Wood Romances

How Increasing CO2 Affects Radiative Forcings and GMST If you pay enough attention to contrarian climate influencers, you may begin to notice how frequently they affirm conflicting opinions and/or flat out contradict themselves. I think they hope that as long as they are careful to word contradictory claims in sufficiently different ways without saying both within the same minute or so, you won't notice the conflict. So I thought it might helpful to expose some of these contradictory claims. I'll start with my personal favorite: CO2 is both low/starved and high/saturated.  This contradiction appears to be particularly common among those who speak for the CO2 Coalition , like William Happer, John Shewchuk and Gregory Wrightstone. You can find these influencers saying both of the following: CO2 concentrations are so how that the planet is starved of CO2. We're in a "CO2 famine." CO2 concentrations are so high that its effect is "saturated" in the atmospher...

GMST Follows CO2 Forcings, not Solar Forcings You could be forgiven for looking at the above graph and thinking that quite obviously temperature (GMST) is following CO2 forcings and not solar forcings. But these facts are inconvenient for the "It's the Sun, stupid" crowd, so they have to figure out a way to turn this on its head. The most common way I've seen is for contrarians to say we have causation reversed. It's actually the increase in GMST that causes CO2 to increase, since warming temperatures causes the oceans to outgas CO2. The mantra I hear from this crowd is that "CO2 always lags temperature," usually followed with "by hundreds of years." Let's examine if this claim makes any sense, looking first at the paleoclimate evidence (where this myth originated) and then the historical evidence, where this claim can be conclusively refuted. Paleoclimate Evidence The "CO2 always follows temperature" myth has its origin a misunde...

A popular contrarian trope promoted by Bjorn Lomborg  and his followers is that " climate-related deaths " have plummeted since 1920. Recently, he's claimed that there has been a 97.5% reduction in climate-related deaths since 1920. This is an extremely misleading graph, and it's not too difficult to uncover why. Lomborg got his data for "climate-related" deaths from the Our World in Data website, which lists deaths from "natural disasters" (OWD does not specify which of these deaths from natural disasters are "climate-related." I went to the site to see if I can reproduce Lomborg's graph. He only lists " floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires " but OWD includes other causes of death, including extreme weather and temperature. So below I show all on the OWD site except for earthquakes and volcanic activity . I suspect this is what Lomborg did. It should be easy to see what Lomborg has done: He relabeled OWD's data for ...

The 2025 Global Carbon Budget was just released. The data included in the report goes from 1750 to 2024, since the report was published before the end of 2025. Below "FFI" stands for fossil fuels and industry and "LUC" stands for land use change . I'm not including uncertainties in my graphs below for the sake of keeping the graphs readable, but the uncertainties are discussed in the report linked at the bottom of this post. 2025 Carbon Budget Atmospheric CO2 (aCO2) Carbon Mass CO2 Equiv. Significance aCO2 (1750) 591 GtC 278 ppm Preindustrial aCO2 in 1750 aCO2 Growth (1750 - 2024) 312 GtC 147 ppm 34.6% of aCO2 in 2024 aCO2 (2024) 903 GtC 424 ppm 52.9% increase in aCO2 above 1750 Human Carbon Emissions (FFI & LUC) 752 GtC 353 ppm 2.41x greater than aCO2 Growth aCO2 (1750) + Carbon Emissions 1343 GtC 631 ppm What aCO2 would be without land/ocean sinks Human Contribution to Land/Ocean Sinks 440 GtC 207 ppm 58.5% of human emissions goes to land/ocean sinks Hum...

The Winery I've found that is the farthest North  63.47°N A common trope from contrarian activists is that the roman warm period ( RWP ) and medieval warm period ( MWP ) were warmer than today. The proxy data we have conclusively show this to be false, but most of these contrarians reject the proxy evidence in reputable studies. Instead, you often hear claims based on a misuse of historical data, one example being that during the RWP and MWP, you could grow wine in England , but you can't now. Therefore, the globe was warmer then than now. One version of this trope is: The Romans wrote about growing wine grapes in Britain in the first century,” says Avery, “and then it got too cold during the Dark Ages . Ancient tax records show the Britons grew their own wine grapes in the 11th century, during the Medieval Warming, and then it got too cold during the Little Ice Age . It isn’t yet warm enough for wine grapes in today’s Britain. Wine grapes are among the most accurate and se...

The DOE climate assessment report was published a month ago, and already hundreds of scientists have written responses criticizing the handling of the scientific evidence regarding AGW , including 85 scientists who compiled a 400+ page rebuttal  and associated press release . In response, the authors of the DOE report appear to be on a PR campaign for damage control, and so Koonin wrote an op/ed for WSJ and Judith Curry took to her blog . Her blogpost attempts to defend her mistakes about sea level rise and acceleration in the DOE report by highlighting a paper that was published this year. The paper claims to show that 95% of tide gauges do not show any statistically significant acceleration, and the remaining 5% have non-climatic explanations for their observed acceleration: Approximately 95% of the suitable locations show no statistically significant acceleration of the rate of sea level rise. The investigation suggests that local, non-climatic phenomena are a plausible cau...

A couple months ago, I saw that the " Indicators of Global Climate Change 2024 " ( IGCC24 ) was published, which is an annual update on the state of global climate and how it is changing in response to human and natural forcings. The data provides the most up to date information on human emissions and associated changes in radiative forcings as well as an evaluation of the change in temperature. A graphical summary of this is below. From IGCC24 I thought it would be helpful to show how updated values for warming, EEI, and radiative forcings would impact calculations for Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS). Here's their accounting of the various natural and anthropogenic forcings. Note that s olar forcing in the diagram above is only for 2024 only and so disagrees with the accounting in the table below. Change in Radiative Forcing Forcer 1750-2024 CO2 2.33 ± 0.28 W/m² CH4 0.57 ± 0.11 W/m² N2O 0.23 ± 0.03 W/m² Halogenated GHGs 0.41 ± 0.08 W/m² Ozone 0.5 ± 0.25 W/m² Strat...