Wood Romances

Today I came across a post on X from Dr. Matthew Wielicki in which he claims that warming from 1916 - 1942 was the same amount as from 1998 - 2024. Both time periods show +0.6°C warming. Since CO2 was lower and "more stable," Wielicki claims that "This one chart delivers a devastating blow to the core climate narrative, that recent warming is both unprecedented and primarily caused by human CO₂ emissions." Here's the chart he shared. There are times when I'm simply amazed at the level of stupidity coming from contrarian influencers, especially among those that certainly know better. His own bio on X says, "Dr. Matthew Wielicki stands as a beacon of rational thought. With a Ph.D. in earth science from UCLA and as a professor-in-exile, he bravely challenges the norms that many in the scientific community only whisper about." So Wielicki is claiming to have the expertise to offer rational criticism of the norms of within climate science. How did he ...

I've witnessed many debates about climate change recently in which debaters behave badly. In fairness to at least some of these debaters, many don't realize they're behaving badly. They received information they trust on blogs and YouTube videos, and they use this information in a discussions with others. But these bad tactics are still bad behavior even if we don't know it. So I thought it would be helpful to write a series on the dishonest tactics I see used in debate contexts that reflect bad behavior (either by the debater or his/her source). I'll begin with a tactic I've seen quite commonly recently - cherry picking short-term trends.  This tactic is frequently used by debaters attempting to show that global warming has "paused" or that Arctic sea ice is no longer decreasing. In the interest of brevity, I'll focus on the claim that there has been a "pause" in global warming. As we'll see, this is a  faux pause claim (I'll be...

In a recent post by Willis Eschenbach[1] at the Watts Up With That blog, we are again being told that there has been a recent decline in global temperatures. The argument was that a breakpoint analysis of multiple datasets reveals a break around 2015, and trends following that breakpoint are either flat or cooling. Yet it's completely unsurprising that such a breakpoint was found in 2015, since that was the beginning of a very large El Nino, and we haven't had a significant El Nino since. Instead, La Nina conditions have prevailed. Yet, the following is indisputable from the GMST data we have: 1. El Nino years are warming at about the same rate as La Nina years (both are warming at 0.2 C/decade since 1980). 2. El Nino years average almost 0.2 C warmer than La Nina years (the difference in the Y direction between the red and blue lines above). 3. The AGW warming signal is about 0.2 C/decade since 1980. 4. ENSO cycles between El Nino and La Nina inside of decadal time scales. Tha...