Wood Romances

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...

Update (6/6/2025): I edited the text for clarity (especially in the first couple paragraphs), changed g to  g̃ to distinguish the normalized GHE from the acceleration due to gravity,  and added more references with excerpts at the bottom of the post. The Earth's effective temperature - the mean surface temperature of Earth if the atmosphere contained no GHGs but with current albedo can be calculated since we know that ASR (hereafter Fin) =  (1-α)*S/4 and OLR (hereafter Fout) is governed by  εσ*T^4. At equilibrium, ASR = OLR (Fin = Fout). With no greenhouse effect (GHE), the Earth's emission temperature (Te) would be at the surface, meaning that Te = Ts, so we can solve for Te with (1-α)*S/4 = εσ*Te^4 If we solve for Te with a surface emissivity ( ε) o f 0.98 and albedo ( α) of 0.306, we end up with Te = 255.3 K.  So, if the earth had no atmosphere with albedo roughly the same as today, the average surface temperature of the earth would be about  -18°C. ...

Pages 2K Reconstruction of Global Temperatures Replicating MBH98/99 In a previous post , I wrote an initial review of Gregory Wrightstone's Book, Inconvenient Facts. We began to see that Mr. Wrightstone's book was pretty low on facts and high on convenience - that is, Wrightstone's claims would be very convenient for us if we believe him, since if there is no problem, we have no compelling reason to fix a non-existent problem. That post covered only the first two chapters of his book. Chapter 3 is supposed to contain more inconvenient facts about temperature, but what we get is a lot of misinformation about temperature based on 1) the rejection of scientific evidence about temperature and 2) the confusion of global temperatures with local temperatures, including 2a) Central England and 2b) the Greenland summit, and 3) the misuse of a terrible proxy reconstruction. Confusion About Proxies Mr. Wrightstone (somewhat) correctly observes that, if global (or Northern Hemisphere)...

Sometimes I still hear objections to AGW that claim that humans could not be causing the atmosphere to warm because our emissions constitute only a tiny fraction of the CO2 that's in the atmosphere. There are several forms of this claim, but most have to do with the fact that human CO2 emissions are a small fraction of total emissions every year, which of course is true. What they don't tell you is that natural sinks remove what natural sources add each year, and a little more, making the natural carbon cycle a net sink. So while human emissions are small compared to natural, they are responsible for flipping the carbon cycle from being a net sink to a net source of CO2. Human activity is responsible for virtually all the increase in CO2 above preindustrial levels. The graph below shows various components of the carbon cycle with averages for 2011-2020. Here the natural carbon cycle removes about 5.9 GtC annually, while human emissions from fossil fuels and land use change cont...

Recently I came across a document reportedly written by William Happer and Richard Lindzen (HL) entitled Comment and Declaration on the SEC’s Proposed Rule “The Enhancement and Standardization of Climate-Related Disclosures for Investors,” File No. S7-10-22, 87 Fed. Reg. 21334 (April 11,2022).[1] As I read through the science-related material in the document, it became quickly apparent to me that his document is utter garbage. It's so bad, I wonder to what extent either of them actually wrote it. Rather than go through the document section by section, I want to just analyze the section on climate sensitivity. What we'll see here is that the paper is inconsistent with itself, it contradicts the other published works of the authors, and of course, it's demonstrably false. Internal Inconsistencies The section I'd like to discuss primarily is section II.M, with the brief title, "The Logarithmic Forcing from CO2 Means that Its Contributions to Global Warming is Heavil...