Thursday, December 19, 2019

The Irony of Dendrochronology

4 comments:

Jennifer said...

Misleading and offensive to climate science. Most dendrochronology is done using tree cores, though some makes opportunistic use of trees felled for logging or other reasons. The dendro record is important for climate reconstruction, particularly rainfall in arid and semi arid regions.

PBurns said...

New to the Far Side or new to the internet?

PBurns said...

A memorable tree cutting:

https://www.historychannel.com.au/articles/worlds-oldest-tree-is-cut-down/

"On this day in 1964, in remote foothills in the US state of Nevada, the world’s oldest tree was chopped down, enabling researchers to determine precisely just how long it had been living. Known as Prometheus, the Great Basin Bristlecone Pine was the oldest known non-clonal organism in the world."

Jennifer said...

Larson is usually funny. This one is about as funny as ignoramus jokes about shock collars...and I imagine some awful uses of e-collars can be found if you go back to 1964.
I met several dendrochronologists in the 1980s when I did research on fire history. All were proud of their coring gear, and would have been horrified by the idea of cutting a living tree just to study its rings.