Wood Romances

Whenever people tell you that climate sensitivity (ECS) is so low that it will never become a problem for human societies, there's a rather simple "sniff test" you can perform to test whether their proposal for ECS is plausible when compared to empirical data. To show this, first I'll show how the energy balance equation works for a rough estimate for ECS. Then I'll show how you can rearrange terms to show that low sensitivity claims force their proponents to propose implausibly high natural forcings that no one has been able to identify. To begin, let's start with the fact that at thermal equilibrium absorbed solar radiation (ASR) equals outgoing longwave radiation (OLR). When these two are not equal, the climate warms or cools until an equilibrium is reached. So when ASR > OLR, there is an earth energy imbalance (EEI), and the surface must warm until ASR = OLR again. So we can expand our equation to account for this: ASR = OLR + EEI, which shows that ener...

IPCC 1990, Figure 7.1c is a Replica of the Lamb 1965, Figure 3a, "Analyst's Opinion" In the IPCC's First Assessment Report, published in 1990, three schematics were published that were labeled, "schematic diagrams of global temperature variations." The third (c) schematic was labeled, "the last thousand years" with a dashed line that "nominally represents conditions near the beginning of the twentieth century." The graph is below. IPCC-FAR 1990, Figure 7.1c "Schematic diagram of temperature variations over the last thousand years. The dotted line nominally represents conditions near the beginning of the twentieth century." I think it may be fair to say that the biggest mistake the IPCC has ever made was using the word "global" with reference to the (c) schematic, because that objectively is not the case. It was a replica of Hubert Lamb's reconstruction of Central England temperature (CET), where Central England is ...

Frequently I'm told that climate-related papers are fraudulent, usually because the person revaluating the paper is 1) predisposed to deny any data they don't like and/or 2) completely illiterate about what they're reading. In discussing these papers, I often find that wading through the details of the analysis can go so far over contrarians' heads that they don't even bother reading either the paper or my corrections to their claims about the paper. Brandolini's Law gets the win most of the time for two reasons: it takes an order of magnitude more time to refute nonsense than it does to create it, and those those who create the nonsense frequently lack the literacy to read the rebuttal (a point I make here ). Occasionally there's a congruence of two conditions that can allow rational discussion to proceed. In my experience, these are: 1) the paper can be replicated/evaluated with a spreadsheet (reducing the time commitment to evaluate the paper) and 2) the ...

Two new studies were recently published quantifying ice mass lost from the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) and the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AnIS)[1] and mountain glaciers.[2] The GrIS/AnIS study is important because it combines 43 independent estimates of ice mass changes, from satellite measurements to arrive at estimates of ice sheet mass balance changes from 1972 for the GrIS and 1979 for AnIS. Combines, the two ice sheets "lost 11,309 ± 565 billion tonnes of ice between 1979 and 2023, with glacier dynamical imbalance driving 84% of the ice loss and surface mass balance the remainder." This change in total mass balance (TMB) equates to 31.4 ± 1.6 mm (1.24 ± 0.06 in) contribution to sea level rise since 1979. Now 1.24 in may not seem like a lot, but we have to remember that this accounting does not account for contributions from ice loss from mountain glaciers or other freshwater contributions to sea level rise. It also does not account for thermal expansion of the oceans. Accountin...

A couple days ago, someone on social media shared with me one of their favorite crank theories about why the greenhouse effect isn't real using data from a couple planetary bodies. The person is not well-known, and who the person is doesn't really matter, so I'm not going to mention the name. I'm not so much interested in refuting this person here as I am in showing the thought processes that went into making the crank theory. It was a very good illustration of how crank theories come to be and how pseudoscience works. Here's a screenshot of the post: So this person (we'll call him/her "J") multiplied planetary outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) by the molar mass of the atmosphere (M) for Venus and Earth and came up with the same number. The thinking here is that because OLR · M came up with the identical value for two planets, the temperature of planets must depend on the molar mass of the atmosphere, not the greenhouse effect. Even before considering ...

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 th...

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: 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. 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.  Wielicki is cl...

In a video promoted by both Heartland and Climate Realism  that has been circulating on social media, YouTube and blogs for since at least 2022, two people (the top person is Stanley Goldenberg , and the bottom person is Dr. Richard Keen ) discuss an AMS Monthly Weather Review report describing the warming of the Arctic Ocean . After reading some language from the report describing large and dramatic climatic changes in recent years he says, "it goes on and on" and then quotes it saying, "Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coast cities uninhabitable." Then comes the big reveal - this report was written in 1922. So dire predictions stemming from climate alarmism have been around for over a century. Who knew? The short answer to that question is, apparently nobody in 1922. It turns out that these two people were not reading from an AMS Monthly Weather Review report. They were in fact reading from a Washington...

Frequently I see contrarians confuse local and global temperatures in such a way that they end up contradicting themselves. The contradictions goes like this - on the one hand they say global warming can't be a problem because a small amount of glo. warming is no different than the change in temperature over a small portion of the day, and nobody would notice this small change anyway. But then they also say that during the Little Ice Age, climate was so much worse than it is today, including wide spread famines, frozen rivers, puritans burning witches, etc. Given that the LIA was only a couple degrees colder than today, this directly contradicts their claims about the effects of a couple degrees of global warming. I'll document an example of this below.  On September 6 , Matthew Wielicki posted a claim on X that global warming isn't a problem because 2°C warming by 2100 is "about the temperature change from 8am to 10am in most major cities." He then showed a gra...