Wood Romances

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...