Wood Romances

There's a very strange conspiracy theory that has been floating around social media since 2017 that an ex-NOAA employee became a "whistleblower" to alert the world of fraud in NOAA's GMST dataset. It's a strange conspiracy theory because even the so-called "whistle blower" says that the conspiracy theorists are wrong. Let's set the context. A paper was published in Science in 2015 (the "Karl study") arguing, “Here, we present an updated global surface temperature analysis that reveals that global trends are higher than those reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, especially in recent decades, and that the central estimate for the rate of warming during the first 15 years of the 21st century is at least as great as the last half of the 20th century.” Dr. John Bates in 2017 decided to go public with complaints about NOAA's process in 2017 (after retiring in November 2016). To be clear, Bates said nothing publicly about

There is a table floating around X and other social media outlets being used to claim that even the IPCC acknowledges that most extreme weather events are not increasing in frequency or severity. This claim comes from a misreading of Table 12.12 in the AR6 report from the IPCC. The line of reasoning comes almost entirely from this chart, and in the past, I've responded to several people making these claims by quoting from the text of AR6 to clarify what it says about some of these climate impact drivers (CIDs). But Tim Osborne put together a series of posts on X that does a better job of explaining how badly these people are misreading the chart. Following extended arguments on X is sometimes difficult, especially for those who (like me) don't pay to be able to make longer posts. So I thought it would be helpful to reproduce his argument here in a manner that is more easy to digest without the need to scroll through several posts and hope you're keeping them in order. I wa