Wood Romances

In November 2009, someone likely stole[1] and publicly released over 1,000 emails from Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. Following this, people combed through all these emails  looking for evidence of frauds and coverups on the part of climate scientists. They found very little damaging information, but not everything they found was was good. There were, as best I can tell, four categories of content that were discovered: The normal kinds of communication you'd expect to find in correspondence between scientists Words and phrases that were twisted out of context and redefined to support an imagined conspiracy that had been imposed on the emails. Evidence of mean-spirited attacks on contrarian scientists and heavy-handed tactics intended to punish journals that published contrarian studies.  A single email describing the process of creating a graph for a WMO statement that used the phrase "hide the decline."  Here I plan to tackle the "hid...

One of the enduring points of debate on social media has to do with claims that NASA and NOAA (and for that matter, pretty much the entirety of climate science) is fabricating the warming we've been experiencing since the 20th century. The "proof" of this sometimes comes from comparing old graphs of global temperatures with newer graphs. The difference between them is thought to be proof that NASA, NOAA (and the rest of climate science) is lying. Tony Heller is perhaps the most popular purveyor of this kind of conspiratorial thinking, and this week, he posted a couple videos where he recycles the same kind of stuff he's been saying for over a decade. His main conspiratorial argument in these comes from a graph from 1974. There are a couple versions of it that can be found online; one is from Newsweek from April 28, 1975. The source for this is said to be the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The description of this graph in the main body of the article says, ...