- a bunch of white folks running around telling non-whites not to reproduce.
Yes, the West produces the most greenhouse gases, but at least we are starting to get it under control. The highest rates of growth in the output of greenhouse gases are not in the West. I have believed for some time (without subtracting from the importance of the U.S. becoming more energy efficient and energy independent) that if I were running the Environmental Defense Fund, my biggest offices would be in China right now.
Another way of looking at it is if we were talking about the outbreak of a pandemic, where would you apply most of your effort (given limited resources): a) where the pandemic was largely contained and was not growing, or b) where the rates of growth were high and the opportunity to prevent infection across a large population was still possible?
I don't know, maybe it's already too late for China. If the Chinese can't do it -- and they are pretty good at running a top-down, command-style system with some market features (otherwise known as a single party state) -- it may be hard to protect the ecosystem without an informed, regulated market economy. Is that what Western climate change lobbyists really want? Hopefully, but I am skeptical.
By 
, at
Thu Nov 01, 01:45:00 AM:
He might even look a bit deeper. Oil and gas below the surface, evidence of massive decay of vegetation. Well before much human activity and CO2 production, by humans.
SEW
By Cas, at
Thu Nov 01, 05:09:00 AM:
Is there any reason NOT to assume that these "stumps" were not made by some other agency...I don't know, what about BEAVERS building a dam?
The photos I saw could have been indicative of either beavers or men with axes...
By , at
Thu Nov 01, 11:35:00 AM:
First, two clarifications before getting to the meat of the matter.
"escort81": China surpassed the US in greenhouse gases last year. With its 544 additional coal-burning power plants on the drawing board, my guess is they won't be signing Kyoto II anytime soon.
TH: "The seemingly lefty LiveScience..."
No, the decidedly lefty LiveScience. Of the various "science" web sites (using the term in its most generous sense, the same way Fox News uses it by placing articles on Bigfoot and UFOs in their 'Science' section), LiveScience has been promoting global warming alarmism from the beginning, and with gusto.
__________________________________
TH: For someone as intelligent and well-informed as you are, it was absolutely stunning to see you write this a few days ago:
"Rapid climate change will cause the early demise of some humans, and it almost certainly will kill off countless species of plants and animals..."
I was so blown out I couldn't even answer it. I thought maybe you'd drunk your breakfast.
In this article, you appear to have sobered up and are now doubting something you said a mere few days before.
The next time you write on climate change, perhaps you'd care to address these few questions to help clarify your position:
1. According to NASA, the earth hasn't warmed in ten years. The last 'peak' year was 1996. How is this defined as "rapid" climate change?
2. Similarily, the earth has only warmed a tad over 1 degree in a century. Again, how is this defined as "rapid" climate change?
3. According to articles I've read, there were no mass extinctions during the last warming period a thousand years ago, and, in fact, most species flourished. Why are suddenly "countless species" going to die off this time around?
4. Likewise, how do you see the actual demise of people because the earth warms up a bit? Allow me to expound to pre-cover a few bases:
-- If you mean because of things like malaria expanding, this has been widely disproven. Before quinine came along, there were as many cases of malaria in Russia as the tropics. They had one epidemic about a hundred years ago that wiped out 10,000 people.
-- If you mean because of heat, please remember that this will occur over hundreds and hundreds of years, so if it gets a little too toasty for some desert dwellers, they'll simply have to move.
-- Given how many more people die every year from cold than heat, wouldn't the net benefit from global warming be on the positive side?
5. Despite the protests of Al Gore and his disciples, the geologic record clearly shows that CO2 trails both global warming and cooling by some 500 to 800 years. (It has to do with the saturation of the deep oceans)
If we are currently going through a "rapid" man-made climate change as evidenced by the CO2, is it being suggested that the people driving SUVs 500 years ago are at fault?
_________________________________
Damn, this is a fun subject. :)
By , at
Thu Nov 01, 12:45:00 PM:
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the science in this, but it was my understanding that glaciers scoured the earth they were over, moving giant boulders and leaving a morraine at their perimieters. So how did these stumps survive being covered by a glacier and not being pulverized by glacial movement, or crushed under the weight of tons of ice?
RPD
By David M, at
Thu Nov 01, 01:45:00 PM:
The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the - Web Reconnaissance for 11/01/2007 A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...so check back often.
By , at
Thu Nov 01, 04:12:00 PM:
1. Trees convert CO2 to Oxygen, and fix the carbon in organic material, thereby working against this greenhouse gas, and inhibiting "global warming".
2. Glaciers crush trees, eliminating their ability to photosynthesize cellulose from CO2, leaving only stumps behind.
3. Therefore, glaciers cause global warming.
Is there a movie in this for me?
-David
By , at
Fri Nov 02, 12:42:00 AM:
Global warming,al capones vualts the hitler diaries,piltdown man,and other big time hoaxes
By , at
Sat Nov 03, 11:02:00 PM:
The Earth is only 6000 years old, so obviously these 7000 year old stumps are fabricated.
By , at
Sun Nov 04, 10:41:00 PM:
your right about that violet the earth is only 6000 to 7000 years old and not billions like carcked urns like CARL SAGAN was always saying and we have some glacers and trees in our county and we have MT SHASTA which has glacers
