Wielicki is Now Using AI-Generated Slop Memes

It looks like Wielicki is now generating and/or promoting AI-generated memes that misrepresent climate science. I saw this from him on X earlier today (an alternate version from him is here).

AI-generated Meme from Wielicki

Wielicki's meme misrepresents and/or fabricates multiple lines of evidence. Let's look look at each of these supposed lines of evidence to see if he's made his case that "Natural variability produced temperatures like these before, so we should expect it to contribute to temperatures like these again... regardless of CO₂."

Temperature Stripes

The climate stripes in Wielicki's meme is attributed to Büntgen et al 2020[1]. This paper was explicitly not limited to Europe. It included extratropical NH temperatures with distinct treatments for Eurasia (EA) and Eurasia/North Atlantic (EA+), and even the EA reconstruction is significantly larger than Europe. The paper is intended both 1) to parse out the role of volcanic forcings during the common era so that anthropogenic forcings today can be better understood, and 2) to show that tree ring reconstructions show more variability in summer temperatures than is preserved in the Pages 2K product. The Pages 2K reconstruction included not just tree rings (for annual summer temperature data) but at also ice cores, lake and marine sediments, corals, historical sources, sclerosponges, speleotherms, boreholes, bivalves, distributed globally for land + ocean temperatures. This shows the variability in NH-JJA temperatures compared to Pages 2K in Büntgen et al 2020. The paper concluded, "Reconstructed summer temperatures in the 280 s, 990 s and 1020s most likely exceeded the tree ring-based modern warming until 2010 CE."
The paper even included temperatures stripes to highlight the differences between EA, EA+ and Pages 2K.
Note that these climate stripes begin 900 years before Wielicki's meme and end in 2000, but the stripes look very different from Wielicki's AI-generated meme. Wielicki has modified these stripes to make the MWP look warmer than current temperatures. The middle panel above is EA, so it's the most comparable to Europe here, which does show much more variability than Pages 2K, but it also does not show that European summers during the MWP were warmer than the 21st century. This also clear in the following graph from the paper, which also shows the role of volcanic forcings in explaining the warm and cool periods in EA and EA+.
What can be identified as warm and cold periods here are much shorter time periods than is often claimed; the RWP and MWP are shorter intervals, as are the various cold spells referred to as LALIA and three LIAs. The data show that these RWP and MWP periods in EA+ coincided with low volcanic forcings. In fact, one of the main conclusions of Büntgen et al 2020 was,
If pre-industrial summers during Roman and medieval times, in the relative absence of volcanic forcing, were sometimes as warm as modern ones, the effects of anthropogenic greenhouse gases could be larger than anticipated.

So if we actually read the paper that Wielicki cites, we get essentially the opposite conclusion from what Wielicki's AI-slop meme would cause us to believe. And it just gets worse from there. In a more recent paper[3], Esper et al 2024 (with Büntgen as a co-author), shows that the summer of 2023 was unprecedented over the last 2000 years for NH JJA temperatures.

And of course, JJA 2026 was even hotter than 2023, especially in Europe.
Clearly Wielicki failed to make a case from Büntgen that the summer of 2026 in Europe was not unprecedented in the last 2026 years. He had to generate AI-slop that misrepresented the data and conclusions of a paper he likely didn't even bother to read.

Multiple Lines of Evidence

Following this, Wielicki's AI-generated meme shows icons with other supposed "multiple lines of evidence" designed to support his manipulated climate stripes. These include "glaciers, wine, tree rings, lakes, and historical records." Of course, tree ring data was the data used by Büntgen and Esper above, and we've already seen this doesn't support the claims of his meme. But we've also seen that other proxies, including glacial ice, lakes, and historical records were included in Pages 2K, and these lines of evidence reduced variability in annual temperatures. In other words, including additional proxy evidence would make NH temperatures look more like Pages 2K and less like Büntgen et al 2020. This was one of the observations of Büntgen et al 2020 that Wielicki either read and ignored or didn't bother to read.

This leaves only the evidence of wine, where he claims "grapes were grown in England at higher latitudes." And this is a flat out lie. As I've shown in another post, grapes for wine have been grown in England since the 1950s (the Hambledon Vineyard was founded in 1952), and now there are multiple vineyards in Scotland, Norway and Finland:

Grapes are not a good proxy for temperature, because they are grown commercially, and locations where they're grown depend in part on the economics of growing wine grapes locally vs transporting wine grown elsewhere, but even if we accept the locations of vineyards as a suitable proxy for temperature, Europe is warmer now and has been since the late 20th century.

Conclusion

So we've seen that Wielicki's graph manipulates tree ring data and misrepresents the scientific evidence, but how should we evaluate Wielicki's claim that "Natural variability produced temperatures like these before, so we should expect it to contribute to temperatures like these again... regardless of CO₂?" We could rewrite this as "natural variability contributes to heat extremes, while CO₂ is driving the overall increase in European temperatures," and I would be fine with that. Nobody is saying that hot summers didn't happen in Europe in the past, but as baseline summer temperatures increase, the natural variability that produces European heat waves are adding to warmer baseline temperatures, so extreme hot summers now are becoming more common and more severe.



References:

[1] Ulf Büntgen et al. Prominent role of volcanism in Common Era climate variability and human history, Dendrochronologia. Volume 64, 2020, 125757, ISSN 1125-7865. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dendro.2020.125757 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1125786520300965)

[2] Neukom, R., Steiger, N., Gómez-Navarro, J.J. et al. No evidence for globally coherent warm and cold periods over the preindustrial Common Era. Nature 571, 550–554 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1401-2

[3] Esper, J., Torbenson, M. & Büntgen, U. 2023 summer warmth unparalleled over the past 2,000 years. Nature 631, 94–97 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07512-y

 

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