At www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/30/climate_tipping_points/ we learn that climate catastrophe is changing gear and slowing down – and this piece looks at the influence of Han Joachim Schellnhuber, a German physicist highly influential in CAGW and the founder of the Potsdam climate research unit, an advisor to the EU commission and buddy boys with the likes of Angela Merkel and Tony Blair. He seems to have instilled a lot of scary stuff into the polemic of politicians right across Europe. In that context see a couple of posts at the German sceptic site http://notrickszone.com/2011/10/30/schellhuber-calls-mans-world-rotten/ and http://notrickszone.com/2011/10/11/german-faz-schellnhubers-wbgu-has-str…
At www.physorg.com/print241761601.html … it seems a paper in PNAS (Nov 29th) claims research at the University of Bristol has discovered a molecular mechanism that makes some plants grow more rapidly when the temperature rises – a global warming gene according to the blurb placed on the press release. However, all is not as picture perfect as plants that shoot up due to hot weather become spindly and have low yields. Warm is not always good as anyone who has tried to grow spinach in the middle of the summer will know. Plants that do not have this 'gene' do not make the dreaded sprint in growth – but no such luck for bolting beetroot, onions that run to seed or lettuce that grow like a green tower with a long central stem. No doubt plant scientists will make good use of this discovery – and improve crop yields.
At http://archaeology.about.com/cs/datingtechniques/a/timing_2.htm … we learn that dendrochronology was first developed in the American SW by an astronomer, AE Douglass, as long ago as 1901. He began investigating tree ring growth as an indicator for solar cycles. Douglass thought solar flares affected climate and hence the amount of growth a tree might gain in a given year. It is not clear exactly how this aspect of his research panned out but what he did discover is that tree ring width varies with annual rainfall, the single most important impact on growth. Tree rings also vary regionally, reflecting different precipitation levels and basically record wet years and dry years rather than temperature. If this was known a hundred years ago why do modern climate scientists insist that tree rings are a global proxy for climate?
Lastly, an amusing post at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12.01/hockey-stick-falsification-so-easy… in which a fellow climate scientist confides to Michael Mann, that his son did a tree ring science project (at school) that invalidated the centrepiece of Mann's creation, the hockey stick graph. The climategate 2 emails continue to throw up information that mainstream media should be picking up – where is Private Eye on this?