Wood Romances

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 (I'm not sure who the top person is, but 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 P...

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 ...

A lot is being said about the fact that July 2026 eclipsed July 1936 as the warmest month on record for CONUS temperatures. Objections from contrarians are voluminous, but a post on X from Chris Martz seems to capture the gist of the objections I'm hearing. According to him, "That claim is misleading for two reasons:   This is due to minimum temperatures only, which skew the 'average.'   The real, measured thermometer data (area-weighted) don’t support this claim." Each of these objections are seriously uninformed and misleading, and it won't be hard to demonstrate why. After rebutting Martz's claims, though, I'll point out some ways that this record could be reported in misleading ways, and what I think might do a better job of showing what's happening in the US. Objection #1: The Record is Due to Minimum Temperatures Only This is objectively false. The record is for average temperature (Tavg), not minimum temperature (Tmin), and it should be pa...

A few years ago, I responded to a political " comment " from the CO2 Coalition in which Happer, Lindzen (and potentially ghost writers) made a series of self-contradictory claims about climate sensitivity. Recently I became aware of another political tract in which they simplified their argument tremendously. They've also hidden almost all their math, making it more difficult to check up on what they say. However, there is plenty we can say about this that shows that they are still actively changing their opinions, and this always in the direction of distancing themselves from the best scientific evidence. Much of this tract depends on the following graph: The graph above is supposed to agree with another chart in the tract, and it mostly does, except that ΔT14 = 0.054°C above but is wrongly rounded up to 0.06°C. In the description of these calculations, this tract asks, " How much warming did CO2 cause when CO2 increased from 280 ppm in 1750 to the 420 ppm in the ...