Wood Romances

  Now that 2023 is in the books, it's pretty clear that all global temperature datasets will show 2023 to be the warmest year on record by a significant margin. And since 21st century has exceeded the warmest temperatures of the Holocene (the current interglacial), it's also fair to say that 2023 has likely been the warmest year at least since the last interglacial ended 125K years ago. I'm going to wait until all the major datasets are updated to 2023 before saying more about 2023. But already the dishonesty from contrarians is coming out to spin 2023 into something other than what it actually was. Patrick Moore's Dishonesty Patrick Moore posted a tweet with the above graph claiming that what I summarized about 2023 above is an "outright lie." His words: The claim is being made that “2023 was the hottest year in 125,000 years”. This is an outright lie. The Holocene Climatic Optimum from about 10,000-5,000 years ago, when the Sahara was green, was warmer than...

Example 1: CO2 and Temperature I frequently hear that climate scientists only consider the last 150 years of history (since the beginning of the instrumental record), and if we paid better attention to geology, we would realize one or more of several things: 1) CO2 doesn't correlate with temperature or doesn't affect global temperatures, 2) climate changes are normal, so there's no danger with current warming, 3) most of the earth's history has been warmer than today, so a bit of warming would be good or 4) CO2 levels have been declining to dangerous levels for millions of years, and thankfully we burned fossil fuels to save the planet from CO2 starvation. None of these claims are true, and none have any basis in geologic evidence. I have several posts here showing the correlation between CO2 and temperature and/or glaciation. So where do people get this idea? One of the chief sources of misinformation is crappy graphs like the one above (Example 1). Early Examples Exa...