Dr. Matthew Wielick Attempts Math Again

A couple days ago I saw the following post on X from Dr. Matthew Wielicki, who has decided to double down on some terrible math that I (and many others) corrected over a year ago (see here for his terrible math and rebuttal).

Dr. Wielicki Attempts math

The errors in this post are numerous. Let's summarize them:
  1. It's wrong to calculate the amount of warming by subtracting one annual value from another. Wielicki should calculate the rates of warming by calculating proper trends. His approach completely ignores the natural variability that he says matters in this post.
  2. The trends for the two time frames are below. The difference between the two is statistically significant. The central trend for 1915-1936 is ~2.7x more rapid than 2005-2025 (not 3.6x), though the 2σ CIs are large.
         1915 - 1936: 0.79 ± 0.5°C/decade (2σ) or 1.73°C warming over 22 years.
         2005 - 2026: 0.29 ± 0.4°C/decade (2σ) or 0.64°C warming over 22 years. 
  3. Wielicki is clearly engaging in significant cherry picking in his choice of dates. He deliberately chose a date range of 22 years because 1915 happened to be cold and 1936 happened to be hot. If he had chosen 37 years (1900-1936, 1990-2026), the two trends would be indistinguishable. 
  4. Wielicki also engaged in significant cherry picking in his selection of data. He selected only half of daily measurements (he used Tmax but not Tmin) from only one quarter of the year (JJA, not the rest of the year) and from only 2% of the globe (CONUS). Without this extensive use of cherry picking, he wouldn't be able to find this difference in trends. In fact, Wielicki is exploiting the Dust Bowl years, which were also made much worse by human activity, but it was caused by a very different mechanism. Poor agricultural practices made Tmax much hotter than Tmin in the Central US, and Wielicki is quite literally ignoring the context that he's claiming matters.
  5. If you plot the top 10% of JJA Tmax temperatures, the 2020s already have more occurrences than the 1930s, despite only having 7 years in the books. To be clear, the two hottest years were 1936 and 1934, but only 4 of the top 10% occur in the 1930s and 5 occur between 2020 and 2026.
  6. Despite the 6 ppm increase in CO2 from 1915-1936, the correlation between GMST and ln(rCO2) is strong with an r² of 0.89. This is the proper comparison to evaluate, not JJA Tmax for 2% of the globe.
  7. Nobody is saying climate is controlled by a single variable. There are other forcings, and Wielicki knows that the IPCC and the peer-reviewed literature account for these forcings. In fact, Wielicki is ignoring both context and natural variability.
JJA Tmax with the Dotted Line for the Top 5%

Since President Trump appointed Wielicki to head up U.S. Global Change Research Program earlier this year, I think it's important to document these examples of his blatant incompetence on these matters. In theory, Wielicki will be heading up the publication of the next NCA report (though the proper NCA6 report may still be published in peer-reviewed journals). These kinds of posts from Wielicki document that he lacks the competence (and potentially the integrity) to complete an NCA report that will be anything more than regurgitating contrarian talking points with really bad math and shoddy analysis (I document more of his incompetence here and here).

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