Beth Moon, a photographer based in San Francisco, has been
searching for the world’s oldest trees for the past 14 years. She has traveled
all around the globe to capture the most magnificent trees that grow in remote
locations and look as old as the world itself.
“Standing as the earth’s largest and oldest living
monuments, I believe these symbolic trees will take on a greater significance,
especially at a time when our focus is directed at finding better ways to live
with the environment” writes Moon in her artist statement.
Sixty of Beth Moon’s duotone photos were published in a book
titled “Ancient Trees: Portraits Of Time”. Here you can have a sneak preview of
the book, full of strangest and most magnificent trees ever.
One of the most common misunderstandings amongst climate
change "skeptics" is the difference between short-term noise and
long-term signal. This animation shows
how the same temperature data (green) that is used to determine the long-term
global surface air warming trend of 0.16°C per decade (red) can be used
inappropriately to "cherrypick" short time periods that show a
cooling trend simply because the endpoints are carefully chosen and the trend
is dominated by short-term noise in the data (blue steps). Isn't it strange how five periods of cooling
can add up to a clear warming trend over the last 4 decades? Several factors can have a large impact on
short-term temperatures, such as oceanic cycles like the El Niño Southern
Oscillation (ENSO) or the 11-year solar cycle.
These short-term cycles don't have long-term effects on the Earth's
temperature, unlike the continuing upward trend caused by global warming from
human greenhouse gas emissions.
The data (green) are the average of the NASA GISS, NOAA
NCDC, and HadCRUT4 monthly global surface temperature anomaly datasets from
January 1970 through November 2012, with linear trends for the short time
periods Jan 1970 to Oct 1977, Apr 1977 to Dec 1986, Sep 1987 to Nov 1996, Jun
1997 to Dec 2002, and Nov 2002 to Nov 2012 (blue), and also showing the far
more reliable linear trend for the full time period (red).
