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."

Comments

Let me guess...

[daveschroeder]

...to what the majority of comments to this article will be related, given the delicious quotes like this in the article:'

"I'm used to seeing so many acorns around and out in the field, it's something I just didn't believe. [...] But this is not just not a good year for oaks. It's a zero year. There's zero production. I've never seen anything like this before."

[...]

The absence of acorns could have something to do with the weather, Simmons thought. But he hoped it wasn't a climatic event. "Let's hope it's not something ghastly going on with the natural world."

[...]

"This is the first time I can remember in my lifetime not seeing any acorns drop in the fall and I'm 53. You have to wonder, is it global warming? Is it environmental? It makes you wonder what's going on."

Of course, these will be ignored on page two of the story:

Whatever the reason for no acorns, foresters and botanists are paying attention.

But they say they're not worried yet. "What's there to worry about?" said Alan Whittemire, a botanist at the U.S. Arboretum. "If you're a squirrel, it's a big worry. But it's no problem for the oak tree. They live a long time. They'll produce acorns again when they're ready to."

White oaks can live as long as 300 years. Faster-growing red oaks can reach 200. And it takes only one acorn to make a tree, he said, which in an urban area with little open space is often more than enough.

"This is probably just a low year, a biological event, and it'll go away," Zimmer said. "But if this were to continue another two, three, four years, you might have to ask yourself what's going on, whether it is an indication of something bigger."

I know it's not a popular sentiment here, but Beware the church of climate alarm.

[P]erhaps people are starting to wonder whether the so-called precautionary principle, which would have us accept enormous new taxes in the guise of an emissions trading scheme and curtail economic growth, is justified, based on what we actually know about climate.

One of Australia's leading enviro-sceptics, the geologist and University of Adelaide professor Ian Plimer, 62, says he has noticed audiences becoming more receptive to his message that climate change has always occurred and there is nothing we can do to stop it.

In a speech at the American Club in Sydney on Monday night for Quadrant magazine, titled Human-Induced Climate Change - A Lot Of Hot Air, Plimer debunked climate-change myths.

"Climates always change," he said. Our climate has changed in cycles over millions of years, as the orbit of the planet wobbles and our distance from the sun changes, for instance, or as the sun itself produces variable amounts of radiation. "All of this affects climate. It is impossible to stop climate change. Climates have always changed and they always will.

His two-hour presentation included more than 50 charts and graphs, as well as almost 40 pages of references. It is the basis of his new book, Heaven And Earth: The Missing Science Of Global Warming, to be published early next year.

Plimer said one of the charts, which plots atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature over 500 million years, with seemingly little correlation, demonstrates one of the "lessons from history" to which geologists are privy: "There is no relationship between CO2 and temperature."

[...]

Plimer says creationists and climate alarmists are quite similar in that "we're dealing with dogma and people who, when challenged, become quite vicious and irrational".

Human-caused climate change is being "promoted with religious zeal ... there are fundamentalist organisations which will do anything to silence critics. They have their holy books, their prophet [is] Al Gore. And they are promoting a story which is frightening us witless [using] guilt [and urging

Re:Let me guess...

[daveschroeder]

That said, I would have hoped that you could dig up some better references to support your post; Miranda Divine is an ignoarmus and Kieth Windshuttle has only slightly more credibility than David Irving.

It was more just that it was a very recent article (November 27, 2008) from a major media outlet, and very on point.

It's the content of the article that matters, no matter who the author; "People who are really confident [of their facts] relish debate," is still true no matter whence it comes.

Re:Let me guess...

[Samschnooks]

...the comments on this article can actually include speculation on what may be occurring beyond climate change alarmism?

That's the thing that kind of bugs me is that Global Climate change gets all of the attention at the expense, it seems, over other issues. For example, coal fired power plants. The argument usually boils down to green house gases and maybe air quality. But the issue of coal burning releasing mercury into the environment (why do you think predator fish are contaminated with the stuff?) is hardly ever brought up and if it is, it's just ignored.

Unfortunately, global climate change has become a very politically polarizing issue and it drowns out any sort of rational discourse. Which means, regardless of what needs to be done, it won't get done because folks will spend all their time digging their heals in to be "right".

Re:Let me guess...

[Anonymous Coward]

"However, I expect that "vicious and irrational" will win out."

Duh. You've already built the strawman you've outwitted.

It's idgits like you that poison the discussion by defining it as a contest between alarmists and anit-alarmists.

get bent.

Re:Let me guess...

[Enter the Shoggoth]

Au contraire, in an ideal world, or a close approximation (say a fully refereed journal) content can stand alone, but in any journalist outlet (especially from a so called "think tank") the content tends to be selective at best and is often down right fraudulent, now I admit that I haven't read the particular issue of Quadrant to which you refer but the journal definately sits in the former category and until I can see a fully referenced and sighted article from Mr. Windshuttle then I'm afraid his past transgressions will continue to weigh heavily.

And as for Ms. Divine, an article written by an actual journalist from the SMH could fairly be described as originating from a major media outlet, but her piece is an Editorial comment placed in the paper to stir the pot from the right, just as say a Philip Adams editorial will stir from the left, I quite enjoy Mr Adams' rantings, but I admit the fact that it is an editorial opinion and cannot be fairly called journlism

That said, I would have hoped that you could dig up some better references to support your post; Miranda Divine is an ignoarmus and Kieth Windshuttle has only slightly more credibility than David Irving.

It was more just that it was a very recent article (November 27, 2008) from a major media outlet, and very on point.

It's the content of the article that matters, no matter who the author; "People who are really confident [of their facts] relish debate," is still true no matter whence it comes.

Re:Let me guess...

[famebait]

It's the content of the article that matters, no
matter who the author;

Yes, but if the content incorporates more than facts widely known to be previously proven, and clear and verifiable logic building on those, evaluating the content is very far from trivial.

If you are unable to, or cannot be expected to, do a thorough vetting of all remaining claims in the content, then you are in reality really also being asked to _believe_ the author's claims of knowledge, and to _trust_ his judgement in handling it.

For that, reputation and past transgressions do indeed matter rather a lot.

Re:Let me guess...

[Ambitwistor]

I agree that no one should be jumping to attribute this particular event to climate change. Climate change is generally slow, and something that abruptly shows up in a particular year probably isn't climate related. If the acorns have been gradually disappearing over the past few decades, that would be another matter.

That being said, most of what Plimer says about climate change is misleading at best, and dishonest nonsense at worst. (But it sure does sell books, doesn't it?) Climate change is real and is being substantially influenced by humans. You can start by reading last year's IPCC AR4 report.

For example, Plimer says:

"Climates always change," he said. Our climate has changed in cycles over millions of years, as the orbit of the planet wobbles and our distance from the sun changes, for instance, or as the sun itself produces variable amounts of radiation.

Total non sequitur. We know climate has changed over millions of years. That doesn't mean that we ought to be changing it further in ways that are to our detriment, or with consequences we can't fully predict.

And the current climate change is not due to orbital wobbles (that takes place over tens of thousands of years) nor variance in solar radiation (whose measured history in the 20th century does not agree with the actual changes we've observed).

"All of this affects climate. It is impossible to stop climate change.

No one is seriously claiming we can stop all climate change, forever. We can't even stop the current change we've caused. We can, however, slow it down to a more manageable rate.

Plimer said one of the charts, which plots atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature over 500 million years, with seemingly little correlation, demonstrates one of the "lessons from history" to which geologists are privy: "There is no relationship between CO2 and temperature."

That's an absolutely ridiculous statement, and even more ridiculous to claim that this is some well known fact among geologists. See, for example, Royer et al.'s Phanerozoic climate sensitivity estimate, or the vast amount of work on the effect of CO2 on the glacial-interglacial cycle, or the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) event (although it's still debated whether that was CO2 or methane).

Sure, you can draw a graph of CO2 vs. temperature (or rather, some paleotemperature proxy) over 500 million years, and no, they're not always going to agree with each other. That doesn't mean that CO2 is unrelated to climate. It means CO2 is not the only thing which affects climate, as Plimer himself acknowledges. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the continents were in totally different locations, the atmospheric and ocean circulation patterns were likewise altered, ice sheets were in different places or absent altogether, the distribution of vegetation was different, the sun itself was slightly weaker, and so on.

All those things affect climate. But it's very difficult to infer all the factors which were contributing that long ago. To isolate the effect of CO2, the best we can do is look at certain intervals when there were large changes, like the PETM, where the climate signal is very strong. Or we can start going closer to the present, where we have more data; we can dig ice cores back a million years and reconstruct a lot of the past climate drivers more directly then we can if we have to rely on much older ocean sediment cores. That covers many of the glacial-interglacial cycles. And we do see direct relations between temperature and CO2.

In short, it's completely dishonest to claim that you can disprove the link between CO2 and temperature using nothing but the correlation between the two. This goes the same for people who claim that you can prove the link using the glacial-interglacial correlation between the two. The link is vastly more subtle than that. Plimer would know that if talked to any of his geolog

Re:Let me guess...

[Ambitwistor]

So you have irrefutable evidence that global warming is due to fossil fuel combustion products and not, say, the output of the sun?

Yes, pretty much. Hardly anything is totally "irrefutable", but there is plenty of evidence which supports the link between warming and CO2, including the paleoclimate record, the observed timing, rate, and magnitude of the warming compared to the CO2 forcing (when other forcings are included too, of course), the stratospheric cooling fingerprint, the observed changes in the diurnal cycle, etc. All of those directly disagree with solar irradiance trends. The solar trend disagrees in rate, timing, and magnitude with the warming since the mid-20th century, although it explains a fair bit of the warming before then. So does the cosmic ray trend, for that matter. Solar warming doesn't lead to stratospheric cooling, it doesn't lead to the same changes in the day-night cycle as globally distributed greenhouse gases do, and so on. See Foukal et al., Lockwood and Frohlich, etc. Of course, your article doesn't bother to mention any of those inconvenient facts.

The whole "other planets are warming" is among the dumbest of all skeptic arguments. The climate of other planets has about jack squat to do with the Earth's climate. Some of them hardly have any atmosphere, none have water oceans, and so on. When you actually look at what causes warming on various planets, it's not even the Sun; Martian warming is attributed to a change in global dust storms, Jupiter warming isn't even global, Pluto warming is due to it being summer there, and so on. I don't know why people ignore the large amount of data we have on Earth climate and what causes it, in favor of much sparser data from planetary climates dramatically unlike our own.

The fact is that most of the global warming theories are based on poor evidence and conjecture.

Oh, that's a "fact" is it? What establishes this fact?

we shouldn't have irrational, knee-jerk reactions to the use of fossil fuels.

It's not an irrational, knee-jerk reaction, it's one based on over 40 years of scientific and economic study. The IPCC AR4 WG1 report summarizes the state of the science. Nordhaus's A Question of Balance is a good introduction to the policy side of the issue.

Re:Let me guess...

[DavidTC]

If the earth's temperature is being increased by the sun, then it's more important we do something about global warming, and quick.

All the bad stuff that's going to happen thanks to global warming doesn't magically vanish because it's being done by the sun.

If it's caused by humans, we just need to back off. As long as we don't hit the point where the ocean currents flip or the antarctic ice melts, we're okay.

If it's caused by the sun, we need to back way the hell off, back to the stone age, and even farther, perhaps with some sort of technology to shade the earth, and attempt to weather it out without hitting the tipping point in several of the systems that would push us past no recovery.

I.e., the car we're in just got a flat tire. Most people are arguing that it's because we're driving over a rocky road with bad tires, whereas you're arguing there's a sniper shooting at us. That doesn't make the situation better and somehow mean we can ignore it, that makes it a good deal worse and means we need to start panicking now.

Re:Let me guess...

[nahdude812]

I emailed my mom who lives in Pennsylvania (which was mentioned in the article), and who owns 5 acres of oak trees (terrible for raking in the fall - these leaves decay very slowly and lay very flat - each missed leaf is a dead bit of grass come the spring). She also lives on the edge of ~100 acres of forest composed largely of oak.

Yes, we have lots of acorns - acorns are on a two-year cycle. It takes two years for an acorn to mature; so one year there are lots and the next year there are not very many. Our trees are not synchronized with each other, so we have pretty many acorns every year.

The cicadas this year ate the tender tips of a lot of oak trees - that is where the acorns form.

BUT the oak trees are in trouble. There is a disease called "Sudden Oak Death" that is doing a lot of damage and we have lost at least seven trees in our yard.

She's a zoologist and not a botanist, though botany is a bit of a hobby of hers. This explanation sounds as plausible as any other, and more plausible than most.

So I think that alarmism about this is overboard until there's more information. That said though, environmental concern under the guise of global warming is overall a good thing - it's causing people to pay attention to the impact of their actions on the world.

Just like most main stream causes, the only way to maintain the public attention the cause requires is to either federally mandate the attention, or to engage in a lot of alarmism. The only way to get the federal mandate is to convince politicians that doing so is in their political career's best interest, so you need to engage the public with... alarmism.

Re:Let me guess...

[Anonymous Monkey]

Get decoy squirrels for your house. They may be evil super geniuses but are extremely short sighted. A few fake squirrels on your lawn and they will think you are being ransacked by their brothers and ignore you. By the end of this, only redneck humans and old ladys may be left alive.

Re:Let me guess...

[instarx]

Yes, but if the content incorporates more than facts widely known to be previously proven, and clear and verifiable logic building on those, evaluating the content is very far from trivial. [emphasis mine]

The politically-driven global warming "skeptics" rely on the difficulty of verifying their claims. I recently spent most of a day chasing down and reading original scientific papers that had been cited as references on a professional-looking anti-global warming site. Without exception the papers did not reach the anti-warming conclusions the site claimed they reached. In at least one instance the paper came to the exact opposite conclusion and stated it very plainly in its conclusions section. Yet it was still used as a reference against global warming.

These charletans rely on people being unable or unwilling to go to the significant effort to check their sources. In this particular instance Plimer's "40 pages of references" and "more than 50 charts and graphs" is used to give his speech a gravitas it doesn't deserve. Quadrant Magazine is a right-wing conservative rag [see wiki] that vetts any pseudo-science articles it publishes through accepted conservative filters. The American Club of Sydney hires out its meeting halls to anyone. However, citing it as a venue implies support from the Club and sounds more impressive than if Plimer spoke at the local Grange Hall.

Re:Anecdotal data point

[jav1231]

The problem is a lone observer in a single locale can muster up a climate scare like this and apparently get attention. Here in my area we too saw a large crop of at least the large variety of acorns. These are the kinds of things that we'll find Al Gore referencing if we're not careful.

Re:Have the bees gone too?

[Plug]

Have a more open world view, moderators; the OP is referring to the arc linking all the episodes of series 4 of Doctor Who. It's the first thing I thought of when I read the post, and is also why the article is tagged 'badwolf' and 'starsgoingout'.

there's something alarmist

[Reality Master 201]

About your apparent need to deny, out of hand, even a remote possibility that this or any other event is linked to anthropogenic climate change.

You appear to have decided a priori how things are, and seem to go into an intellectual panic when something comes up that challenges you understanding of thing. You're just as bad as you claim the global warming "alarmists" to be, worse perhaps. You're willing to cling to what a tiny fraction of people have to say about the topic because it suits what you want to hear.

It's a plot

[confused one]

It's part of a plot developed by the squirrels. They want us to feel sorry for them, feed them, and invite them into our homes. They've become jealous of what the dogs and cats have, and they want in...

Re:Anecdotal data point

[StrawberryFrog]

Here in my area we too saw a large crop of at least the large variety of acorns.

And a lone observer like you can dismiss it with an anecdote. Which is why people have to compare notes across wide areas ... which is pretty much what they're doing, if you read the article.

These are the kinds of things that we'll find Al Gore referencing if we're not careful.

Oh look, I just fed a troll.

Re:Actually its a normal occurence

[tbo]

The AC is right. In grad school, my wife studied population genetics of coast live oak (quercus agrifolia), and she saw the same boom-and-bust cycles of acorn production. The boom years are known as "mast" years--not sure what the bust years are called.

This is just a normal cycle, and, as usual, the media's reporting of science is atrocious.

Re:Anecdotal data point

[khallow]

I look forward to proper "data collection" following. The fact that it has not occurred yet doesn't mean that the whole thing should be dismissed out of hand.

What thing? I'm just reading that some peoples' oak trees are producing less acorns than those people expected and that low acord production is routine. I think it should be dismissed out of hand. There's no evidence that there's anything to look into.