Wood Romances

Did you know that there have been 50 failed doomsday predictions since the 1960s? Yea, neither did I, but that's what an opinion piece at AEI from 2019 claims. The article compiles its list from several sources, including 27 from Tony Heller. A Breitbart article upped that to 41. Then Perry added 9 more from Heller to get it up to 50. When his list had 41 predictions, Perry wrote, "For more than 50 years Climate Alarmists in the scientific community and environmental movement have not gotten even one prediction correct, but they do have a perfect record of getting 41 predictions wrong. In other words, on at least 41 occasions, these so-called experts have predicted some terrible environmental catastrophe was imminent... and it never happened. And not once — not even once!" The logic of this is bafflingly stupid, even if we accept his opinions on these predictions at face value. If there are 41 (updated to 50) failed predictions on this list, that doesn't indicate a ...

If you follow climate discussions on X, you're bound to see John Shewchuk and/or Tony Heller show graphs that reportedly show that NOAA is tampering with temperature data to fabricate global warming with spurious warming trends. I've gone over many of the reasons why this is nonsense before in posts about bias correction and so-called  ghost stations . I think it's good to show what's actually going on with the graphs they present as "proof" of data manipulation, though. I think it can be easily demonstrated here that it's actually Shewchuk and Heller that are tampering with data. Shewchuk (Top) and Correct (Below) Above are two graphs. The top graph shows what John Shewchuk claims shows that NOAA is manipulating data. It shows USHCN "raw" and "altered" Tmax data for 1900 to 2023. The bottom graph above is the correct plot of NOAA's published data from the current and correct dataset ( nClimDiv ) with a 5-year running mean to m...

Recently I've seen people posting the following graph from Tony Heller, which is intended to show a cooling trend in temperatures following the 1940s and suggest that the "start of the satellite record" begins when temperatures are at their low point. Heller's graph is unsourced except for being called "Briffa's Reconstruction." This graph has shown up on Twitter, and so far I haven't seen any one identify the source of this data or even what the data represents. However, I was able to determine that up through 1960, the data is identical to Briffa 2001[1], and the data is on an Excel spreadsheet on an FTP site maintained by NOAA for plate 3 of Briffa's paper. The same site also has regional data that includes years following 1960 (plate 2 in Briffa's paper), but Briffa is clear that the post-1960 data does not have a clear temperature signal. Briffa writes, "The period after 1960 was not used to avoid bias in the regression coefficients...