Maybe it is because yesterday was "Earth Day", but suddenly it seems that prominent scientists are coming out everywhere denouncing the myth of man-caused global warming. Perhaps they are offended by Al Gore's ridiculous advertising campaign promoting his brand of pagan mythology. Here are excerpts from a brief interview with a prominent geologist, professor and author about global warming and climate change.
Peter
Scientist Who voted for Gore in 2000 Now Debunks Warming Fears
By Dr. Don J. Easterbrook, Professor Emeritus Geology, Western Washington University
We’ve been warming up about a degree per century since the Little Ice Age in about 1600. We’ve been warming for 400 years, long before human�generated CO2 could have anything to do with the climate. If we project the previous century into the coming one, my projection is that we will have about a half-a-degree of cooling from 2007 (plus or minus three to five years) to about 2040. Then it will start getting warmer as we enter the next warm cycle, followed by cooling again.
For a number of interviews, especially in the national news media, they ask ‘Are you a Republican?’ and I say ‘No, I�m not, as a matter of fact, I voted for Al Gore. I don�t want to pick on him because he�s not a scientist.’ The nonsense he spews comes from the IPCC [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], so in a sense I don’t condemn him as much as I do the so-called climatologists like [James] Hansen, who says things that are idiotic. They’re the ones giving him all this stuff.
Al Gore makes a hundred-million dollars? He has five-billion in his slush fund? Look at [U.S. Senator] Barbara Boxer, she sponsored a bill for carbon cap and trade [Sanders/Boxer Global Warming Bill S.309]. Who will benefit from hundreds of billions of dollars for administering a scheme like that?
The other thing is research funding. The U.S. spends about two-billion dollars a year on research. Right now, if you submit anything that says CO2 is not the bad guy, you won�t have a chance of getting funding. It all goes to the CO2 people who build little fiefdoms; they have grant money coming out of their ears. They mimic Al Gore and say the debate is over. The last I heard, the U.S. plans to increase its research spending to 3.5 billion dollars, virtually all of which goes into CO2 research.
The last part of this equation is the news media and money being made by people like National Geographic who recently put out a show called Six Degrees of Global Warming [Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, by Mark Lynas] and how many people watched that and watched the ads that went with it? How much money did they make doing it? How much money would they have made if they’d said ‘Oh, it’s not CO2, it’s solar?’
Doom and gloom is easy to sell. Herman Goebbels said in World War II, and said it right, that if you tell a big enough lie often enough, people will eventually believe it. Today is like that, total hogwash. Gore made a statement that less than a half-dozen people in world don’t believe that CO2 causes AGW. That’s totally nuts.
Read more and an interview with Dr. Easterbrook here.
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2 comments:
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Well Pete, more or less I “dig” this dude (get it? He’s a geologist, “dig it”).
Easterbrook’s theory is based upon the geologic record and, essentially, posits that the upswing in temperatures we have been seeing are a result of natural long-term climate fluctuations between glacial ages. The last ten years have seen a mild if progressive cooling trend which would seem to fortify Easterbrook’s claims. I am happy to say that – if I read his resume correctly – his findings are peer-reviewed or under review (at least I think they are), which speaks well of his theories.
Personally, as a layman, I find Easterbrook compelling and interesting if not convincing. He is a credible scientist who has done a great deal for the geology community and seems to be a sane and sober person. His theories make sense and seem to have hard data to back them up. There are, by the way, counter-theories (that the effect of CO2 is momentarily offset by the natural cooling of the planet, or that the rising ocean levels are absorbing more of the atmospheric heat because of their increased surface area, or that the trend, even if it is momentarily cooling, is still in an alarmingly upward trend overall) and this is precisely where it becomes confusing to the layman – who do you believe? I mean, what if past warming trends were based on sun spots but this warming trend is based on something else? Like CO2 maybe?
I would feel much better about Easterbrook’s theories if he were not such a lone voice on the subject (that is not to say that he is the only one who has noticed this trend – because there are others), but Easterbrook should really team-up with a climatologist and / or a climate physicist, or even a couple of other geologists to make his case look more convincing. It is also worthwhile to note that Easterbrook only looks at one thin slice of science and comes up with some pretty big conclusions.
Again, I would feel better about his science if he had the backing of more voices and from different disciplines; such would make him much more credible for an already credible guy.
I also find it hard to believe that climatologists are such dumb-dumbs that they wouldn’t have already looked at these facts (after all, I found these theories in about 1 second on Google), which again makes me furrow my brow. What is most interesting is that Easterbrook’s theories have spurred such relatively low interest in the blogosphere, on either side of the issue, when compared to some other theorists…not sure what to make of this…
I am, of course, a little concerned that Easterbrook is a geologist who spent most of his career working on subjects like sediments and magnetic variations and the like up until the 21st century when he suddenly became a climate scientist. Not that this discredits him in any way – but it doesn’t help his cause either.
And it is unsettling when Easterbrook delivers papers at conferences supported by the “Heartland Institute” for the simple reason that such an organization is sooooo politically conservative that it is hard to overlook the connotations.
And, yeah, Easterbrook is a geologist, not a climate scientist.
These facts do not deserve red flags but they do merit reservations. In the end, I am not completely convinced. After all, we don’t want to be too hasty and believe any old theory that suits us…now do we, Pete?
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