Wood Romances

CO2 Coalition 's " fact #6 " and " fact #7 " are essentially identical, and both are largely just a rehash of statements made in previous "facts." Here we're told that "our current geologic period, the Quaternary, has seen the lowest average levels of carbon dioxide since the Precambrian." To support this claim, they took the data from the climate model in Berner 2001 and averaged all the CO2 concentration values for each Geologic period, ignoring the confidence intervals and the length of the period, and plotted the following graph. Note that each geologic period is shown as if they were the same length. As I've already shared , CO2 proxies often paints a somewhat different picture from Berner 2001's climate model. The model has been updated several times since 2001, but the CO2 Coalition  appears to be completely unaware of this. Here again is the proxy evidence we have for CO2. It's pretty sparse before the proliferation of

 CO2 Coalition 's " fact #3 " repeats the mantra "CO2 is plant food." This of course is superficially true, but CO2 Coalition oversimplifies this point and then carefully omits important information. The effect is to mislead. Below is a picture of Dr. Craig Idso with 4 trees apparently showing that increasing CO2 produces larger trees. The citation for this apparently is another political propaganda group CO2 Science and "Idso 2013," which is cited as if it's a peer-reviewed study, but in fact it's just another political tract written by Idso at the "Center for the Study for Carbon Dioxide and Global Change" and "CO2 Science." Let's be clear at the beginning that it is of course superficially true that "CO2 in plant food" in the sense that photosynthesis requires CO2. The chemical reaction for photosynthesis is: 6CO2 + 6H2O → C6H12O6 + 6O2 This reaction requires solar energy for plants to take water and carbon

CO2 Coalition 's " fact #4 " is virtually identical to its " fact #1 " but just on a different time scale. All they did with this "fact" is change the scale and repeat the same lies with the same dose of alarmism. Rather than showing a climate model of CO2 for 140 million years, they show proxy evidence for CO2 for the last 420,000 years. They simply repeat here that CO2 fell to ~180 ppm, and we should be alarmed by this because below 150 ppm "terrestrial plant life cannot exist." And if you're not sufficiently scared by this lie, they reinforce it and then imply the fossil fuel industry saved us from a mass extinction.  We came within about 30 ppm (30 molecules out of every one million) to the extinction of most plant life on land, and with it the extinction of all higher terrestrial life-forms that depend on it. Bear in mind that, before we began adding CO2 to the atmosphere, we weren’t sure that we wouldn’t cross that critical 150-ppm

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 20

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