Wood Romances

I saw a s hort presentation  by R.B. Alley a while back that did a marvelous job of explaining why geologists have overwhelmingly concluded that greenhouse gases (and in particular CO2 ) are the primary drivers of climate changes on geologic time scales. This presentation was given prior to the publication of Judd et al 2024 ,[1] so I thought it might be fun to show how his argument would be enhanced even more with the more recent data we now have about Phanerozoic temperature and CO2. But let me set the stage. GMST is set by a balance between incoming absorb solar radiation (ASR) and outgoing longwave radiation (OLR). ASR is affected by changes in how much sunlight reaches the earth ( solar variability ), where and when sunlight reaches the earth ( orbital cycles ) and how much is reflected vs absorbed ( albedo ). Outside influences can also at least theoretically play a role in affecting process on earth ( galactic cosmic rays ) that could change how much incoming solar is a...

My last post  was a bit of a rant. I apologize for that (sort of), though I get bombarded with these obviously erroneous graphs, and I wanted to put down in one place all the problems I have with that family of contrarian graphs. But it occurred to me today that it would be more helpful (and less of a rant) if I demonstrate how the data used in those graphs would look different if the problems I described were fixed. So to do this, I went on an internet search and found a wonderful set of data from a paper I described in an earlier post , Royer 2004. It's a spreadsheet with the data from the GEOCARB III model (which originates in Berner 2001) and global temperatures corrected from Vezier.[1] This only goes back 520 million years, but I found the full Berner CO2 data on another site.[2] The CO2 data is reported in RCO2, which is the ratio of CO2 at a time in the past and preindustrial CO2 (280 ppm). So I converted these values to a change in radiative forcing (RF) from preindustrial...