Relationship To Climate Change
Drunken trees are not a completely new phenomenon—dendrochronological evidence can date thermokarst tilting back to at least the 19th century. The southern extent of the subarctic permafrost reached a peak during the Little Ice Age of the 16th and 17th centuries, and has been in decline since then.
Permafrost is typically in disequilibrium with climate, and much of the permafrost that remains is in a relict state. However the rate of thawing has been increasing, and a great deal of the remaining permafrost is expected to thaw during the 21st century.
Al Gore cited drunken trees caused by melting permafrost in Alaska as evidence of global warming, as part of his presentation in the 2006 documentary film An Inconvenient Truth; but global warming skeptic Marlo Lewis, senior fellow of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, claims that, "drunken trees may partly be a consequence of the PDO shift," referring to the 1976 switch to the warm phase of the Pacific decadal oscillation.
Similar warming leading to permafrost thawing in neighboring Siberia has been attributed to a combination of anthropogenic climate change, a cyclical atmospheric phenomenon known as the Arctic oscillation, and feedbacks due to albedo changes after melting ice exposes bare ground and ocean which absorb, rather than reflect, solar radiation.
Read more about this topic: Drunken Trees
Famous quotes containing the words relationship to, relationship, climate and/or change:
“Sometimes in our relationship to another human being the proper balance of friendship is restored when we put a few grains of impropriety onto our own side of the scale.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Christianity as an organized religion has not always had a harmonious relationship with the family. Unlike Judaism, it kept almost no rituals that took place in private homes. The esteem that monasticism and priestly celibacy enjoyed implied a denigration of marriage and parenthood.”
—Beatrice Gottlieb, U.S. historian. The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age, ch. 12, Oxford University Press (1993)
“The climate of Ohio is perfect, considered as the home of an ideal republican people. Climate has much to do with national character.... A climate which permits labor out-of-doors every month in the year and which requires industry to secure comfort—to provide food, shelter, clothing, fuel, etc.—is the very climate which secures the highest civilization.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“The more I read and the more I talked to other parents of children with disabilities and normal children, the more I found that feelings and emotions about children are very much the same in all families. The accident of illness or disability serves only to intensify feelings and emotions, not to change them.”
—Judith Weatherly (20th century)