Using penguin poop to study climate; how NASA got climate wrong & much more | CERES Podcast Ep#02

In the second episode of the CERES Podcast, the CERES team leaders (Dr. Willie Soon, Dr. Ronan Connolly & Dr. Michael Connolly) cover everything from using penguin poop to study climate change in Antarctica to the problems with the various “homogenization adjustments” that NOAA are applying to the global temperature records.

In Part 1 – the “science news round-up” – we discuss three recent papers that caught our attention in the last two weeks:

a) The latest results on “the greening of the Earth”, i.e., how increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is leading to more plantlife worldwide;

b) A paper that uses penguin poop to show that Antarctica went through a period of warming from 750-1250 AD that was similar to today;

c) A similar study (preprint) that uses snow petrel stomach oil sediments to reveal that Antarctica was similarly warm around 4500 BC.

In Part 2, we take a deep dive into a popular graph by the NASA Climate website that people often share to allegedly “debunk” the idea that solar activity could explain recent climate change. This graph is often shared on social media and the fact that it was “created by NASA” impresses a lot of people. But, we show that the graph is pseudoscientific disinformation – not a genuine representation of the ongoing scientific debates over the causes of recent climate change.

In Part 3, we describe some of the published research of the CERES team. In this episode, Ronan, will look at the “homogenization adjustments” that the various groups (especially NOAA) compiling global temperature records apply to the weather records before using them. He shows how these adjustments are introducing non-climatic biases into the temperature data.

🔹 🔹 🔹 🔹
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction to the podcast
00:27 Part 1: Science news
00:56 Greening of the Planet – Li et al. (2024)
13:12 Using penguin poop to study Antarctic climate changes of the last 1500 years – Zheng et al. (2023)
20:52 The Stephenson et al. (2025) preprint study using Antarctic snow petrel stomach oil deposits to investigate Antarctic climate changes from 4500 BC to 500 AD
26:39 Part 2: Deep dive into the claim that “NASA has proven that the Sun can’t be the cause of any warming since 1950s”
31:32 First problem with the NASA Climate graph: the temperature record they use
49:06 The other problem with the NASA Climate graph: the solar activity record they use
55:28 Summary of why the NASA Climate graph is wrong
59:42 Part 3: This episode’s CERES research spotlight – the “temperature homogenization” problem
1:07:45 The “temperature homogenization” approach used by NOAA, NASA, etc., to adjust the global temperature data
1:14:57 Ronan & Michael’s February 2015 meeting with the NASA GISS lead scientist to discuss the problems with NASA’s global temperature record (“GISTEMP”)
1:19:37 Our evaluation of NOAA’s homogenization adjustments to 800 European weather station records (O’Neill et al., 2022)
1:31:08 Our analysis of the “urban blending” problem of current temperature homogenization adjustments (Katata et al. 2023)
1:40:10 Did Hausfather et al. (2013) debunk the urban blending problem? No.
1:45:28 Final comments

🔹 🔹 🔹 🔹
⭐ If you want to support the work of CERES, please visit us at https://www.ceres-science.com/support-us
🔹For more about Dr. Ronan Connolly & links to his social media channels, visit https://ronanconnollyscience.com/

🔹 🔹 🔹 🔹

Relevant Links:

⭐ Part 1: Science News
❶ Li et al. (2024) paper on “Global greening”: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-024-00543-z
❷ Zheng et al. (2023) paper on using penguin poop to study Antarctic climate change https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2023.108308
❸ Stevenson et al. (2025) – the preprint study on using Antarctic snow petrel deposits: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-513

⭐Part 2: Debunking “that NASA Climate graph”
❖ Soon et al. (2015). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2015.08.010
❖ Connolly et al. (2021). https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-4527/21/6/131
❖ Soon et al. (2023). https://doi.org/10.3390/cli11090179
❖ Connolly et al. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-4527/acf18e
❖ The 2009 op-ed that Willie co-authored with Harrison Schmitt: https://tinyurl.com/2kdjxfvj (It was a “viewpoint” article written for a student newspaper, “The Daily Universe”, for BYU)

⭐ Part 3: the “temperature homogenization” problem
❶ O’Neill et al. (2022). https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos13020285
❷ Katata et al. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-22-0122.1

❖ The Hausfather et al. (2013) study mentioned: https://doi.org/10.1029/2012JD018509