Wood Romances

I've written a lot on the effect of urbanization and urban heat islands  (UHI) on GMST and CONUS  trends, and I don't want to duplicate those efforts here, but I think this section of the DOE report deserves its own post. The DOE report (authored by the Climate Working Group) has a section on "Urbanization influence on temperature trends" on pp. 20-21 (section 3.3) that engages in a bit of rhetorical slight of hand that I find dishonest. In particular, their treatment of UHI involves two studies authored or co-authored by members of the Climate Working Group (CWG), but the report misrepresented one and casually dismissed the other. The report misrepresented a study by Roy Spencer and casually dismissed a paper co-authored by Judith Curry, despite the fact that this study provided conclusive evidence against the position taken in the DOE report. I consider this particularly dishonest. Their treatment of UHI begins with: Historical temperature data over land has been ...

If you follow popular discussions about AGW, you'll likely see many claims that climate scientists have been making terrible predictions and climate models invariably run too hot compared to observations. If you investigate these, almost all of so-called "predictions" of climate scientists turn out to be some combination of misinformed assessments by media personalities, reporters and politicians or claims by scientists that have been misread by contrarians. And while it's true that some climate scientists have said some things that have not panned out, this is clearly the exception, not the rule. In fact, overall, climate scientists have been slightly conservative with their predictions, and climate model have performed quite well.[1] In fact, Zeke Hausfather has done a pretty good job of tracking how model predictions compare to observations, and overall, they've done quite well. So given all the rancor from contrarians about the predictions of climate scientist...