Anthony Watts
Watts Up With That?
1/3/2012
Tom Nelson has another Climategate 2 email well worth reading
Dendrochronologists get spanked by guy with expertise in tree physiology and wood anatomy
“However, there are bounds to dendrochronology, as there are to every field of investigation, and the discipline has spilled over way outside of those bounds, to the point of absurdity.”
“What troubles me even more than the inexactness attending chronological estimates is how much absolute nonsense — really nothing but imaginative speculation — about the environment of the past is being deduced from tree rings and published in dendrochronology journals.”
“…but dendrochronology has persistently rejected walking the hard road, that of understanding the fundamental genetic and environmental factors controlling wood formation. As I see it, the peer review process in dendrochronology must be fundamentally flawed to allow such publications. Physiologist remain to build any real confidence in their ideas of how environmental factors influence tree ring formation, and dendrochronologists therefore are not at all justified in pretending that they do.
The bounds of dendrochronology will be extended, as will confidence in dendrochronological reports, when your group stops pretending that it knows the answers before it has done the needed research. Again, I am troubled by your group that it shows little humility, no genuine desire to discover the truth.”
The writer of this email:
UNB | Faculty of Forestry and Environmental Management | Rod Savidge
Areas of expertise
Tree physiology
Wood anatomy
Plant
cell biology
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This, IMHO, is why Mann’s rendition of the hockey stick is unsupportable, its all speculation based. Anyone who knows Liebig’s Law understands this.
Mann’s tree reconstructions are known to be statistically crap, and even if they weren’t, the assumption that these trees primarily measure temperature is an absurd speculation.
