Wood Romances

This is a follow up to a post about Nikolov & Zeller here , updated on 4/14/2025. In a recent manuscript [1] "published" on the so-called Science of Climate Change blog, Nikolov and Zeller (NZ) articulate how they believe that the Earth's temperature remains warmer than its effective temperature. Without getting into whether that amount should be considered 90K or 33K, it's clear that for them the long-term baseline temperature of earth is determined solely by total solar irradiance (TSI) and atmospheric pressure (P). Here it is in their words: NASA planetary data indicate that the radiative “greenhouse effect” does not exist in reality. That’s because, across a wide range of planetary environments in the Solar System, the long-term (baseline) global surface temperature on rocky planets and moons is fully determined by the mean Total Solar Irradiance (i.e. distance from the Sun) and total surface atmospheric pressure. Variability on this long-term baseline temper...

There's a  schematic  that is frequently promoted by John Shewchuk on X to claim thatt long-term solar cycles explain much more of temperature variability of the last 2000 years than changes in greenhouse gases like CO2. The implication is also frequently made that the current warming over the last century or so is due to these cycles and not to changes in GHG concentrations. One common version of this graph is here. The Hallstatt-Bray cycle, which has a periodicity of ~2400 years, and the Eddy cycle, which has a periodicity of 976 years, are both related to sunspots, and so they indeed do have an impact on total solar irradiance (TSI), and therefore they can in principle have an effect on global temperatures on millennial timescales. But the significant question is, by how much?  Astute observers will note that Shewchuk didn't include any scale for the y-axis; the impact of these cycles could be negligible or large as far as this schematic is concerned. I do find ironic,...

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 ...

The graph above (and similar versions of it) is circulating widely on social media and promoted as evidence that the Holocene Thermal Maximum (HTM) between 5000 and 10,000 years ago was warmer than today. The graph originates from Javier Vinós' self-published book. In the graph above the black "b" time series is reported to be variability of global temperatures since the beginning of the Holocene. This particular version also shows Marcott et al 2013 as the "a" time series and Earth's obliquity as the "c" time series. My interest here has to do with the data tampering Vinós used to generate the black "b" time series, so I'm going to refer to this as the "Vinós time series." The Vinós time series is fabricated by tampering with Marcott's proxy data. In his self-published book and various blogposts, he has told us how he fabricated it. To see how he did so, we must first look at a version of this graph in which the Vinós t...

NOAA has released their December 2024 results for both nClimDiv and USCRN US temperatures, and 2024 turned out to be the warmest year for CONUS on record (records beginning in 1895). NOAA's website reports CONUS for 2024 as 55.51°F. Below I show several graphs for nClimDiv, with monthly temperatures, a 12-month running mean, and a 10-year running mean. ERA5 for CONUS is also out, and to make apples to apples comparisons, I changed nClimDiv to Celsius and set it to a 1951-2000 baseline. USCRN began recording CONUS temperatures in 2005, so the end of 2024 marks the 20th year for that dataset. Below I show graphs comparing USCRN to both nClimDiv and UAH-TLT for CONUS. Here's how USCRN compares to ERA5, with the scale switched to Celsius to match ERA5. Since USCRN only goes back to 2005, I can't give you 30-year trends, but CONUS is warming so rapidly, that the last 20 years is already statistically significant. From Jan 2005 to Dec 2024, CONUS trends were: USCRN: 0.451 ± 0.241...

If you've participated in discussion about climate change, you've probably come across the slogan "Exxon Knew." This came out as private, internal communications from within Exxon (and other fossil fuel companies) revealed that their scientists had been investigating potential catastrophic consequences of fossil fuel emissions, and they made predictions that turned out to be pretty accurate. To what extent Exxon is culpable for this is difficult to determine. However, what is clear (to me) is that Exxon and other fossil fuel companies ought to be held liable for knowingly promoting misinformation when their own scientists were telling them that there were valid concerns that continued fossil fuel emissions would have harmful consequences for humanity. Papers were published in 2021[1] and 2023[2] that evaluated the accuracy of the scientific work that Exxon knew by evaluating the internal studies that have now been made public. The above graph has been popularly shared...

Even though there is no theoretical basis for the Beer-Lambert formula, ∆RF = αln(C/Co), it has been accepted by the scientific community as a reasonable approximation. In this paper we propose an improved mathematical approximation that... has no theoretical basis. ~ H. Douglas Lightfoot A paper was published in Energy & Environment by Lightfoot & Mamer back in 2014 (LM14)[1] arguing that we should toss out decades of research establishing a theoretical basis for and quantifying the logarithmic relationship between changes in CO2 ( ∆CO2) and radiative forcing ( ∆RF ) for no good reason. In it's place, they sought to replace it with the results of a curve fitting exercise for no good reason except to generate an equation that would conform with a climate myth that was conclusively refuted in the 1950s. A theoretical basis for the near-logarithmic relationship between  ∆CO2 and  ∆RF was established beginning in 1896 with Arrhenius' landmark paper. Arrhenius quantified ...