Wood Romances

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.” ~  Charles Bukowski  ~ Any of us who have spent time in debates and/or discussions regarding any issue of substance for a significant amount of time have come across individuals who are simultaneously overconfident in their beliefs and incompetent in the subject matter. When this occurs, many of us become convinced that the person with which we are discussing is suffering from what has been popularly coined the "Dunning-Kruger Effect." I'd like to challenge this notion. The Perpetual Sophomore Effect is a Different Curve from the Popularized Dunning-Kruger Effect Dunning-Kruger Effect The actual Dunning-Kruger Effect (DKE) is described by David Dunning and Justin Kruger and has to do with observations that, on average, if you plot both self-perception of ability and actual test scores by level of experience, both test scores and perceived ability i...

I thought it would be beneficial to produce an annotated bibliography of important scientific works in the field of climate science. Obviously I can't make this list exhaustive, but I'm planning to generate several bibliographies, mostly on specific topics in climate science that interest me, and I plan to periodically modify them as new papers are written (or as I discover papers written in the past). I thought it best to cover the early years of climate science as a historical survey. My first post will cover 164 years of  climate science from Fourier in 1824 to Hansen in 1988.

You sometimes hear that, at least on certain time scales, CO2 and global temperature (GMST) don't correlate very well or even that the two go in opposite directions. The implication drawn from this is that CO2 can't be the primary driver of climate changes. What I want to show here is that this claim is categorically false. On virtually all time scales in the Phanerozoic, CO2 and GMST correlate very well, especially when taking into consideration that GMST correlates with the log of CO2.  The best way for me to demonstrate this point is to simply show the correlation. Where I can, I convert CO2 to forcings (using RF = 5.35*ln(CO2/280)) and and plot CO2 forcings on the x-axis and GMST on the y-axis. This gives us two advantages: first, it allows us to calculate the r^2 for that correlation, and second, the slope of the correlation gives us an indication of sensitivity - that is, the temperature response to changes in CO2 forcings. A few caveats are in order here, though: CO2 isn...