Wood Romances

Greenland's Contribution to Sea Level Rise Since 1992 In 2019, Tony Heller posted on his blog that "Over the past three years, Greenland’s surface has gained 1.2 trillion tons of new ice... Experts in the press corps have generously interpreted the data for us, and determined that there is a climate emergency and it is President Trump’s fault." He then showed graphs supporting that Greenland's surface mass balance (SMB) did indeed gain ice each of those years, totaling 1.2 trillion tons of ice.  What Heller doesn't tell you is that Greenland's SMB gains ice pretty much every year, but it also loses ice every year due to glacial calving and basal melting; this is referred to as discharge (D). In order to assess whether Greenland gained or lost ice, what is referred to as total mass balance (TMB) you have to account for both SMB and D. The equation for this is not that hard: TMB = SMB + D Heller was capable of looking up the value for SMB but neglected to look u...

I wonder if there's a climate conspiracy that isn't found on Tony Heller's blog in some way, shape or form. We have plenty of empirical data showing the decline in Arctic Sea Ice, but according to Tony Heller, that's not the case, and NOAA is actively hiding data that would prove them wrong. According to him, we have satellite data going back to 1972, but NOAA only shows data beginning in 1979 because that was a cold year, and if they showed the 1972 -1978 data, it would undermine their claim that Arctic Sea Ice is shrinking. "The reason why NOAA starts their sea ice graphs in 1979, is because it was the coldest year on record in much of the Arctic and the ice was very thick. By starting in 1979, they can defraud the public into believing that the ice is disappearing."[1] But Heller apparently did some sleuthing and found that data in a 1990 IPCC report so he can alert the world to the data that NOAA is hiding away. But is this data hidden? Well, no. It's...

Radiosonde Data Since 1958 Sometimes it's difficult to believe the stuff that Tony Heller says. In one of his blogposts[1] from 2016, Heller claimed that NOAA has been hiding radiosonde data in “their latest attempt to defraud the public.” According to Heller, NOAA is hiding this data because they don’t want to tell you that there has been no warming since 1958. As he writes, “Here is why they are hiding the rest of the data. The earlier data showed as much pre-1979 cooling as the post-1979 warming.” He then goes on to haphazardly splice a graph from a paper in 1978[2] with another graph showing radiosonde data from 1979 on (from NOAA’s 2015 climate report).[3]  From this he concludes that there has been no warming in radiosonde data for the last 58 years. However, careful observers will note that Heller just slapped one graph on top of the other. He didn't even bother to find the data and graph both together properly. He literally just lined up 0 C on both graphs, but the prob...

Heatwaves in the Continental US (1880-2020) The Dust Bowl It's commonly believed that the heatwaves that hit the US in the 1930s were the worst in American History, at least since Europeans began colonizing the territory. And certainly they were terrible. The causes were due to a combination of natural phenomena as well as human activity. In particular, the Homestead Act of 1862 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 brought many families into the Great Plains believing that agriculture would allow them to make a life for themselves. Many of these were inexperienced farmers, so they brought with them poor farming practices. They over-plowed and replaced the deep rooted grasses of the Great Plains with wheat. When those crops began to fail with the onset of drought in 1931, they exposed bare soil, and the Dust Bowl began and lasted until normal rains returned in 1939.[1] To make matters worse, the radiative forcing from dust loading in the atmosphere increased drought intensity and ...

My last post  was a bit of a rant. I apologize for that (sort of), though I get bombarded with these obviously erroneous graphs, and I wanted to put down in one place all the problems I have with that family of contrarian graphs. But it occurred to me today that it would be more helpful (and less of a rant) if I demonstrate how the data used in those graphs would look different if the problems I described were fixed. So to do this, I went on an internet search and found a wonderful set of data from a paper I described in an earlier post , Royer 2004. It's a spreadsheet with the data from the GEOCARB III model (which originates in Berner 2001) and global temperatures corrected from Vezier.[1] This only goes back 520 million years, but I found the full Berner CO2 data on another site.[2] The CO2 data is reported in RCO2, which is the ratio of CO2 at a time in the past and preindustrial CO2 (280 ppm). So I converted these values to a change in radiative forcing (RF) from preindustrial...

Example 1: CO2 and Temperature I frequently hear that climate scientists only consider the last 150 years of history (since the beginning of the instrumental record), and if we paid better attention to geology, we would realize one or more of several things: 1) CO2 doesn't correlate with temperature or doesn't affect global temperatures, 2) climate changes are normal, so there's no danger with current warming, 3) most of the earth's history has been warmer than today, so a bit of warming would be good or 4) CO2 levels have been declining to dangerous levels for millions of years, and thankfully we burned fossil fuels to save the planet from CO2 starvation. None of these claims are true, and none have any basis in geologic evidence. I have several posts here showing the correlation between CO2 and temperature and/or glaciation. So where do people get this idea? One of the chief sources of misinformation is crappy graphs like the one above (Example 1). Early Examples Exa...

Since warm air holds more moisture, any rise in surface temperatures, regardless of the cause of that rise, will cause more evaporation and thus more water vapor in the atmosphere. This means that a rise in surface temperatures decreases the “lapse rate” - the rate of cooling as altitude increases. The lapse rate is slower at the equator than at the poles - the rate at the equator is about half that of the subtropics. Because of this, it’s been predicted that there should be a tropospheric “hot spot” in the tropics. Climate models predict this because there is good reason to expect it, and this is true regardless of what is causing the warming. It should be there whether warming is caused by an increase in TSI or an increase in GHGs. Finding that hotspot would not mean that we have detected an anthropogenic signature of warming due to GHGs; it rather would mean that we understand how surface warming affects lapse rates. Not finding the hotspot means either: 1) we have more to learn abo...