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...

The CO2 Coalition 's Fact #5 is titled, "CO2 emissions began accelerating in the mid-20th century." This one doesn't even get its title superficially correct. The explanation that goes with this is rather short, so I'll share it all. "Global man-made CO2 emissions began accelerating in the post-World War II economic boom and continue increasing today. If CO2 is the primary factor driving a warming planet, we should see indications of an acceleration of warming beginning in that period and continuing today." The graph associated with this "fact" is below. There are at least two obvious problems with this. First, you can detect acceleration in emissions by an upward curve - that indicates that emission rates are increasing. Clearly this curve is present in the late 19th century, then flattens early 20th century and increases again in the 1930s or so. But second, and more importantly, the CO2 Coalition  did not show any emissions from land use c...

The IPCC (and others) have observed that there has been a near linear increase in GMST with cumulative anthropogenic carbon emissions. "In the literature, units of °C per 1000 PgC (petagrams of carbon) are used, and the AR6 reports the TCRE likely range as 1.0°C to 2.3°C per 1000 PgC in the underlying report, with a best estimate of 1.65°C."[1] To be clear, 1000 PgC = 1000 GtC = 1 TtC.  I decided to see if that has been observed in the empirical data. I took values from the 2021 global carbon budget [2] and HadCRUT5 set to a 1850-1900 baseline and plotted the relationship. The R^2 was 0.88, and the slope of the best fit line was 1.847 ± 0.104°C/TtC (2σ). So the 95% likely range is between 1.74 to 1.95 C/TtC from 1850-2021. If I start after we reach 200 GtC in 1951, the best fit line is 2.153 ± 0.176°C/TtC (2σ) and the R^2 increases to 0.90, but I think it's best to be conservative here. What this suggests to me is that the IPCC may again be a bit conservative their best e...

Little Big Econ State Forest One objection I frequently hear to climate science is that the human contribution to the increase in CO2 concentrations is small, so reducing our carbon emissions will have little to no effect on global temperatures. This claim is completely misguided, and calculations using estimates of human carbon emissions can settle this pretty quickly. The following calculations are through 2018, with CO2 levels at 410 ppm, about 130 ppm higher than pre-industrial 280 pm. We can provide a rough estimate of how much of the 410 ppm is human by looking at empirical data regarding anthropogenic CO2 emissions  and a couple conversion factors:[1] 3.67GtC = 1 GtCO2  1 ppm CO2 = 7.81 GtCO2. According to the global carbon budget through 2018, humans have emitted 441 GtC through fossil fuel use and 203 GtC through land use, for a total of 604 GtC anthropogenic emissions.[2] That translates to 2217 Gt CO2 emissions. About 50% of that amount stays in the atmosphere. So: ...