Wood Romances

CO2 Coalition's " fact #1 " is an excellent example of I consider contrarian alarmism. The claim here is essentially that the overall trend over the last 140-million years shows that we are on a long-term trend towards a climate apocalypse until we were saved by carbon emissions from the fossil fuel industry. In fact, while contrarians frequently call those who accurately present the scientific evidence as "alarmist," this so-called "fact" actually qualifies as an alarmist claim. In the graph above, the CO2 Coalition claims that CO2 levels have been steadily decreasing for 140 million years, such that "CO2 levels fell precipitously & steadily to within about 30 ppm of the 150 ppm 'line of death' below which plants can’t survive. Both the relatively short-term data from ice cores and much longer-term data going back 140 million years... show an alarming downward trend toward CO2 starvation." The data they use comes from Berner 2001

The Epoch Times (ET) is a newspaper operated by the Falun Gong cult which was formed in 1992. The cult is (understandably) opposed to the Chinese Communist Party, but recently it has made some inroads into the US, where it supports far-right political agendas; its ET newspaper has promoted a number of conspiracy theories involving QAnon, anti-vaccine propaganda, and climate science denial. In a recent " premium report ," the Epoch Times claims that the U.S. Temperature dataset operated by NOAA contains data from "non existent temperature stations" and asserts that there are "hundreds of ‘ghost’ climate stations" that are no longer operational, and data is just filled in from surrounding stations, with the implication that they do so to support Biden's climate policies. The Supposed Problem The article relies mostly claims made by influential climate-tweeter named John Shewchuk and climate-blogger Anthony Watts. Strangely, almost all their claims have

Recently I've seen people posting the following graph from Tony Heller, which is intended to show a cooling trend in temperatures following the 1940s and suggest that the "start of the satellite record" begins when temperatures are at their low point. Heller's graph is unsourced except for being called "Briffa's Reconstruction." This graph has shown up on Twitter, and so far I haven't seen any one identify the source of this data or even what the data represents. However, I was able to determine that up through 1960, the data is identical to Briffa 2001[1], and the data is on an Excel spreadsheet on an FTP site maintained by NOAA for plate 3 of Briffa's paper. The same site also has regional data that includes years following 1960 (plate 2 in Briffa's paper), but Briffa is clear that the post-1960 data does not have a clear temperature signal. Briffa writes, "The period after 1960 was not used to avoid bias in the regression coefficients