Wood Romances

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...

In a previous post , I considered the rise of pseudo-skepticism in much of current contrarian movements. At the heart of pseudo-skepticism is using what is demonstrably wrong as justification for the rejection of known evidence and well-established science; in order to explain the fact that virtually all the evidence disagrees with you, you need a conspiracy to explain the contradictory evidence away. So "flat earthers" say that because "you can see too far" and "water seeks its level" the earth must be flat, and physics and geology and maps and common sense are all wrong. That means NASA must be doctoring photographs of the earth, air traffic is faked, and nobody has ever been to Antarctica. Most people are "sheeple" who are simply not skeptical enough to see through all the lies and evidence and data and common sense to know that everyone in authority is lying to us. This kind of thinking can only be sustained with a well-developed confirmatio...

The image below is a fake image. It's reported to be an image of a rainbow that was posted on the David Attenborough Club  (apparently maintained by Hasan Jasim) and attributed to Lloyd Ferraro . According to at least one source, Lloyd Ferraro is a pilot who took this image at 30,000 ft while flying a plane. "According to Ferraro, he was flying over the Pacific Ocean when he spotted the rainbow and decided to capture the moment on camera. The resulting photograph has since gone viral, captivating people around the world with its beauty and rarity." However, there is no doubt that the rainbow in this image is photoshopped or (perhaps more likely) AI-generated .  There are at least three ways we know this is the case. First, we see rainbows when looking in the direction of our shadow. It's not possible to see a rainbow when the sun is in front of you, as is basically the case in this image. Second, the primary red ring of a rainbow forms at a 42° angle, relative to yo...

JWST Image from NASA Like many, I've been dazzled by the early images of the the James Web Space Telescope (JWST), and I've loved seeing not only the images but the memes poking fun at how popular these images have become. I've found these images beautiful, inspiring and even mind blowing. The scientists who are examining these images have had similar reactions, and from what I can tell, early images and reports from the JWST may have far reaching implications for how scientists understand the universe, especially how the earliest galaxies formed. But on August 11, 2022, Eric Lerner wrote an opinion piece for iai news suggesting that these images from the JWST basically prove that the Big Bang didn't happen. When someone shared this on Facebook, I was very interested in this, since as I understand it, this would be a major paradigm shift in our understanding of the universe as expanding. I read the article to be told that many of the surprising images from the JWST we...

Andy May recently wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Examiner[1] that I think warrants a rebuttal. If you haven't heard of him, Mr. May is a petroleum geologist who somewhat inflates his credentials when sharing his opinions to obscure his conflict of interest with climate science. He claims that he is a "petrophysicist" (he's a petroleum geologist with a BS in Geology), a "paleoclimate expert" (which he demonstrably isn't, see below), and a member of the CO2 Coalition (which he is). But he's popular in the contrarian blogosphere, so I think there are some things we can learn from interacting with his claims here that can yield some helpful insights into climate science and the scientific method. In this opinion piece, Andy May is claiming that Karl Popper's philosophy of science should cause us to see that climate change is unfalsifiable and therefore pseudoscience. Well, I think that's what he's trying to say but he kind of blunde...