Wood Romances

It's hard sometimes to find ways to describe the range of views expressed by those participating in public discourse on climate change without sounding pejorative.  Public discourse is frequently corrupted by various forms of name calling; those who disagree with climate science are called "deniers" and those who agree with it are called "alarmists." Perhaps even more damaging to public discourse is the heavy reliance on simple bulverism : "you believe AGW is a problem because you're a socialist or communist looking to control people's lives and raise people's taxes," or, "You reject the evidence for AGW because you're a fascist shill serving fossil fuel interests." To avoid these pejoratives in this blog, I've used "proponent" to refer to those who accept the basic positions in climate science and "contrarian" to refer to those who reject those views. But if you read the scientific literature, the actu

Example 1: CO2 and Temperature I frequently hear that climate scientists only consider the last 150 years of history (since the beginning of the instrumental record), and if we paid better attention to geology, we would realize one or more of several things: 1) CO2 doesn't correlate with temperature or doesn't affect global temperatures, 2) climate changes are normal, so there's no danger with current warming, 3) most of the earth's history has been warmer than today, so a bit of warming would be good or 4) CO2 levels have been declining to dangerous levels for millions of years, and thankfully we burned fossil fuels to save the planet from CO2 starvation. None of these claims are true, and none have any basis in geologic evidence. I have several posts here showing the correlation between CO2 and temperature and/or glaciation. So where do people get this idea? One of the chief sources of misinformation is crappy graphs like the one above (Example 1). Early Examples Exa