Wood Romances

The 2024 Global Carbon Budget has been out for a while now, but I thought it would be helpful to show the results of this update now along with the 2024 "year in review" type posts. The data included in the report goes from 1750 to 2023, since the report was published before the end of 2024. Below FFI stans for fossil fuels and industry and LUC stands for land use change. I'm not including uncertainties in my graphs below for the sake of keeping the graphs readable, but the uncertainties are discussed in the report linked at the bottom of this post. Carbon emissions continue to increase, though rates have flattened over the last decade or so. The bad news is that 2023 experienced record high emissions, so we haven't reversed the trend towards decreasing emissions yet. Here are graphs showing this from 1850 and 1958 (when the Keeling Curve begins. Human carbon emissions are mirrored by the land and ocean sinks plus atmospheric growth, such that on average, human emissi...

The December 2024 data from RSS was just made available, so I thought I'd put together some summary graphs for RSSv4 and UAHv6.1. The 2023-2024 warming spike was more pronounced in satellite data, which is intriguing. But RSS continues to show more warming than UAH.   Here are trends for the full dataset and the last 30 years: 1979 - 2024 Trends UAH: 0.153 ± 0.012°C/decade (2σ) RSS: 0.230 ± 0.012°C/decade (2σ) 1995-2024 Trends UAH: 0.162 ± 0.025°C/decade (2σ) RSS: 0.249 ± 0.024°C/decade (2σ) These trends seem pretty disparate from each other (RSS shows ~50% more rapid warming), and my uncertainty calculation doesn't account for all the sources of error in these datasets. Most importantly (as I share here ), difficulties with satellites beginning around 1998 were resolved in different ways between RSS and UAH. The decisions made by each explain a good portion of the disagreement between them (they can be seen between 1998 and 2004 below), and that is not factored in to the abov...

Most of the GMST temperature data is in for 2024, and as most predicted, it was the warmest year on record, though perhaps by a larger margin than expected. El Niño conditions developed in 2023, and typically the following year becomes the warmest year on record. When large El Niños developed in 1997 and 2015, it was the following year that became record years, and this pattern continued again.  Above, here's how 2024 looks in several major datasets. I put the 2-sigma uncertainties for HadCRUT5 in dotted lines. This graph is set to the 1951-1980 mean (left scale), and this allows you to see that most of the variability between the datasets occurs in the late 19th century. The right scale is offset to show the warming above the 1850-1900 baseline for HadCRUT5 with the 1.5°C target as a dotted horizontal line. Below I set the same data to the 1850-1900 baseline and plotted centered 30-year means from HadCRUT5; this has the effect of better showing warming for each dataset above ...

A few years ago, I began seeing contrarians promoting data from a website called temperature.global (TG), a website that claimed to publish global temperatures. According to their description, TG "calculates the current global temperature of the Earth. It uses unadjusted surface temperatures. The current temperature is the 12M average mean surface temperature over the last 12 months compared against the 30 year mean. New observations are entered each minute and the site is updated accordingly. This site was created by professional meteorologists and climatologists with over 25 years experience in surface weather observations." The website was run anonymously; to my knowledge, nobody knows exactly who is behind it. I corresponded with at least one of the people who ran the website, and he/she used the initials TG for the person's name. In another post I documented some of the failures of the website after seeking clarification from TG. The more I corresponded with TG, th...

Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller have published a new paper (NZ24) in the quasi-predatory MDPI journal geomatics [1] which claims to rule out the effects of greenhouse gases as a cause for the increase in GMST in recent decades. Their paper concludes, Our analysis revealed that the observed decrease of planetary albedo along with reported variations of the Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) explain 100% of the global warming trend and 83% of the GSAT interannual variability as documented by six satellite- and ground-based monitoring systems over the past 24 years. Changes in Earth’s cloud albedo emerged as the dominant driver of GSAT, while TSI only played a marginal role. They produce a graph that they believe supports their claim, which sure enough shows a decrease in the Earth's albedo over the last 24 years and a corresponding increase in absorbed solar radiation (ASR). Let me be clear here at the beginning that there absolutely has been both a decrease in albedo and a corresponding in c...

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.” ~  Charles Bukowski  ~ Perhaps we've all encountered individuals who seem to be simultaneously overconfident and incompetent in a subject matter in which they have strong beliefs. When this occurs, many of us become convinced that these people are suffering from what has been popularly coined the "Dunning-Kruger Effect." I'd like to challenge this notion. I think this oversimplifies a complex problem we're experiencing today. We don't gain, learn and process information like we used to, and the information we see is frequently curated  by our own biases and social media, and both can cause us to become ideologically entrenched in a condition in which we accept what is false and reject what challenges us. The Perpetual Sophomore Effect is a Different Curve from the Popularized Dunning-Kruger Effect Dunning-Kruger Effect The actual effect...