Wood Romances

In my last post I shared about a fascinating paper that was just published with improved bias corrections for the cooling bias affecting SSTs between 1900 and 1930. As I was studying up on this paper, I was reminded of one of the hacked CRU emails discussing roughly the same problem back in 2009. The email was from Tom Wigley at UCAR to Phil Jones at CRU about bias correction issues affecting SSTs, especially from the 1940s and earlier. The language indicates that there's a context between the two that is left unexplained - that is, we're entering into a conversation mid stream, and there's language between the sender and recipient that people wouldn't necessarily understand without context (like what the "blip" is). The text of the email is below: From: Tom Wigley [University Corporation of Atmospheric Research] To: Phil Jones [CRU] Cc: Ben Santer [Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory] September 27, 2009 Subject: 1940s Phil,  Here are some speculations ...

A new (currently not paywalled) Nature paper[1] was published this week with some really interesting findings. The authors examined potential biases in sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and found evidence of a cooling bias affecting SSTs between roughly 1900 and 1930 that, if corrected, would warm SSTS during that time frame and also coincidentally make the instrumental record conform more closely with model simulations for the early 20th century. Since this study did not discover a significant bias between 1850-1900, these corrections would not have a significant impact on the amount of global warming above the 1850-1900 mean, but it would have a significant impact on our understanding of multi-decadal variability in temperatures in the instrumental record. However, some on X have taken this to mean that scientists have overestimated the amount of global warming the earth has experienced. Ryan Maue called this a "bombshell climate paper" and found it disconcerting that it wa...

A paper published earlier this year is the latest in the long history of attempts to show that CO2 is already "saturated" in the atmosphere, and therefore increased CO2 cannot cause any more warming. The latest in a series of these kinds of papers from Kubicki et al 2024[1] attempts to make this point by modeling the atmosphere in a couple different experiments. The result of their experiments suggested to them that we should question whether "additionally emitted CO2 in the atmosphere is indeed a greenhouse gas," since their experimental results, "unequivocally suggests that the officially presented impact of anthropogenic CO2 increase on Earth's climate is merely a hypothesis rather than a substantiated fact." But de their experiments actually justify this claim? The Greenhouse Effect In order to see if their experiment indeed challenges accepted science regarding the Greenhouse affect, we should first explain how increasing CO2 is expected to cause ...

Today I saw a post  by  Javier Vinós on X that shows just how far he will go to lie about what paleoclimate studies teach us about our current warming trend. The text of the post w as, "I can lose weight at 1 kg/week, 4 kg/month. But not 52 kg/year or 521 kg/decade. Each kg is harder than the one before. Climate change extrapolation in models and alarmism is also wrong. The rate of warming will decrease over time until it stops." Then he shows this graph from Moberg et al 2005: Vinós' Nonsense On Curry's blog some years ago he says that the red curve is his take on Eddy cycles with a 980-year periodicity. He calculates no forcing value for these cycles, nor does he justify at all the scale he used for the sine wave's amplitude. He appears to have just calculated a sine wave with an amplitude that matches Moberg 2005 and set to a periodicity of 980 years. The clear implication of his post and graph putting both of these together is that it's impossible for th...

On January 15, 2022, the volcano Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai (hereafter Tonga) erupted. Normally, volcanic eruptions such as this send sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere that cause a short-term cooling effect in the troposphere (and warming effect on the stratosphere) for a couple years.  However, the Tonga eruption was somewhat unique in that it erupted in shall water and therefore injected 146 MtH2O along with 0.42 MtSO2 into the stratosphere.[1] The injection of water vapor into the stratosphere created the potential that this particular volcano might not cause the short-term tropospheric cooling normally expected. Ever since the anomalous warming began in 2023 (roughly coinciding with the onset of El Nino conditions), a lot of misinformation has circulated on social media that the Tonga eruption is responsible for the warming spike the globe is currently experiencing. This misinformation appears to come from 1) a misreading of one early study[1] that examined only the impact of...

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 Osborn 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 wan...