Wood Romances

A paper was published in 2013[1] that reconstructed intermediate water temperatures (IWT) for an area of Indonesian waters around the Makassar Straight and the Flores Sea. The study includes two reconstructions, one at 500 m depth and another at 600 m to 900 m depth in an effort to show how Pacific IWT ha sbeen affected by high latitude source waters. The reconstruction somewhat predictably found that during the HTM, average IWT in this area were warmer than in 1970. Given the misuse of this paper by contrarians (see below), I think it best to quote directly from the paper so you can see precisely what this paper is actually about. The early Holocene warmth and subsequent IWT cooling in Indonesia is likely related to temperature variability in the higher-latitude source waters. To assess the mechanisms that caused these hydrographic variations, we estimate down-core salinities and densities for the 500- and 600- to 650-m depths. A temperature-salinity-density plot suggests that althoug...

Just recently an organization called Clintel (a combination of Climate and Intelligence) published a document called The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC: An Analysis of AR6.  Virtually none of this document has any substantial analysis of AR6. It basically regurgitates talking points that have been debunked for decades. The authors apparently compiled them into a single document with superficial references to AR6.  I'd like to highlight what I consider the one of the most humorously dishonest parts of the document. I have a page with an outline of Clintel's document and links to rebuttals of their arguments here . Clintel's Critique of the Instrumental Record In a chapter entitled "No confidence that the present is warmer than the Middle Holocene," Clintel wants to make the claim that we don't have enough certainty regarding the proxy evidence and the instrumental record to know if current temperatures are warm with respect to the Holocene. In an attempt to s...

Central Greenland Temperature Reconstruction In 2000, R. B. Alley published the results of a proxy analysis of a single ice core in Central Greenland as part of the GISP2 project.[1] The resulting time series reconstructs local temperature fluctuations over the last 50,000 years. The graph above includes only the last 15,000 years; you may see versions of this graph showing the last 10,000 or 12,000 years. The proxy reconstructs temperatures at the Greenland Summit (the GISP2 project) using the ratio of two different oxygen isotopes: 18O and the more abundant 16O. Lower the 18O/16O ratio indicates lowers temperatures, since as temperatures decrease, a more 18O precipitates out at lower latitudes, making the 18O/16O ratio smaller over Greenland. Alley's time series ends 95 years BP, or 95 years before 1950, so the last data point in this analysis is 1855. The IPCC and other organizations are interested in modern warming frequently consider modern warming as measured against the 1850...

Andy May recently wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Examiner[1] that I think warrants a rebuttal. If you haven't heard of him, Mr. May is a petroleum geologist who somewhat inflates his credentials when sharing his opinions to obscure his conflict of interest with climate science. He claims that he is a "petrophysicist" (he's a petroleum geologist with a BS in Geology), a "paleoclimate expert" (which he demonstrably isn't, see below), and a member of the CO2 Coalition (which he is). But he's popular in the contrarian blogosphere, so I think there are some things we can learn from interacting with his claims here that can yield some helpful insights into climate science and the scientific method. In this opinion piece, Andy May is claiming that Karl Popper's philosophy of science should cause us to see that climate change is unfalsifiable and therefore pseudoscience. Well, I think that's what he's trying to say but he kind of blunde...