Wood Romances

We hear a lot that climate models predict too much warming of global mean surface temperature (GMST), but just about every graph intended to back this up contains flaws or misrepresentations, either by sloppy comparisons of models vs observations or using a subset of models that are heavily influenced by those with high sensitivities. I think it's valuable to show how well models form, since the sensitivities of those that perform the best are likely to be good indicators of the sensitivity of the real climate system. So I thought I'd toss my hat in the ring by comparing Hansen's 1988 climate model with observations. This has been done before, most notably by Zeke Hausfather in 2019, but it's been 6 years since then, and I thought it might be good to update it. To do this, I downloaded Hansen's data for GHG forcings and temperatures for his Scenarios A, B and C (available here and here ), and I plotted these scenarios with the major GMST datasets against their 1958...

I thought it would be beneficial to produce an annotated bibliography of important scientific works in the field of climate science. Obviously I can't make this list exhaustive, but I'm planning to generate several bibliographies, mostly on specific topics in climate science that interest me, and I plan to periodically modify them as new papers are written (or as I discover papers written in the past). I thought it best to cover the early years of climate science as a historical survey. My first post will cover 164 years of  climate science from Fourier in 1824 to Hansen in 1988.

Despite the common misconception that estimates for equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) are only derived from model simulations (sometimes erroneously said to be model inputs), there are many ways to estimate ECS. Here on this blog, I've used the energy balance equation with empirical data, and despite varying levels of complexity in quantifying forcings, I keep coming up with a value for ECS of ~3.2°C for 2xCO2 . I consider these back-of-the-envelope calculations, fitting for a blogpost to show IPCC estimates are plausible and realistic, but not really for much else. All these types of equations cover a relatively short time period (~175 years) and can be significantly impacted by the uncertainties in the relevant forcings, most importantly aerosols. Some recent evidence suggests that scientists may be underestimating the cooling effect of aerosol pollution and thus underestimating ECS. In fact, Hansen published a paper recently suggesting that ECS could be as high as 4.8°C.[1] ...

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...