Wood Romances

It's been over a decade, but occasionally I still see people sharing the graphs John Christy's presented as testimony in 2016 as "evidence" that models can't accurately predict observations. The graphs have been heavily criticized at RealClimate (see  here  and here ) for very good reasons.  Sometimes these graphs get dressed up with a different aesthetic while keeping the comparison exactly the same. The version below is from a Heritage Foundation "report" published in April of 2026, but the authors didn't even bother to update observations to 2025. They just ignore the last 10 years of observations, possibly because none of the authors had the competency to update the observational data to today. Since Benestad  and Schmidt  have done such a thorough job debunking these types of graphs, I don't see any need to duplicate their efforts, but here's a brief summary of the what's misleading about these graphs: Christy chose comparisons of a...

If you look at any reconstruction of global mean temperatures covering the entirety of the Holocene, you'll see that the 21st century is warmer than the mean reconstructed temperatures for any point during the Holocene. Now proxy-only reconstructions (Kaufman, Shakun, Marcott) show a warmer Holocene Thermal Maximum than data assimilation approaches (Osman, Erb), and the CI for the HTM is wide enough in Kaufman's reconstruction to allow a small possibility that some years were warmer during the HTM were than they are today, but the evidence is clear that the recent warming spike is unprecedented in the Holocene, and temperatures are likely warmer today than any time during the Holocene.  Attempts by contrarian influencers to undermine this conclusion have been substantial but unconvincing and frequently disingenuous. For instance, Javier Vinós manipulated Marcott's proxy data to make the difference between the Little Ice Age (LIA) and the HTM about 2x warmer than what was ...

I see many contrarians using the Hadley Central England Temperature record (HadCET) temperature record in an attempt to say that "modest warming" has been happening for 300 years, long before CO2 could be to blame, suggesting that continued warming in recent decades can't be attributable to CO2. Much of this rhetoric depends on dishonesty for at three reasons:  HadCET is a local temperature record for Central England. It's not a good indicator of global temperatures. There were no daily means available between 1659 and 1772, only monthly means. These means are not terribly reliable compared to modern temperature records, and they depend on estimates and historical diaries, instead of daily readings. From 1772 to 1878, HadCET only records daily means but lacks Tmax and Tmin data. HadCET is only directly comparable to modern temperature records in 1878. Most annalists consider HadCET to be moderately reliable following 1772, and we should treat the data prior to 1772 wi...

Chris Martz became somewhat of a celebrity in contrarian circles while he was still in college. He generated a fairly large following on social media despite lacking any expertise in climate. His following was large enough that when he graduated from college with a BS in meteorology, he was hired by CFACT to continue being an influencer for their political agenda. Martz's job appears to be just to rehash the same old talking points used by other contrarians that have been debunked for decades, but he makes his own graphs and charts, so they look more up-to-date. Zeke Hausfather has a wonderful take down of one of Martz's most shared graphs here. Recently, Martz decided to compile  ten questions he has for "climate alarmists," by which he apparently means people who try to be informed in climate science. The questions appear to be designed to stump the people he thinks of as alarmists, but they reveal more about Martz than they do about those who are trying to inform...

UPDATE, 6/9/2026 . Zeke Hausfather at ClimateBrink  has published a post showing a similar analysis of the change in emission trends before beginning in 2013. he comes to similar conclusions that I do, but his analysis is of course better than mine. If you only have time to read one post, read his . A lot of misinformation has been circulating in recent weeks concerning the IPCC's decision to remove RCP8.5 from use in the upcoming AR7 report. I agree that the decision is a good one, and I think I can show why below with a simple toy model I created. I think it's fair to say that RCP8.5 is no longer a plausible future for us, given current emission reductions and the shrinking cost of renewable energy. For some very insightful comments from others about the death of RCP8.5, see Zeke Hausfather's post at Climate Brink  (also Michael Mann's comments on it here), a factcheck by Carbonbrief , Reto Knutti's comments , and the wonderful information at Climate Action Trac...

 For fun I've been collecting hockey sticks. The following are not complete, but I think they're pretty representative. In fact, I even collected the much maligned Loehle 2008 reconstruction, which has been the darling of contrarian "science." There are numerous issues with that reconstruction, which I document here , but I'm including it because doing so doesn't change the fact that all known temperature reconstructions covering anywhere from NH-extratropical temperatures to global mean temperatures have a hockey stick shape if you include the 21st century. I decided to break this up into three graphs, one showing GMST reconstructions, one showing NH and NH-extratropical reconstructions, and one showing NH-summer and/or NH-growing season reconstructions. I'm showing each with their respective instrumental counterparts (global, NH, and NH-summer). For reconstructions with annual resolution, those are shown faded, but I show running 10-year means for all of...