Wood Romances

Ole Humlum published a paper about 10 years ago attempting to show that CO2 always lags temperature and therefore the increase in CO2 substantially comes from an increase in temperature, not the other way around. In the words of Humlum's paper, As cause always must precede effect, this observation demonstrates that modern changes in temperatures are generally not induced by changes in atmospheric CO2. Indeed, the sequence of events is seen to be the opposite: temperature changes are taking place before the corresponding CO2 changes occur. and  CO2 released from anthropogene [sic] sources apparently has little influence on the observed changes in atmospheric CO2, and changes in atmospheric CO2 are not tracking changes in human emissions.  What I want to show two things here. First, Humlum's argument is fatally flawed logically, and he has to hide that flaw with by detrending the data. Second, even if we were take his claims, it leads to absurd conclusions. Humlum's Fatal Log...

A paper was published in 2013[1] that reconstructed intermediate water temperatures (IWT) for an area of Indonesian waters around the Makassar Straight and the Flores Sea. The study includes two reconstructions, one at 500 m depth and another at 600 m to 900 m depth in an effort to show how Pacific IWT ha sbeen affected by high latitude source waters. The reconstruction somewhat predictably found that during the HTM, average IWT in this area were warmer than in 1970. Given the misuse of this paper by contrarians (see below), I think it best to quote directly from the paper so you can see precisely what this paper is actually about. The early Holocene warmth and subsequent IWT cooling in Indonesia is likely related to temperature variability in the higher-latitude source waters. To assess the mechanisms that caused these hydrographic variations, we estimate down-core salinities and densities for the 500- and 600- to 650-m depths. A temperature-salinity-density plot suggests that althoug...