Wood Romances

There is a table floating around X and other social media outlets being used to claim that even the IPCC acknowledges that most extreme weather events are not increasing in frequency or severity. This claim comes from a misreading of Table 12.12 in the AR6 report from the IPCC. The line of reasoning comes almost entirely from this chart, and in the past, I've responded to several people making these claims by quoting from the text of AR6 to clarify what it says about some of these climate impact drivers (CIDs). But Tim Osborn put together a series of posts on X that does a better job of explaining how badly these people are misreading the chart. Following extended arguments on X is sometimes difficult, especially for those who (like me) don't pay to be able to make longer posts. So I thought it would be helpful to reproduce his argument here in a manner that is more easy to digest without the need to scroll through several posts and hope you're keeping them in order. I wan...

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...

If you participate in debates on climate science, how often have you been told that Al Gore predicted that the North polar ice cap would be gone by 2013? How often have you been given quotes from Edenhofer "proving" that AGW is a political hoax from a socialist agenda to redistribute global wealth? These kinds of claims are everywhere in these debates, but frequently when we investigate these seemingly outlandish quotes, they turn out to be fabrications - contortions of what was actually said. In other words, they appear to be blatant dishonesty and personal attacks on the part of people who generate the fake quotes.  To be clear, not everyone using these fake/contorted quotes know that they are fake or contorted. People frequently share and promote things without checking on their accuracy, so I thought I'd collect a few of the more prominent fake quotes here. I may add to this as time goes by, but I'll begin with these four that I think are both extremely common and...

Just recently I saw a video by John Robson from what he calls a "Climate Discussion Nexus." I've seen several of his videos before, and for the most part they simply put a nice-looking polish on old, debunked contrarian talking points so that you can see them with a higher production value than what you might see in a Tony Heller video. I've largely ignored most of these; John Robson is a historian, and it's pretty clear that he doesn't understand the evidence he's trying to refute. But in this particular video Robson's credentials as a historian could have served him well, if he had chosen to use his expertise to uncover the facts involved. The "Hockey Stick" as it Appeared in IPCC TAR In this video , John Robson attempts to describe the dissention between Michael Mann and his colleagues as they were preparing chapter 2 of the IPCC TAR. This chapter included the "hockey stick" graph with data from MBH99, Briffa 2000, Jones 1998, a...