Wood Romances

Stossel's second video about climate myths has been published, continuing the shoddy journalism from Stossel and fake research from Lueken. Like my last post , I'll first show the flaws in their rhetorical strategy and then look at the individual myths. I'll then provide a bibliography of the research on each of these subjects so you can check up on me and see for yourself that the actual research does not support Stossel's claims. Rhetorical Strategy The same tactics of taking soundbites out of context continues here. In fact, Stossel reuses the "We don't have decades; we hardly have years" clip in this video. He also shows a soundbite from news story reporting that extreme drought conditions exist in the northeastern US, but he doesn't show that the story attributes that to climate change (as his "myth" 5 claims). And he's still enlisting the help of Linnea Lueken to give scientific credibility to his shoddy journalism. But he adds an ...

CO2 Coalition 's " Fact #12 " asserts that global sea levels rose before CO2 levels started to increase. They say, "The evidence shows that the global warming causing the rise in sea levels and the retreat of the glaciers began long before any significant man-made CO2 increases could have influenced either. ... That glacial 'tipping point' occurred around 1800, with full-on retreat by 1850. Thus began more than 150 years of worldwide glacial retreat and sea-level rise that continues at about the same rate today as 150 years ago." They cite Jevrejeva et al 2014[1] in support of this, and they produced their own version of a graph supposedly taken from that paper, complete with a picture of a rock hammer. Why not? So of course I tracked own Jevrejeva et al 2014 to see if their claims are backed up by the paper they chose to use to support them. Here's the graph from the paper below. As you can see, the paper goes back to 1700, and the 1-sigma confidenc...

Paleoclimate studies offer some very useful information to help scientists understand where our climate is headed given our current concentrations of greenhouse gases. As I have shared in previous posts, the earth has warmed by 1.2°C above the 1850-1900 mean, with about 2°C total warming built into current CO2 levels, given an energy imbalance exceeding 0.8 W/m^2 and ECS of ~3°C for doubling CO2. However, this only considers rapid feedbacks operating on time scales of decades or so. Long term, over time scales of thousands of years, the Earth's climate system is sensitive enough to these forcings to cause drastic changes to the climate system. Earth System Sensitivity (ESS) is frequently estimated to be about 1.5xECS, so 2°C warming on time scales of decades will be amplified to 3°C warming on time scales of thousands of years.  The difference between the last glacial maximum (LGM) and the Holocene Thermal Maximum (HTM) is only ~4-6°C, but that difference in global average temperat...

Sea Level Rise Since 1900 Humans have been very concerned with sea levels for centuries, since understanding tides and sea levels has been important for maritime travel, fishing, and many other aspects of coastal living, including recreation. We have built tide gauges to monitor sea levels, giving us a long-term record of sea levels along our coasts that can now be used for measuring sea level rise (SLR) in response to climate change. As scientists have become more interested in paleo climates, they have also developed reliable means of estimating sea levels going back thousands of years. Both of these methods, proxies and tide gauges, are generally limited to estimating sea levels along our coastlines, but in early 1990s, scientists developed a means to use satellites to estimate sea levels, and this approach for the first time allowed scientists to estimate global mean sea level (GMSL) from most of the surface of the oceans, rather than just our coastlines. Each of these lines of evi...