Wood Romances

Did you know that there have been 50 failed doomsday predictions since the 1960s? Yea, neither did I, but that's what an opinion piece at AEI from 2019 claims. The article compiles its list from several sources, including 27 from Tony Heller. A Breitbart article upped that to 41. Then Perry added 9 more from Heller to get it up to 50. When his list had 41 predictions, Perry wrote, "For more than 50 years Climate Alarmists in the scientific community and environmental movement have not gotten even one prediction correct, but they do have a perfect record of getting 41 predictions wrong. In other words, on at least 41 occasions, these so-called experts have predicted some terrible environmental catastrophe was imminent... and it never happened. And not once — not even once!" The logic of this is bafflingly stupid, even if we accept his opinions on these predictions at face value. If there are 41 (updated to 50) failed predictions on this list, that doesn't indicate a ...

Cliff Harris and Randy Mann promote themselves as climatologists and meteorologists that interpret "weather and Bible prophecy" for the benefit of us all today. They even have a self-published Amazon book  published in 2015 on the subject. In the book, the authors claim to have 60 years experience studying the Bible, weather, and climate, and the low price of $1.99, they will share with you this knowledge so you can have a "joyful, peaceful, and successful life on Earth," at least until you're raptured off the Earth before the "tribulation period." So what can we learn from these scholars in Bible, weather, and climate prophecies? It's hard to say, because it changes pretty frequently. They periodically publish their climate history of global temperatures , now with prophecies through 2040, but it changes on a near-annual basis. Since the wayback machine keeps a record of past versions of their graph, we can look at them and see how they change the...

One of the main reasons why most of our GMST datasets go back only to 1850 is that we don't have enough SST measurements prior to 1850 to calculate GMST anomalies with a confidence interval small enough to be useful. However, ships did record surface air temperatures at least back into the 1780s. Recently the Global Surface Air Temperature project ( GloSAT ) digitized records of marine air temperatures taken on ships to form the GloSAT dataset, which contains near surface air temperatures back to 1781. Ed Hawkins, who worked on the project, has a good post describing the results of the project. The GloSAT database only goes to 2021, so I have included HadCRUT5 so that you can see the close agreement between the two. I find it interesting that the GloSAT dataset captures a little more variability in GMAT in the late 19th century, though trends are not that different between the two. The 95% confidence intervals for annual means are less than 0.3°C for most of the 18th century, exce...

You often hear contrarians repeating mantras about there being "no consensus in science" or that "science is never settled," two related claims that I take to be nearly synonymous. Many examples could be given, but I'll offer a few (with links to the source so you can check up on me): "There is no consensus science. Consensus is group-think and is very dangerous in science. During the Little Ice Age, there was a consensus that witches caused bad weather, and so climate justice resulted in witch killings."  ( John Shewchuk ) "There is no consensus in science … science is about facts" ( John Coleman ) "Science is never settled." ( Matthew Wielicki ) "The minute you hear the science is settled, you know something is wrong. Science is never settled." ( Richard Lindzen ) It's common enough that sometimes you see it dressed up in pretty memes, like this one with a quote from Michael Crichton. I haven't decided yet if i...

Another common contradiction I see among contrarian influencers is that observational data are manipulated to fit a global warming agenda that comes solely from fudged climate models that simultaneously predict far too much warming than observational data. Let's write this as two statements that make the contradiction even more obvious, where:      A = Model Predictions      B = Observational Data      C = Climate Scam Agenda  The contradiction can be stated in at least two ways. In the simpler statement, A = B and A ≠ B: Observational data are manipulated to agree with model predictions. Models are fudged to predict far more warming than is warranted from observational data.  The logic can sometime be stated in a way that is slightly more complex. Here's another wording of the same contradiction. In this case A = C and B = C (so A = B) and A ≠ B: Model predictions are fudged and observations are fabricated to agree with...

A little while ago I watched a short lecture  by R.B. Alley  that did a marvelous job of explaining why geologists have overwhelmingly concluded that greenhouse gases (and in particular CO2 ) are the primary drivers of climate changes on geologic time scales. This presentation was given prior to the publication of Judd et al 2024 ,[1] so I thought it might be fun to show how his argument would be enhanced even more with the more recent data we now have about Phanerozoic temperature and CO2. But let me set the stage. GMST is set by a balance between incoming absorb solar radiation (ASR) and outgoing longwave radiation (OLR). ASR is affected by changes in how much sunlight reaches the earth ( solar variability ), where and when sunlight reaches the earth ( orbital cycles ) and how much is reflected vs absorbed ( albedo ). Outside influences can also at least theoretically play a role in affecting process on earth ( galactic cosmic rays ) that could change how much incoming s...