Researchers find species extinction in Thoreau’s notes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/science/earth/28wald.html?pagewanted=2&ref=scienceI read this article, and I was surprised-the “scientists” didn’t balme George Bush!
If these guys are representative of American science, we are in trouble. There was NOTHING about:
-the walden Pond area was clearcut 100 years ago-all the native white pines were felled for lumber. The whole area was used as pasture for sheep and cows-maybe THAT had SOMETHING to do with the disappearence of certain flowers?
-the data is ANECDOTAL-so Thoreaus saw a ladyslipper flower on June 15-what exactly does THAT tell you about global warming?
-Forest fires: the walden pand area was burned out several times, in the last 160 years-farmers did it, to clear the land of thistles and briars.
What are we supposed to make of "science"ike this?
Or is this just part of the canon, of the church of global warming?
Bits about this were on the newws last night and this morning, but nobody’s given it really good coverage.
I haven’t read the actual work, so I can’t commrent definitively, but the fact that things were cleared and burned out isn’t relevant to the disappearance of species – Heck, most of the Concord area was clear-cut. It’s hard to believe, but there were hardly any trees in the area around Concord Bridge by the time of the famous 1775 battle. Nowadays it’s a well-wooded area. The point is, the plants come back afterwarfds – they certainly came back by Thoreau’s day. And now many of them aren’t coming back. That strikes me as significant.
I’ll have to dig into this and se what’s going on.
This appears to be real science, albeit in its preliminary stages. Don’t make too much of the article though, since it’s from the newspaper, not from a peer reviewed journal, (even then be cautious) and as such was likely simplified and possibly biased toward global war…sorry, “climate change” and just wasn’t written to include any other aspects of the research.
By the way, “church of global warming?” Can we make of that pejorative that you are atheistic to that church?
It’s maybe NOT always a GOOD idea to RANDOMLY emphasize words and insert, commas where they don’t belong and THEN declare unilaterally that THE vast majority, of the world’s CLIMATE SCIENTISTS are WRONG and are simply promoting GLOBAL warming as an ARTICLE of faith.
Adding in a SNIPPIT about how the LIBERALS blame EVERYTHING on Bush doesn’t really add TO your credibility EITHER.
As to the article, I dunno, I’ll have to read up on that.
To elaborate: it’s a newspaper article about a published paper. But it’s published in a conference proceedings, so it’s probably not peer-reviewed. Which doesn’t mean it’s junk, but it may mean the authors feel this work is not ready for a full peer-reviewed article yet.
In any case, any scientific observation should be taken as just one data point, just one result which may be real, or may be due to statistical fluctuations, poor methodology, instrument problems, etc. But when a great number of such results appear to point towards a conclusion, we need to think how likely it is that they’re all wrong.
Here’s a good basic take-away when encountering a general newspaper article about science written by a non-scientist: grain of salt.
Newspaper articles about science are notoriously sensationalized. What you absolutely need to do is realize that no matter what the article says, unless there’s a direct quote from one of the people actually involved in the project in question (and even then keep the shaker handy, because nobody does “out of context” like a non-scientist journalist quoting a scientist…if it’s not hedged in airtight on all sides with maybes, sort ofs, perhapses, and might bes, it didn’t come out of the mouth of someone trained to do science for a living), nothing else in the article comes straight from the scientists involved in the project in question. The reporter is looking for a money shot…a quote or a conclusion that will stick in people’s heads. The workaday experience of science doesn’t produce those, and neither does discussion of the workaday experience of science. The reporter has to create them out of thin air or misreadings of what was actually said.
Grain of salt. Always.
Actually, this thread appears to be an overreaction to a sinlge statement used as a hook at the beginning of the article.
The actual article documents the beginning steps of a joint venture of several fields of study that can provide mutually corroborative information in ways that they previously ignored. This is exactly the sort of stepping back from extreme specialization (mixed with a healthy dose of creativity) that we should be applauding in science rather than getting all huffy about a single line in a single article in the popular press.
Not sure about that - I’d estimate that around 50% of conferences I’ve been involved with as attendee or as tech support had some sort of peer review process for proceedings. That includes geology, geography and environmental science.
Clearly, the Kennedys are to balme.
You want to soothe the Kennedys over this? 
There’s plenty of balme to go around.
I want to bear your children.
From the newspaper article linked it’s hard to tell whether this is good work or not, but there’s no obvious reason to suspect it’s not. If you want to compare distribution and abundance of species between 1850 and the present, you’re going to need to rely on someone’s notes from 1850. If you have reason to believe that Thoreau was competent enough to identify and record species correctly, then who can balme them for using his notes?
I’m not getting the same outrage from you at the limited scope - even reading the newspaper article it doesn’t sound like the sources they’re using are limited to Walden Pond:
Stay balme, there’s no reason to get all excited over this. Salve your outrage for when the entire area of Concord has every white pine cleared to make ointment and sheep and cows cover the town from end to end.
-the walden Pond area was clearcut 100 years ago-all the native white pines were felled for lumber. The whole area was used as pasture for sheep and cows-maybe THAT had SOMETHING to do with the disappearence of certain flowers?
-the data is ANECDOTAL-so Thoreaus saw a ladyslipper flower on June 15-what exactly does THAT tell you about global warming?
-Forest fires: the walden pand area was burned out several times, in the last 160 years-farmers did it, to clear the land of thistles and briars.
What are we supposed to make of "science"ike this?
Or is this just part of the canon, of the church of global warming?
What exactly is the debate here ralph?
I’m one of the boards resident AGW skeptocs and I see nothing contrversial in the article.
Plants are flowering earlier than they were ~150 years ago. There’s no doubt about this amongst botanists AFAIK. There are literally hundreds of really good natural history diaries from that time and before and they all show the same thing. Thoreau’s work just confirms the previous findings. I don’t even think there’s any doubt that it’s caused by the Earth getting warmer. Remember 150 years ago was the trough of the little ice age. The literature fo the time is filled with snow covered cities and wolves chasing sleighs over ice because that’s what the climate was like. Parts of the Northern Hemisphere were several degrees cooler than today. Things have been warming ever since. Most climate change skeptics only argue whether this is human caused. Even the most die hard only argue that the cooling even was localised and that the world as a whole hasn’t warmed, only Europe and parts of North Am.
So where’s the controversy here? What exactly id you wish to debate?
The queue forms to the right. 
So, I guess **Ralph124c **isn’t comin’ back, huh?
This is the real point. Science should be impartial, and conclusions should follow from analysis-not start with them. yes, 1840’s Concord , MA had a climate like present-day Quebec. That is why the mountain laurels have disappeared from Walden Pond-it is too warm for them. And, it is entirely likely that the burning of pastures has altered the landscape to th point where some species could not survive.
Take the case of the wild blueberries-their range is now in canada-and Maine (which used to have a monopoly on blueberry production) is suffering. Is this a natural effect or man-made?
Nothing in the article supports AGW.
The notes by Thoreau are interesting-but they are hardly definative.
I still think that you have entirely missed the “real point.” You have let one attention capturing lead sentence in a mass-distributed article color your entire perception regarding what was being reported.
The story is not that Thoreau proves global warming. The story is that the scientists at the center of the article have begun a multi-disciplinary approach to examining the world to gather facts that other scientists did not believe we could obtain.
I have no idea what your claim about being impartial is supposed to mean; nothing in the article indicates that any of the researchers hold any particular biases. On the other hand, being impartial does not mean being so “neutral” on every possible topic that one is prohibited from conceiving a hypothesis. That is how all analytical science operates: beginning with some few apparent facts, one conceives a hypothesis to be tested as to how those facts are interrelated, making predictions about other facts that might be discovered, then tests the hypothesis to see whether it stands or fails.