Wood Romances

A recent paper[1] published in the MDPI journal Climate by Frank Stefani provides a wonderful illustration of why we should never treat papers from MDPI journals as having any competent, let alone robust peer review. This paper argues that TCR = 1.1°C (0.6°C - 1.6°C) for doubling CO2. I'm not going to evaluate the entire paper here, since that would take too much time. The paper does make some counterfactual claims, like there's a "nearly perfect correlation of solar activity with temperatures over about 150 years." That's objectively false, but the correlation between CO2 forcings and GMST has an r^2 = 0.88. There's also some comical contrarian alarmism in this paper: "we fear that the huge Milankovitch drivers will—perhaps much too soon—massively interfere with the solar and anthropogenic factors that were considered in this paper." There's a lot we could say about this paper, but I want to focus here on some elementary math errors that would ...

Every once in a while a paper gets published in a low-to-no impact journal suggesting that the increase in CO2 concentrations was caused by the increase in global temperatures and not by human emissions. There are several blogs and unpublished manuscripts that make similar claims. Now for sure, since CO2 is less soluble in warmer water, increasing sea surface temperatures, so increasing temperature does cause an ocean-to-atmosphere CO2 flux. But can this explain why CO2 levels are increasing? Some say yes. The most recent paper [1] was published in a no-name MDPI journal called Sci, and Judith Curry promoted it on her blog .  Papers and arguments like this are obviously nonsense, but this paper is a little unique in that it includes the very evidence that proves its central thesis wrong. The following chart comes from the paper. It takes data from the IPCC AR6 accounting of the carbon budget, showing the ocean, land and human sources and sinks. From the numbers the authors included...

A paper was published recently in an MDPI journal Atmosphere [1] by Joachim Dengler and John Reid (DR) that aims to show that we can keep global temperatures from eclipsing the 1.5 C target "if we keep living our lives with the current CO2 emissions – and a 3%/decade efficiency improvement."[2] I saw this paper highlighted on Judith Curry's blog , so I figured it deserved some attention. The basic argument is that the amount of absorbed CO2 increases with CO2 concentration, such that at 475 ppm CO2 we will achieve net zero emissions - natural sinks will absorb 100% of our emissions and CO2 concentrations will stabilize if we improve our efficiency at 3% per decade. And if this occurs, GMST will stabilize at 1.4 C above preindustrial levels, keeping us below the 1.5 C thresholds from the Paris Agreement and IPCC targets. This is a really odd paper. DR begin by acknowledging that a big portion of understanding how our carbon emissions affects climate depends on what percent...