Wood Romances

If you follow popular discussions about AGW, you'll likely see many claims that climate scientists have been making terrible predictions and climate models invariably run too hot compared to observations. If you investigate these, almost all of so-called "predictions" of climate scientists turn out to be some combination of misinformed assessments by media personalities, reporters and politicians or claims by scientists that have been misread by contrarians. And while it's true that some climate scientists have said some things that have not panned out, this is clearly the exception, not the rule. In fact, overall, climate scientists have been slightly conservative with their predictions, and climate model have performed quite well.[1] In fact, Zeke Hausfather has done a pretty good job of tracking how model predictions compare to observations, and overall, they've done quite well. So given all the rancor from contrarians about the predictions of climate scientist...

Recently I came across a document reportedly written by William Happer and Richard Lindzen (HL) entitled Comment and Declaration on the SEC’s Proposed Rule “The Enhancement and Standardization of Climate-Related Disclosures for Investors,” File No. S7-10-22, 87 Fed. Reg. 21334 (April 11,2022).[1] As I read through the science-related material in the document, it became quickly apparent to me that his document is utter garbage. It's so bad, I wonder to what extent either of them actually wrote it. Rather than go through the document section by section, I want to just analyze the section on climate sensitivity. What we'll see here is that the paper is inconsistent with itself, it contradicts the other published works of the authors, and of course, it's demonstrably false. Internal Inconsistencies The section I'd like to discuss primarily is section II.M, with the brief title, "The Logarithmic Forcing from CO2 Means that Its Contributions to Global Warming is Heavil...

In December 2020, the CO2 Coalition published a document authored by Richard Lindzen and John Christy entitled, The Global Mean Temperature Anomaly Record: How it works and why it is misleading . It should be acknowledged that this document is a political and partisan document. It is not written to advance our understanding of the GMST anomaly record. It's written to affect policy. Caleb Stewart Rossiter, Executive Director of CO2 Coalition, makes this nearly explicit. After asserting that academic publishing has been taken over by a "'climate crisis' and an 'easy to change sources' narrative, he says, "this paper, which in earlier days would have, as a matter of course, been published by a scholarly journal, now finds a home with our advocacy group." This is not an academic paper (and this by itself is not a criticism of the paper), and it would never be published in a scholarly journal, since the intended audience is general voters, not scholars. It...