Wood Romances

Two new studies were recently published quantifying ice mass lost from the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) and the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AnIS)[1] and mountain glaciers.[2] The GrIS/AnIS study is important because it combines 43 independent estimates of ice mass changes, from satellite measurements to arrive at estimates of ice sheet mass balance changes from 1972 for the GrIS and 1979 for AnIS. Combines, the two ice sheets "lost 11,309 ± 565 billion tonnes of ice between 1979 and 2023, with glacier dynamical imbalance driving 84% of the ice loss and surface mass balance the remainder." This change in total mass balance (TMB) equates to 31.4 ± 1.6 mm (1.24 ± 0.06 in) contribution to sea level rise since 1979. Now 1.24 in may not seem like a lot, but we have to remember that this accounting does not account for contributions from ice loss from mountain glaciers or other freshwater contributions to sea level rise. It also does not account for thermal expansion of the oceans. Accountin...

It looks like Wielicki is now generating and/or promoting AI-generated memes that misrepresent climate science . I saw this from him on X earlier today  (an alternate version from him is  here ). AI-generated Meme from Wielicki Wielicki's meme misrepresents and/or fabricates multiple lines of evidence. Let's look look at each of these supposed lines of evidence to see if he's made his case that "Natural variability produced temperatures like these before, so we should expect it to contribute to temperatures like these again... regardless of CO₂." Temperature Stripes The climate stripes in Wielicki's meme is attributed to Büntgen et al 2020 [1]. This paper was explicitly not limited to Europe. It included extratropical NH temperatures with distinct treatments for Eurasia (EA) and Eurasia/North Atlantic (EA+), and even the EA reconstruction is significantly larger than Europe. The paper is intended both 1) to parse out the role of volcanic forcings during th...

A couple days ago I saw the following post on X from Dr. Matthew Wielicki , who has decided to double down on some terrible math that I (and many others) corrected over a year ago (see here  for his terrible math and rebuttal). Dr. Wielicki Attempts math The errors in this post are numerous. Let's summarize them: It's wrong to calculate the amount of warming by subtracting one annual value from another. Wielicki should calculate the rates of warming by calculating proper trends. His approach completely ignores the natural variability that he says matters in this post. The trends for the two time frames are below. The difference between the two is statistically significant. The central trend for 1915-1936 is ~2.7x more rapid than 2005-2025 (not 3.6x), though the 2σ CIs are large.      1915 - 1936: 0.79 ± 0.5°C/decade (2σ) or 1.73°C warming over 22 years.      2005 - 2026: 0.29 ± 0.4°C/decade (2σ) or 0.64°C warming over 22 years.  Wielicki is cl...

Frequently I see contrarians confuse local and global temperatures in such a way that they end up contradicting themselves. The contradictions goes like this - on the one hand they say global warming can't be a problem because a small amount of glo. warming is no different than the change in temperature over a small portion of the day, and nobody would notice this small change anyway. But then they also say that during the Little Ice Age, climate was so much worse than it is today, including wide spread famines, frozen rivers, puritans burning witches, etc. Given that the LIA was only a couple degrees colder than today, this directly contradicts their claims about the effects of a couple degrees of global warming. I'll document an example of this below.  On September 6 , Matthew Wielicki posted a claim on X that global warming isn't a problem because 2°C warming by 2100 is "about the temperature change from 8am to 10am in most major cities." He then showed a gra...

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 ...