Wood Romances

I thought it would be beneficial to produce an annotated bibliography of important scientific works in the field of climate science. Obviously I can't make this list exhaustive, but I'm planning to generate several bibliographies, mostly on specific topics in climate science that interest me, and I plan to periodically modify them as new papers are written (or as I discover papers written in the past). I thought it best to cover the early years of climate science as a historical survey. My first post will cover 164 years of  climate science from Fourier in 1824 to Hansen in 1988.

You sometimes hear that, at least on certain time scales, CO2 and global temperature (GMST) don't correlate very well or even that the two go in opposite directions. The implication drawn from this is that CO2 can't be the primary driver of climate changes. What I want to show here is that this claim is categorically false. On virtually all time scales in the Phanerozoic, CO2 and GMST correlate very well, especially when taking into consideration that GMST correlates with the log of CO2.  The best way for me to demonstrate this point is to simply show the correlation. Where I can, I convert CO2 to forcings (using RF = 5.35*ln(CO2/280)) and and plot CO2 forcings on the x-axis and GMST on the y-axis. This gives us two advantages: first, it allows us to calculate the r^2 for that correlation, and second, the slope of the correlation gives us an indication of sensitivity - that is, the temperature response to changes in CO2 forcings. A few caveats are in order here, though: CO2 isn...

In my last post I shared about a fascinating paper that was just published with improved bias corrections for the cooling bias affecting SSTs between 1900 and 1930. As I was studying up on this paper, I was reminded of one of the hacked CRU emails discussing roughly the same problem back in 2009. The email was from Tom Wigley at UCAR to Phil Jones at CRU about bias correction issues affecting SSTs, especially from the 1940s and earlier. The language indicates that there's a context between the two that is left unexplained - that is, we're entering into a conversation mid stream, and there's language between the sender and recipient that people wouldn't necessarily understand without context (like what the "blip" is). The text of the email is below: From: Tom Wigley [University Corporation of Atmospheric Research] To: Phil Jones [CRU] Cc: Ben Santer [Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory] September 27, 2009 Subject: 1940s Phil,  Here are some speculations ...

A new (currently not paywalled) Nature paper[1] was published this week with some really interesting findings. The authors examined potential biases in sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and found evidence of a cooling bias affecting SSTs between roughly 1900 and 1930 that, if corrected, would warm SSTS during that time frame and also coincidentally make the instrumental record conform more closely with model simulations for the early 20th century. Since this study did not discover a significant bias between 1850-1900, these corrections would not have a significant impact on the amount of global warming above the 1850-1900 mean, but it would have a significant impact on our understanding of multi-decadal variability in temperatures in the instrumental record. However, some on X have taken this to mean that scientists have overestimated the amount of global warming the earth has experienced. Ryan Maue called this a "bombshell climate paper" and found it disconcerting that it wa...

A paper published earlier this year is the latest in the long history of attempts to show that CO2 is already "saturated" in the atmosphere, and therefore increased CO2 cannot cause any more warming. The latest in a series of these kinds of papers from Kubicki et al 2024[1] attempts to make this point by modeling the atmosphere in a couple different experiments. The result of their experiments suggested to them that we should question whether "additionally emitted CO2 in the atmosphere is indeed a greenhouse gas," since their experimental results, "unequivocally suggests that the officially presented impact of anthropogenic CO2 increase on Earth's climate is merely a hypothesis rather than a substantiated fact." But de their experiments actually justify this claim? The Greenhouse Effect In order to see if their experiment indeed challenges accepted science regarding the Greenhouse affect, we should first explain how increasing CO2 is expected to cause ...

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...