Wood Romances

It looks like Wielicki is now generating and/or promoting AI-generated memes that misrepresent climate science . I saw this from him on X earlier today  (an alternate version from him is  here ). AI-generated Meme from Wielicki Wielicki's meme misrepresents and/or fabricates multiple lines of evidence. Let's look look at each of these supposed lines of evidence to see if he's made his case that "Natural variability produced temperatures like these before, so we should expect it to contribute to temperatures like these again... regardless of CO₂." Temperature Stripes The climate stripes in Wielicki's meme is attributed to Büntgen et al 2020 [1]. This paper was explicitly not limited to Europe. It included extratropical NH temperatures with distinct treatments for Eurasia (EA) and Eurasia/North Atlantic (EA+), and even the EA reconstruction is significantly larger than Europe. The paper is intended both 1) to parse out the role of volcanic forcings during th...

A couple days ago I saw the following post on X from Dr. Matthew Wielicki , who has decided to double down on some terrible math that I (and many others) corrected over a year ago (see here  for his terrible math and rebuttal). Dr. Wielicki Attempts math The errors in this post are numerous. Let's summarize them: It's wrong to calculate the amount of warming by subtracting one annual value from another. Wielicki should calculate the rates of warming by calculating proper trends. His approach completely ignores the natural variability that he says matters in this post. The trends for the two time frames are below. The difference between the two is statistically significant. The central trend for 1915-1936 is ~2.7x more rapid than 2005-2025 (not 3.6x), though the 2σ CIs are large.      1915 - 1936: 0.79 ± 0.5°C/decade (2σ) or 1.73°C warming over 22 years.      2005 - 2026: 0.29 ± 0.4°C/decade (2σ) or 0.64°C warming over 22 years.  Wielicki is cl...

In a video promoted by both Heartland and Climate Realism  that has been circulating on social media, YouTube and blogs for since at least 2022, two people (the top person is Stanley Goldenberg , and the bottom person is Dr. Richard Keen ) discuss an AMS Monthly Weather Review report describing the warming of the Arctic Ocean . After reading some language from the report describing large and dramatic climatic changes in recent years he says, "it goes on and on" and then quotes it saying, "Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coast cities uninhabitable." Then comes the big reveal - this report was written in 1922. So dire predictions stemming from climate alarmism have been around for over a century. Who knew? The short answer to that question is, apparently nobody in 1922. It turns out that these two people were not reading from an AMS Monthly Weather Review report. They were in fact reading from a Washington...

Frequently I see contrarians confuse local and global temperatures in such a way that they end up contradicting themselves. The contradictions goes like this - on the one hand they say global warming can't be a problem because a small amount of glo. warming is no different than the change in temperature over a small portion of the day, and nobody would notice this small change anyway. But then they also say that during the Little Ice Age, climate was so much worse than it is today, including wide spread famines, frozen rivers, puritans burning witches, etc. Given that the LIA was only a couple degrees colder than today, this directly contradicts their claims about the effects of a couple degrees of global warming. I'll document an example of this below.  On September 6 , Matthew Wielicki posted a claim on X that global warming isn't a problem because 2°C warming by 2100 is "about the temperature change from 8am to 10am in most major cities." He then showed a gra...

It's become clear to me over the last 5-10 years that one of the greatest challenges hindering productive climate discussions has to do with the lack of scientific literacy. Frequently I when I write posts that articulate my position I cite the scientific literature that supports my position, and it's extremely rare that contrarians actually read what I wrote and respond to its contents. I'll instead get responses that 1) attack me, 2) accuse the scientific literature of being biased/fraudulent, or 3) attempt to change the subject. I get exactly the same kinds of responses if I cite the scientific literature directly. It's easy to conclude from this that climate contrarians are simply obstinate, refusing to read the literature that proves them wrong. And while that may be the case, there may be an even simpler explanation - scientific literacy. The PIAAC (Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies) has six proficiency levels for literacy. These ar...

In a previous post (see that post for the cited literature), I calculated ECS from data provided in the Indicators of Global Climate Change for 2025 (IGCC25). I made 4 calculations using ΔT from two different baselines (1850-1900 and 1790-1839) and two different means for current temperature (the last 4 years and the last 12 years). I’d like to share again the calculations using a 1850-1900 baseline so I can illustrate how feedbacks amplify a warming signal. Here are the calculations in table form: Where ΔFt is total forcings since 1850 and ΔFc is the forcing for doubling CO2. Using these values and the Energy Balance Equation and averaging the two results, we come up with an ECS of 3.4°C. Notice here that to calculate ECS we didn’t have to quantify any feedbacks. We do know that there must be positive feedbacks because Planck sensitivity (Sp) is only about 1.2°C, and we’ve already seen that much warming with just over a 50% increase in CO₂. But the Planck Feedback (λp) is important ...