Wood Romances

Frequently I'm told that the increase in CO2 from fossil fuel emissions is good for the planet because, before the industrial revolution, CO2 levels were dangerously low. Gregory Wrightstone, for instance, claims that "before we began adding CO2 to the atmosphere, we weren’t sure that we wouldn’t cross that critical 150-ppm threshold during the next glacial period" when nearly all "terrestrial plant life cannot exist." According to him, "advanced plant life could not survive without at least 150 ppm" CO2. He calls this a "line of death." [1] I've even read people claiming that currently the atmosphere is "starved" of CO2. It's hard to know where this 150 ppm value originates; I haven't been been able to find it anywhere in the scientific literature, but I did read once that in greenhouses, daytime photosynthesis can lower CO2 concentrations to about 150 ppm. However, that does not justify any conclusion that plants canno...

Pages 2K Reconstruction of Global Temperatures Replicating MBH98/99 In a previous post , I wrote an initial review of Gregory Wrightstone's Book, Inconvenient Facts. We began to see that Mr. Wrightstone's book was pretty low on facts and high on convenience - that is, Wrightstone's claims would be very convenient for us if we believe him, since if there is no problem, we have no compelling reason to fix a non-existent problem. That post covered only the first two chapters of his book. Chapter 3 is supposed to contain more inconvenient facts about temperature, but what we get is a lot of misinformation about temperature based on 1) the rejection of scientific evidence about temperature and 2) the confusion of global temperatures with local temperatures, including 2a) Central England and 2b) the Greenland summit, and 3) the misuse of a terrible proxy reconstruction. Confusion About Proxies Mr. Wrightstone (somewhat) correctly observes that, if global (or Northern Hemisphere)...

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...

This is part 1 of a two part book review.  A few years ago, a man named Gregory Wrightstone appeared in several of the Facebook groups I participate in. He participated in debates with other members over issues related to climate change, frequently using graphs that he had made. It turns out he was working on a book, and as best I can tell, he was testing his content in debate groups to hear objections to his claims before self-publishing the book. That's a bit of speculation on my part, but I noticed that his book sometimes was changed from what he had posted in the discussion groups, and I like to think that he altered his arguments as a result of conversations with others. He self-published his book under the sufficiently political title, Inconvenient Facts: The Science Al Gore Doesn't Want You to Know .[1] The not-so-subtle implication here is that Al Gore misrepresented the facts and science of climate change and doesn't want you to be informed, but Mr. Wrightstone is...