Wood Romances

Lucy Biggers appears to be the next up-and-coming influencer in the climate space. She presents herself as a former a climate activist suffered from extreme anxiety over climate, and so she advocated for policies and viewed other activists like Greta Thunberg as her hero. However, she says she was uninformed about the scientific evidence supporting her "doomer" anxiety. Then she read a couple books by Shellenberger and Koonin that caused her to stop being a climate activist, and now she is employed by the Free Press to share her newly found liberation from doomerism with the world. In reality she never stopped being a climate activist; she just changed her politics. Her appeal to her viewers appears to be that she (unlike many of her thought leaders) usually doesn't pretend to be an expert in science or policy. Instead, her approach appears to be that since she converted from doomerism to contrarianism, she has cured herself of her anxiety .[5] She was once filled with cl...

Chris Martz decided to make a point about extreme temperatures by posting a map with the hottest August temperatures ever recorded in each state of the US. Martz asks : Did you know that 33 U.S. states set their “all-time” August high temperature records before 1955?  Of those, eight Midwestern states set their August records in 1936 alone while seven set theirs in 1918. Here's the map he shared. Chris Martz's Map on X This I suppose would be interesting if we were considering when outliers appear to clump up. There's probably something meaningful in the fact that 8 states had their warmest August record temperature in 1936 and 7 had their warmest August record in 1918. We all know about the Dust Bowl, during which human activity was responsible for causing extremely high daily maximum temperatures (Tmax) during the summer months, especially in the Midwest. GHG-induced warming causes Tmax to increase but it causes Tmin to warm even more rapidly. Human activity made the Dust...

Chris Martz became somewhat of a celebrity in contrarian circles while he was still in college. He generated a fairly large following on social media despite lacking any expertise in climate. His following was large enough that when he graduated from college with a BS in meteorology, he was hired by CFACT to continue being an influencer for their political agenda. Martz's job appears to be just to rehash the same old talking points used by other contrarians that have been debunked for decades, but he makes his own graphs and charts, so they look more up-to-date. Zeke Hausfather has a wonderful take down of one of Martz's most shared graphs here. Recently, Martz decided to compile  ten questions he has for "climate alarmists," by which he apparently means people who try to be informed in climate science. The questions appear to be designed to stump the people he thinks of as alarmists, but they reveal more about Martz than they do about those who are trying to inform...