Wood Romances

Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr has published two posts recently having to do with extreme weather and the IPCC. In the first post , he expresses frustration over an apparently inevitable retraction of a paper on extreme weather. The paper is Alimonti et al 2022 (A22) published in The European Physical Journal Plus (EPJP)[1]. I became aware of this paper about a year ago; it was not a good paper and was not particularly influential; it received almost no attention except for a brief period of time when the usual blogs promoted it, and then after SkyNews in Australia publicized this study as demonstrating there is no climate emergency. In the second post , Pielke summarized what he believes the IPCC's position is on extreme weather, and here he refers again to this previous paper. He declares that he believes that popular and scientific treatments of extreme weather have become far mor extreme than the position taken by the IPCC. According to him, "with the exception perhaps of only extr...

Heatwaves in the Continental US (1880-2020) The Dust Bowl It's commonly believed that the heatwaves that hit the US in the 1930s were the worst in American History, at least since Europeans began colonizing the territory. And certainly they were terrible. The causes were due to a combination of natural phenomena as well as human activity. In particular, the Homestead Act of 1862 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 brought many families into the Great Plains believing that agriculture would allow them to make a life for themselves. Many of these were inexperienced farmers, so they brought with them poor farming practices. They over-plowed and replaced the deep rooted grasses of the Great Plains with wheat. When those crops began to fail with the onset of drought in 1931, they exposed bare soil, and the Dust Bowl began and lasted until normal rains returned in 1939.[1] To make matters worse, the radiative forcing from dust loading in the atmosphere increased drought intensity and ...