Wood Romances

A couple days ago I saw the following post on X from Dr. Matthew Wielicki , who has decided to double down on some terrible math that I (and many others) corrected over a year ago (see here  for his terrible math and rebuttal). Dr. Wielicki Attempts math The errors in this post are numerous. Let's summarize them: It's wrong to calculate the amount of warming by subtracting one annual value from another. Wielicki should calculate the rates of warming by calculating proper trends. His approach completely ignores the natural variability that he says matters in this post. The trends for the two time frames are below. The difference between the two is statistically significant. The central trend for 1915-1936 is ~2.7x more rapid than 2005-2025 (not 3.6x), though the 2σ CIs are large.      1915 - 1936: 0.79 ± 0.5°C/decade (2σ) or 1.73°C warming over 22 years.      2005 - 2026: 0.29 ± 0.4°C/decade (2σ) or 0.64°C warming over 22 years.  Wielicki is cl...

Frequently I see contrarians confuse local and global temperatures in such a way that they end up contradicting themselves. The contradictions goes like this - on the one hand they say global warming can't be a problem because a small amount of glo. warming is no different than the change in temperature over a small portion of the day, and nobody would notice this small change anyway. But then they also say that during the Little Ice Age, climate was so much worse than it is today, including wide spread famines, frozen rivers, puritans burning witches, etc. Given that the LIA was only a couple degrees colder than today, this directly contradicts their claims about the effects of a couple degrees of global warming. I'll document an example of this below.  On September 6 , Matthew Wielicki posted a claim on X that global warming isn't a problem because 2°C warming by 2100 is "about the temperature change from 8am to 10am in most major cities." He then showed a gra...

Back in January 2025 , I mentioned that since 2025 was expected to trend towards La Niña conditions we would be less likely to see another record-breaking year like we had in 2023 and 2024. And then I said contrarians would likely pivot back to the rhetoric they used following the 1998 and 2016 El Niño events: And since La Niña conditions are expected to develop in 2025, it's doubtful that 2025 will be another record-breaking year, so we should expect contrarians to pivot again back to the same kinds of fake arguments they used after 1998 and 2016. They'll start counting the months for which we've seen no warming while ignoring the fact that we should expect La Niña years to fall below the overall trendline and El Niño to land above it. I don't think anyone following climate discussions on social media would be surprised that this prediction is already showing itself to be accurate, and I'm sure there are many others that made similar predictions. But now on social...

Today I came across a post on X from Dr. Matthew Wielicki in which he claims that warming from 1916 - 1942 was the same amount as from 1998 - 2024. Both time periods show +0.6°C warming. Since CO2 was lower and "more stable," Wielicki claims that "This one chart delivers a devastating blow to the core climate narrative, that recent warming is both unprecedented and primarily caused by human CO₂ emissions." Here's the chart he shared. There are times when I'm simply amazed at the level of stupidity coming from contrarian influencers, especially among those that certainly know better. His own bio on X says, "Dr. Matthew Wielicki stands as a beacon of rational thought. With a Ph.D. in earth science from UCLA and as a professor-in-exile, he bravely challenges the norms that many in the scientific community only whisper about." So Wielicki is claiming to have the expertise to offer rational criticism of the norms of within climate science. How did he ...