Wood Romances

Today I saw a post  by  Javier Vinós on X that shows just how far he will go to lie about what paleoclimate studies teach us about our current warming trend. The text of the post w as, "I can lose weight at 1 kg/week, 4 kg/month. But not 52 kg/year or 521 kg/decade. Each kg is harder than the one before. Climate change extrapolation in models and alarmism is also wrong. The rate of warming will decrease over time until it stops." Then he shows this graph from Moberg et al 2005: Vinós' Nonsense On Curry's blog some years ago he says that the red curve is his take on Eddy cycles with a 980-year periodicity. He calculates no forcing value for these cycles, nor does he justify at all the scale he used for the sine wave's amplitude. He appears to have just calculated a sine wave with an amplitude that matches Moberg 2005 and set to a periodicity of 980 years. The clear implication of his post and graph putting both of these together is that it's impossible for th

On January 15, 2022, the volcano Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai (hereafter Tonga) erupted. Normally, volcanic eruptions such as this send sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere that cause a short-term cooling effect in the troposphere (and warming effect on the stratosphere) for a couple years.  However, the Tonga eruption was somewhat unique in that it erupted in shall water and therefore injected 146 MtH2O along with 0.42 MtSO2 into the stratosphere.[1] The injection of water vapor into the stratosphere created the potential that this particular volcano might not cause the short-term tropospheric cooling normally expected. Ever since the anomalous warming began in 2023 (roughly coinciding with the onset of El Nino conditions), a lot of misinformation has circulated on social media that the Tonga eruption is responsible for the warming spike the globe is currently experiencing. This misinformation appears to come from 1) a misreading of one early study[1] that examined only the impact of wat

There's a very strange conspiracy theory that has been floating around social media since 2017 that an ex-NOAA employee became a "whistleblower" to alert the world of fraud in NOAA's GMST dataset. It's a strange conspiracy theory because even the so-called "whistle blower" says that the conspiracy theorists are wrong. Let's set the context. A paper was published in Science in 2015 (the "Karl study") arguing, “Here, we present an updated global surface temperature analysis that reveals that global trends are higher than those reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, especially in recent decades, and that the central estimate for the rate of warming during the first 15 years of the 21st century is at least as great as the last half of the 20th century.” Dr. John Bates in 2017 decided to go public with complaints about NOAA's process in 2017 (after retiring in November 2016). To be clear, Bates said nothing publicly about

There is a table floating around X and other social media outlets being used to claim that even the IPCC acknowledges that most extreme weather events are not increasing in frequency or severity. This claim comes from a misreading of Table 12.12 in the AR6 report from the IPCC. The line of reasoning comes almost entirely from this chart, and in the past, I've responded to several people making these claims by quoting from the text of AR6 to clarify what it says about some of these climate impact drivers (CIDs). But Tim Osborn put together a series of posts on X that does a better job of explaining how badly these people are misreading the chart. Following extended arguments on X is sometimes difficult, especially for those who (like me) don't pay to be able to make longer posts. So I thought it would be helpful to reproduce his argument here in a manner that is more easy to digest without the need to scroll through several posts and hope you're keeping them in order. I wan

There's a graph circulating on X created by Javier Vinós that is being used to suggest that global warming rates are actually decreasing. The origin of this graph comes from a WUWT blogpost , and it superficially seems convincing. The relevant graph is labeled "Figure 2," and the caption claims, "Evolution of the warming rate for 15-year periods between 1979 and 2022 in °C/decade and its linear trend, from monthly UAH 6.0 satellite temperature data." Javier Vinós Thinks Global Warming Rates are Decreasing Javier Vinós was kind enough to explain how he made this graph: "To analyze the evolution of the warming rate, we subtract from each monthly data the previous one to calculate the monthly increase. We then deseasonalize the monthly increase by finding the 12-month moving average to remove a lot of the noise. Finally, we calculate the 15-year average warming rate in °C/decade by calculating the 180-month moving average and multiplying the resulting data by

Along with the publication of Emily Judd's reconstruction[1] of global temperatures, she and her team compiled an up-to-date reconstruction of CO2 concentrations from proxy data. I shared in a previous post how this new reconstructions shows a CO2 and GMST as well-correlated on geologic time scales, with GMST increasing by ~8 C for 2xCO2. Her CO2 reconstruction is another step forward for paleoclimate because it makes use of a growing database of proxy evidence, much of which is being compiled at the Paleo CO2 project . For the Paleozoic and Mesozoic, Judd's reconstruction followed Foster et al 2017 [2] pretty closely, especially during the Paleozoic, but she also included additional data from Witkowski et al 2018[4][3]. Differences between Judd's and Foster's reconstruction had to do with different ways of site and time averaging and updates from Witkowski's study. During the Cenozoic, she followed more recent work by Rae et al 2021 [5] which agrees closely with t