Climate: Explaining The Tree Ring Divergence Problem
Wednesday, May 7, 2014 - 09:20
in Earth & Climate
The climate hockey stick, a popular visual metaphor for climate change, has received considerable attention. It depicts a slightly cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere from 1000 A.D. until 1900 A.D. and then swings sharply upward in the last 80 years. It was created using tree ring data for the older timeframes but not recently - after 1960, tree ring data showed a cooling trend so it was replaced. Clearly that was not correct but if tree rings don't detect the modern warming trend, they might also have 'missed' warming episodes in the past - we know that the climate is not cooler now, that is not the issue, but if tree ring proxies are unreliable, it casts doubt on the whole onus of media and IPCC accounts since 2001. read more