Wood Romances

A few years ago, I began seeing contrarians promoting data from a website called temperature.global (TG), a website that claimed to publish global temperatures. According to their description, TG "calculates the current global temperature of the Earth. It uses unadjusted surface temperatures. The current temperature is the 12M average mean surface temperature over the last 12 months compared against the 30 year mean. New observations are entered each minute and the site is updated accordingly. This site was created by professional meteorologists and climatologists with over 25 years experience in surface weather observations." The website was run anonymously; to my knowledge, nobody knows exactly who is behind it. I corresponded with at least one of the people who ran the website, and he/she used the initials TG for the person's name. In another post I documented some of the failures of the website after seeking clarification from TG. The more I corresponded with TG, th...

Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller have published a new paper (NZ24) in the quasi-predatory MDPI journal geomatics [1] which claims to rule out the effects of greenhouse gases as a cause for the increase in GMST in recent decades. Their paper concludes, Our analysis revealed that the observed decrease of planetary albedo along with reported variations of the Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) explain 100% of the global warming trend and 83% of the GSAT interannual variability as documented by six satellite- and ground-based monitoring systems over the past 24 years. Changes in Earth’s cloud albedo emerged as the dominant driver of GSAT, while TSI only played a marginal role. They produce a graph that they believe supports their claim, which sure enough shows a decrease in the Earth's albedo over the last 24 years and a corresponding increase in absorbed solar radiation (ASR). Let me be clear here at the beginning that there absolutely has been both a decrease in albedo and a corresponding in c...

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.” ~  Charles Bukowski  ~ Perhaps we've all encountered individuals who seem to be simultaneously overconfident and incompetent in a subject matter in which they have strong beliefs. When this occurs, many of us become convinced that these people are suffering from what has been popularly coined the "Dunning-Kruger Effect." I'd like to challenge this notion. I think this oversimplifies a complex problem we're experiencing today. We don't gain, learn and process information like we used to, and the information we see is frequently curated  by our own biases and social media, and both can cause us to become ideologically entrenched in a condition in which we accept what is false and reject what challenges us. The Perpetual Sophomore Effect is a Different Curve from the Popularized Dunning-Kruger Effect Dunning-Kruger Effect The actual effect...

I thought it would be beneficial to produce an annotated bibliography of important scientific works in the field of climate science. Obviously I can't make this list exhaustive, but I'm planning to generate several bibliographies, mostly on specific topics in climate science that interest me, and I plan to periodically modify them as new papers are written (or as I discover papers written in the past). I thought it best to cover the early years of climate science as a historical survey. My first post will cover 164 years of  climate science from Fourier in 1824 to Hansen in 1988.

Note: 1/15/2024. Graphs are updated to include 2024 when available. You sometimes hear that, at least on certain time scales, CO2 and global temperature (GMST) don't correlate very well or even that the two go in opposite directions. The implication drawn from this is that CO2 can't be the primary driver of climate changes. What I want to show here is that this claim is categorically false. On virtually all time scales in the Phanerozoic, CO2 and GMST correlate very well, especially when taking into consideration that GMST correlates with the log of CO2.  The best way for me to demonstrate this point is to simply show the correlation. Where I can, I convert CO2 to forcings (using RF = 5.35*ln(CO2/280)) and and plot CO2 forcings on the x-axis and GMST on the y-axis. This gives us two advantages: first, it allows us to calculate the r^2 for that correlation, and second, the slope of the correlation gives us an indication of sensitivity - that is, the temperature response to chang...

In my last post I shared about a fascinating paper that was just published with improved bias corrections for the cooling bias affecting SSTs between 1900 and 1930. As I was studying up on this paper, I was reminded of one of the hacked CRU emails discussing roughly the same problem back in 2009. The email was from Tom Wigley at UCAR to Phil Jones at CRU about bias correction issues affecting SSTs, especially from the 1940s and earlier. The language indicates that there's a context between the two that is left unexplained - that is, we're entering into a conversation mid stream, and there's language between the sender and recipient that people wouldn't necessarily understand without context (like what the "blip" is). The text of the email is below: From: Tom Wigley [University Corporation of Atmospheric Research] To: Phil Jones [CRU] Cc: Ben Santer [Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory] September 27, 2009 Subject: 1940s Phil,  Here are some speculations ...

A new (currently not paywalled) Nature paper[1] was published this week with some really interesting findings. The authors examined potential biases in sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and found evidence of a cooling bias affecting SSTs between roughly 1900 and 1930 that, if corrected, would warm SSTS during that time frame and also coincidentally make the instrumental record conform more closely with model simulations for the early 20th century. Since this study did not discover a significant bias between 1850-1900, these corrections would not have a significant impact on the amount of global warming above the 1850-1900 mean, but it would have a significant impact on our understanding of multi-decadal variability in temperatures in the instrumental record. However, some on X have taken this to mean that scientists have overestimated the amount of global warming the earth has experienced. Ryan Maue called this a "bombshell climate paper" and found it disconcerting that it wa...