Led by the director of the California Space Institute, Dr. Wolfgang Berger, a team of researchers, teachers and students developed an educational website, highlighting topics such as the role of global climate on the ocean’s biological productivity. The website, called Earthguide, is located at http://earthguide.ucsd.edu.

Pinus torreyana, the Torrey pine, grows in a limited region along the coast in North San Diego County near Del Mar; the oldest trees are somewhat over a century old. The history of its rate of growth is contained in its tree rings, which tell an interesting story about patterns of climate change; thatis, the history of precipitation in the region.

As a consequence of the prevailing geographic diversity, the county has an extraordinary variety of plants and animals. It is an internationally recognized "biodiversity hot spot" and has very few equals in that regard, in all of North America or elsewhere on our planet.

The enigma of why mountain glacier started to retreat in the 1850s in the Rocky Mountains and elsewhere remains unresolved. The most important factor affecting climate change presumably was a change in the mode of operation of the sun one or two decades earlier, (from irregular periodicity and low output to regular periods and greater brightness). But the direct cause appears to have been the onset of drought in the 1830s. Interestingly, there is no obvious solar information in the drought narrative in Montana and southwestern Canada. The presence of tidal lines in the spectrum of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, together with the presence of lines that could be interpreted as beat periods between solar and tidal forcing in the drought series, suggests that the energy of solar variation is preempted for interference with tidal forcing, within the system of oscillations informing precipitation patterns in the region. The suggestion is supported by the presence of a strikingly dominant 12.5-year period in the drought series, which is interpreted as a difference tone between the main sunspot cycle (at 10.8) and a tidal period at 5.8. Also, this period is close to 2/3 of the nodal tide (at 18.61).

Douglass favorite target was the Ponderosa Pine or “Yellow Pine.” The methods he introduced are now generally in use. Douglass is best known for his role in dating the ancient ruins in the Southwest. The focus of Douglass’s studies was not the age of ancient ruins, but the behavior of the sun through time. Many of his publications emphasize this fact, and he reported prominently on reconstructing solar (sunspot) cycles from climate cycles seen in tree growth histories.