Wood Romances

CO2 Coalition 's " Fact #13 " and  " Fact #16 " are essentially identical. Fact 13 claims that temperatures changed dramatically before human activity, and Fact 16 claims current warming isn't unprecedented. Both use the same graph. Fact 16 claims to be the first of three parts, but these parts aren't given sequentially. The other two of the three parts are " Fact #17 " and " Fact #26 ." These two "facts" are (like many others) lifted from Gregory Wrightstone's self-published book, which I've reviewed elsewhere. The text of this "Fact 16" is not identical to the book, but the content is basically the same, and some of it directly quotes the book. We're told that the current warming period is "very similar to nine other warming trends of the last 10,000 years. For more than 6,100 years (or 60%) of the current interglacial warm period, the temperature was warmer than it is today. Of the nine earlier...

In my first two posts in this series , I described the bad behavior of cherry-picking short-term trends and choosing the wrong scale to hide the incline of global temperatures. Here I want to consider the trick of using local (or regional) temperatures in place of global temperatures. As best I can tell, there are at least two reasons why people might want to do this. Some people want to say that global warming is good, the world is starved of CO2, and we need to add more CO2 to the atmosphere. Unsurprisingly, two of the most prominent proponents of this tactic are former geologists for the fossil fuel industry. They want to show that societies thrive when global temperatures are warmer. Others using this tactic seem to want to say that global temperatures don't correlate with CO2. And what better way to make that point than to use local temperatures instead of global temperatures? Prepare for some snarkiness.  Using Local Temperatures to Say Global Warming Is Good Imagine you ha...

Central Greenland Temperature Reconstruction In 2000, R. B. Alley published the results of a proxy analysis of a single ice core in Central Greenland as part of the GISP2 project.[1] The resulting time series reconstructs local temperature fluctuations over the last 50,000 years. The graph above includes only the last 15,000 years; you may see versions of this graph showing the last 10,000 or 12,000 years. The proxy reconstructs temperatures at the Greenland Summit (the GISP2 project) using the ratio of two different oxygen isotopes: 18O and the more abundant 16O. Lower the 18O/16O ratio indicates lowers temperatures, since as temperatures decrease, a more 18O precipitates out at lower latitudes, making the 18O/16O ratio smaller over Greenland. Alley's time series ends 95 years BP, or 95 years before 1950, so the last data point in this analysis is 1855. The IPCC and other organizations are interested in modern warming frequently consider modern warming as measured against the 1850...