Posts

The Oregon Petition

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Opinion polls appear to be all the rage among contrarians. These polls appear to be attempts to undermine the fact that over 99% of the recent scientific literature agrees with AGW, and 100% of scientific agencies globally that have taken a stance on AGW agree with AGW. In fact, as best as I can count, only about a half dozen credentialed climate scientists still working in the field globally disagree with AGW (10 if you count living, retired scientists). Since the evidence is overwhelming in favor of AGW and the consensus on AGW is so strong, political activists need to resort to opinion polls to generate the perception that there are a significant number of scientists that disagree with AGW. And of course to get large numbers of signatories, you have to make the requirements to sign very low. This I believe explains the existence of the so-called Oregon Petition and the Petition Project . Qualifications of Signatories to the Petition The Oregon Petition was begun in the wake of th...
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Outliers or Poor Indicators of Climate

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Chris Martz decided to make a point about extreme temperatures by posting a map with the hottest August temperatures ever recorded in each state of the US. Martz asks : Did you know that 33 U.S. states set their “all-time” August high temperature records before 1955?  Of those, eight Midwestern states set their August records in 1936 alone while seven set theirs in 1918. Here's the map he shared. Chris Martz's Map on X This I suppose would be interesting if we were considering when outliers appear to clump up. There's probably something meaningful in the fact that 8 states had their warmest August record temperature in 1936 and 7 had their warmest August record in 1918. We all know about the Dust Bowl, during which human activity was responsible for causing extremely high daily maximum temperatures (Tmax) during the summer months, especially in the Midwest. GHG-induced warming causes Tmax to increase but it causes Tmin to warm even more rapidly. Human activity made the Dust...
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Tony Heller On US Temperatures

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Tony Heller made the following mashup of two graphs intended to show that NASA lies about CONUS temperatures as part of a criminal conspiracy to fabricate global warming. It will be very easy to show that Tony Heller is the one lying.  It took about 5 minutes for me to document why the bottom graph is an improvement over the top graph, and there's nothing "inexplicable" about it. The information needed to explain the changes comes a  page on NASA's website that documents the developments and improvements to the GHCN station dataset over time. NASA isn't hiding anything. A subset of this network was used to form the USHCN dataset that was used by NASA and NOAA until 2014.  Here are some relevant updates introduced since the top 1999 graph: In 1999, USHCN was expanded from 138 to 1062 stations.[1] And NASA's methodology improved to account for station moves that corrected for unrealistic outliers. Areas with missing data were filled in, meaning that the area-we...
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John Christy's Misleading Graphs from 2016

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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...
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Do Tree Stumps Indicate the HTM was Warmer than Today?

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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 ...
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The Central England (HadCET) Temperatures

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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...
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Chris Martz Has Questions

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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...
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