Wood Romances

A couple papers were published this year about the recent "pause" in the decrease in September sea ice extent (SIE). One paper, Stern 2025[1] shows that the trend in Sept. SIE has been indistinguishable from 0 since about 2007.  From Stern 2025 Likewise, England et al 2025[2] has found that 20-year trends have increased to the point where there is no longer a statistically significant downward trend for 2005-2024. England et al 2025 The publication of these two studies, plus coverage of at least the latter in the Guardian , has caused quite a stir among contrarians on social media, who are claiming this is evidence that AGW isn't really a problem after all, and perhaps natural variability is what's driving recent changes in sea ice extent and temperature. However, that's not the way the authors of these studies are saying. Instead, the authors see the long-term downward trend in sea ice as being very real and caused by human activity, but they are also saying that...

A new (currently not paywalled) Nature paper[1] was published this week with some really interesting findings. The authors examined potential biases in sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and found evidence of a cooling bias affecting SSTs between roughly 1900 and 1930 that, if corrected, would warm SSTS during that time frame and also coincidentally make the instrumental record conform more closely with model simulations for the early 20th century. Since this study did not discover a significant bias between 1850-1900, these corrections would not have a significant impact on the amount of global warming above the 1850-1900 mean, but it would have a significant impact on our understanding of multi-decadal variability in temperatures in the instrumental record. However, some on X have taken this to mean that scientists have overestimated the amount of global warming the earth has experienced. Ryan Maue called this a "bombshell climate paper" and found it disconcerting that it wa...