Wood Romances

Cloud Feedbacks are Likely Positive, from Ceppi et al 2026 In my last post I shared what I consider a pretty good "sniff test" for claims that sensitivity is so low that global warming from human fossil fuel emissions can't cause any significant global warming. I showed that low sensitivity claims require the existence of large external forcings that simply can't be found in nature. Today it occurred to me that there's another "sniff test" we can use when people claims that the sum of all climate feedbacks are very small or negative. Let's begin quantifying feedbacks - that is, energy that gets looped back into the system to either amplify or dampen a warming signal. Total feedbacks ( λt ) is the sum of all individual feedbacks which have been quantified in various studies. Here is an accounting of the dominant feedbacks in the climate system: Water Vapor (λwv): 1.80 W/m²/°C Lapse Rate (λlr): -0.50 W/m²/°C Surface Albedo (λsa): 0.35 W/m²/°C Clouds ...

GMST is now 1.4°C above the 1850-1900 Mean 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 t...

A few years ago, I responded to a political " comment " from the CO2 Coalition in which Happer, Lindzen (and potentially ghost writers) made a series of self-contradictory claims about climate sensitivity. Recently I became aware of another political tract in which they simplified their argument tremendously. They've also hidden almost all their math, making it more difficult to check up on what they say. However, there is plenty we can say about this that shows that they are still actively changing their opinions, and this always in the direction of distancing themselves from the best scientific evidence. Much of this tract depends on the following graph: The graph above is supposed to agree with another chart in the tract, and it mostly does, except that ΔT14 = 0.054°C above but is wrongly rounded up to 0.06°C. In the description of these calculations, this tract asks, " How much warming did CO2 cause when CO2 increased from 280 ppm in 1750 to the 420 ppm in the ...

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...