Wood Romances

A lot is being said about the fact that July 2026 eclipsed July 1936 as the warmest month on record for CONUS temperatures. Objections from contrarians are voluminous, but a post on X from Chris Martz seems to capture the gist of the objections I'm hearing. According to him, "That claim is misleading for two reasons:   This is due to minimum temperatures only, which skew the 'average.'   The real, measured thermometer data (area-weighted) don’t support this claim." Each of these objections are seriously uninformed and misleading, and it won't be hard to demonstrate why. After rebutting Martz's claims, though, I'll point out some ways that this record could be reported in misleading ways, and what I think might do a better job of showing what's happening in the US. Objection #1: The Record is Due to Minimum Temperatures Only This is objectively false. The record is for average temperature (Tavg), not minimum temperature (Tmin), and it should be pa...

Lucy Biggers appears to be the next up-and-coming influencer in the climate space. She presents herself as a former a climate activist suffered from extreme anxiety over climate, and so she advocated for policies and viewed other activists like Greta Thunberg as her hero. However, she says she was uninformed about the scientific evidence supporting her "doomer" anxiety. Then she read a couple books by Shellenberger and Koonin that caused her to stop being a climate activist, and now she is employed by the Free Press to share her newly found liberation from doomerism with the world. In reality she never stopped being a climate activist; she just changed her politics. Her appeal to her viewers appears to be that she (unlike many of her thought leaders) usually doesn't pretend to be an expert in science or policy. Instead, her approach appears to be that since she converted from doomerism to contrarianism, she has cured herself of her anxiety .[5] She was once filled with cl...

Chris Martz decided to make a point about extreme temperatures by posting a map with the hottest August temperatures ever recorded in each state of the US. Martz asks : Did you know that 33 U.S. states set their “all-time” August high temperature records before 1955?  Of those, eight Midwestern states set their August records in 1936 alone while seven set theirs in 1918. Here's the map he shared. Chris Martz's Map on X This I suppose would be interesting if we were considering when outliers appear to clump up. There's probably something meaningful in the fact that 8 states had their warmest August record temperature in 1936 and 7 had their warmest August record in 1918. We all know about the Dust Bowl, during which human activity was responsible for causing extremely high daily maximum temperatures (Tmax) during the summer months, especially in the Midwest. GHG-induced warming causes Tmax to increase but it causes Tmin to warm even more rapidly. Human activity made the Dust...

Chris Martz became somewhat of a celebrity in contrarian circles while he was still in college. He generated a fairly large following on social media despite lacking any expertise in climate. His following was large enough that when he graduated from college with a BS in meteorology, he was hired by CFACT to continue being an influencer for their political agenda. Martz's job appears to be just to rehash the same old talking points used by other contrarians that have been debunked for decades, but he makes his own graphs and charts, so they look more up-to-date. Zeke Hausfather has a wonderful take down of one of Martz's most shared graphs here. Recently, Martz decided to compile  ten questions he has for "climate alarmists," by which he apparently means people who try to be informed in climate science. The questions appear to be designed to stump the people he thinks of as alarmists, but they reveal more about Martz than they do about those who are trying to inform...