Wood Romances

from IPCC AR6 WG1 Chapter 11 With all the misrepresentation of the scientific literature found in the recent DOE report, I thought it might be helpful to show that misrepresenting the scientific literature has a long tradition in contrarian circles, even among those who give the appearance of supporting the overall science presented in the IPCC technical reports. The strategy can serve an important rhetorical goal if you want to show that the science is on your side while taking a counterfactual stance on the science. If your goal is to show that position X (found in the media or in some scientific study) is wrong or not sufficiently supported by evidence, you can cite a series of papers with extremely selective quotations to give the false impression that this series of papers either falsifies Position X or undermines its credibility. This strategy appears to be a go-to strategy in the DOE report.  An interesting twist on this strategy is frequently used by those who want to say t...

Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr has published two posts recently having to do with extreme weather and the IPCC. In the first post , he expresses frustration over an apparently inevitable retraction of a paper on extreme weather. The paper is Alimonti et al 2022 (A22) published in The European Physical Journal Plus (EPJP)[1]. I became aware of this paper about a year ago; it was not a good paper and was not particularly influential; it received almost no attention except for a brief period of time when the usual blogs promoted it, and then after SkyNews in Australia publicized this study as demonstrating there is no climate emergency. In the second post , Pielke summarized what he believes the IPCC's position is on extreme weather, and here he refers again to this previous paper. He declares that he believes that popular and scientific treatments of extreme weather have become far mor extreme than the position taken by the IPCC. According to him, "with the exception perhaps of only extr...

Note: I updated this in 2024 to include 2023 data. In a previous post , I covered the distinction between detection and attribution. These are normally considered sequentially. First you detect a signal above natural variability, then you examine if some portion of that signal can be attributed to human activity. The previous post shows that the two are statistically independent from each other, so there is no need to limit attribution studies to signals that are detectable above natural variability. This distinction and clarification I think is important in discussions of tropical cyclone trends. While trends are clear since 1980, the longer term record (since ~1850-1900) is less clear due to selection biases arising from our increasing ability to detect tropical cyclones. This makes detection difficult long term, but that doesn't necessarily mean that scientists can't also examine ways in which human activity is affecting tropical cyclone trends. Detection in the Satellite R...

There is growing evidence supporting the conclusion that AGW is already having an effect on extreme weather events, and those impacts are not beneficial to humanity or to the earth's ecosystems. But the process of arriving at those conclusions is complex, and different types of extreme weather are affected by AGW in different ways. While there is a clear (and obvious) link between AGW and extreme heat, heatwaves, droughts, and flooding, the effects of AGW on other extreme weather are far more difficult to determine. For instance, it may be that AGW is only affecting which parts of the US are more likely to be affected by tornadoes without impacting their frequency. The effect of AGW on Tropical Cyclones (TCs) has been extensively studied, and it appears that there is growing evidence that there are clear connections between AGW and hurricane activity, but I see many reported connections (or lack of connections) misstated by the media, politicians and "think tanks." In ord...