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Acorns Disappear Across the Country
Hugh Pickens writes "Botanist Rod Simmons thought he was going crazy when couldn't find any acorns near his home in Arlington County, Virginia. 'I'm used to seeing so many acorns around and out in the field, it's something I just didn't believe,' said Simmons. Then calls started coming in about crazy squirrels. Starving, skinny squirrels eating garbage, inhaling bird feed, greedily demolishing pumpkins. Squirrels boldly scampering into the road. And a lot more calls about squirrel roadkill. Simmons and Naturalist Greg Zell began to do some research and found Internet discussion groups, including one on Topix called 'No acorns this year,' reporting the same thing from as far away as the Midwest up through New England and Nova Scotia. 'We live in Glenwood Landing, N.Y., and don't have any acorns this year. Really weird,' wrote one. 'None in Kansas either! Curiouser and curiouser.' The absence of acorns could have something to do with the weather and Simmons has a theory about the wet and dry cycles. But many skeptics say oaks in other regions are producing plenty of acorns, and the acorn bust is nothing more than the extreme of a natural boom-and-bust cycle. But the bottom line is that no one really knows. 'It's sort of a mystery,' Zell said."
Here in the Hanover county north of Richmond Va, we had an early and massive acorn crop. It would be interesting to correlate some weather phenomenon to acorns (long drought in late summer = early crop, very wet spring = huge crop, etc).
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
"LONG-TERM PATTERNS OF ACORN PRODUCTION FOR FIVE OAK SPECIES IN XERIC FLORIDA UPLANDS"
Study of acorn production across several species in FL from 1969 to 1996 http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/01-0707
From the abstract: We identified regular cycles of acorn production ... and found evidence that annual acorn production is affected by the interactions of precipitation, which is highly variable ..., with endogenous reproductive patterns. In contrast, acorn production showed no significant association with minimum winter temperatures.
I need a rest between naps some days
So I'm not the only geek in the world who takes an interest in trees after all?
I knew about mast years, and the following meagre years. This is a common adaptation to predation pressure or parasites. An extreme example of this are cicadas; predators don't live long enough for their population cycle to become synchronized with that of the cicada.
I'm curious what the synchronization mechanism could be. In my area (north western Europe), last year was a mast year ... for beeches, chestnuts and all four species of oak growing in my area. This fall I found only a handfull of chestnuts, no beech nuts and hardly any acorns.
While hiking in North Carolina this fall, I didn't see a lot of acorn remains either, but I attributed that to having been a bit late in the season.
I'm surprised and intrigued that the phenomenon appears coincided on both sides of the Atlantic this year. Are the cycles synchronized via some global (solar?) external trigger, or is this just coincidence? I always assumed it must be the weather, but that isn't even remotely similar on both sides of the Atlantic.
The best scientific introduction is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 4th Assessment Report, Working Group 1 (physical science). It attempts to be a comprehensive literature review of the mainstream science. It is all available online here. If you'd like to know more specifically about any particular issue, and are having trouble locating it in the IPCC report (e.g., if you don't know what keywords to look for), let me know and I might be able to provide more specific references.
The IPCC report is kind of dense and is a survey of the modern state of the art. If you're looking for more of a textbook sort of introduction to climate science, I'd recommend David Archer's book Understanding the Forecast. It's aimed at undergraduate freshmen, so it might be below the level you're looking for, but it's still pretty good at laying out a lot of the important issues.
Warming will cause an ice age. Because of "crucial heat exchanging currents." Got it.
Although that's an oversimplification, that has in fact happened many times in the past (e.g., Dansgaard-Oescher events). What happens is that warming causes more fresh water to be added to the North Atlantic, due to increased precipitation and ice melt, or freshwater pulses from draining inland bodies of water (e.g., Lake Agassiz and the Younger Dryas event). This disrupts the Atlantic thermohaline circulation which carries heat from the tropics to northern Europe. That region will experience strong cooling, although not all regions do. Numerous such cooling events are recorded in the geologic record, including plunging the regional climate back into an ice age shortly after recovery from one. However, it is thought that glacial climates are more susceptible to such events than is the current interglacial. Current estimates are that even if the thermohaline circulation shuts down, Europe will still warm, since the cooling there is counteracted by the large amount of warming necessary to trigger such a collapse.
Some of you have bought so heavily into this crap that you can't even tell how ridiculous you sound.
Some of you are so pathetically unaware of everything we know about climate that you can't even tell how ignorant you sound.