Wood Romances

CO2 Coalition 's " fact #1 " is an excellent example of I consider contrarian alarmism. The claim here is essentially that the overall trend over the last 140-million years shows that we are on a long-term trend towards a climate apocalypse until we were saved by carbon emissions from the fossil fuel industry. In fact, while contrarians frequently call those who accurately present the scientific evidence as "alarmist," this so-called "fact" actually qualifies as an alarmist claim. In the graph above, the CO2 Coalition claims that CO2 levels have been steadily decreasing for 140 million years, such that "CO2 levels fell precipitously & steadily to within about 30 ppm of the 150 ppm 'line of death' below which plants can’t survive. Both the relatively short-term data from ice cores and much longer-term data going back 140 million years... show an alarming downward trend toward CO2 starvation." The data they use comes from Berner 20...

For over 20 years, geologists have attempted to model CO2 concentrations across the geologic past. Geologists currently have sufficient proxy evidence to reconstruct CO2 concentrations for significant parts of the last 420 million years, but models can be useful to infer concentrations when proxy evidence is weaker or lacks sufficient resolution. While "box" models like COSPE or GEOCARBSULF  confirm broad correlations between CO2 and global temperatures , the correlation may be improved if the models take better account of tectonic processes affecting CO2 concentrations. Evaluation of Proxies for CO2 and Temperatures In a study published three years ago, Mills et al 2019 evaluated the performance of CO2 proxies as well as COPSE and GEOCARBSULF "box" models for CO2. The latter model is the most recent update to the GEOCARB model that is frequently misused in contrarian graphs of CO2 and temperature - GEOCARBIII was published in Berner 2001 and is often plotted wit...