Dr. Don J. Easterbrook, Professor Emeritus Geology, Western Wa****ngton
University, author of 8 books, 150 journal publications with focus on
geomorphology; glacial geology; Pleistocene geochronology; environmental
and engineering geology.
CBS-TV, 60 Minutes, Burlington, Wa****ngton
March 30, 2008
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/DonEasterbrookInterviewTranscript.pdf
QUOTE: "The time of maximum CO2 emissions started in 1945 and
temperatures should have shot up, but we cooled off. That's an
anti-correlation."
But, the things he [Gore] does, the things he says, are so outrageous, I
don't forgive him anymore. For example, when he says things like 'people
like me are right in there with the flat earth theory'. He says the
debate is over. The debate is not over-it's just getting started. There's
a huge uproar in the scientific world because in the last ten years, the
climate has cooled slightly, but the media won't tell you that. This
year is a big downturn, you can't miss it. Global warming simply ended
in 1998, but the public doesn't know it.
KLC: I could draw it myself, you have a peak in '98 and it's been flat
or declining since then. The trend depends on where you start. They love
starting in 1850.
DJE: That doesn't work because there are 30-year cycles. The chairman of
the IPCC admits we've had global cooling for at least eight years, and
there are sources on the Internet, you've probably seen them, that show
the IPCC folks are panicking.
KLC: Talk about an inconvenient fact.
DJE: On the temperature curve, 1998 was the high point, and this year,
we've cooled dramatically. It's been kind of flat for ten years, sort of
a plateau, but if you take 1998 as your starting point, it's down
slightly, not soaring as predicted by IPCC.
KLC: Playing the devil's advocate, if you start in the early 90's, you
would still have a positive trend.
DJE: If you want to be really honest about this, the curve should rise
from 1977 and end after 1998. It depends on what you want to show and
how you want to filter it. You can filter it with a two-year average, a
five-year average, or over whatever period you want and you'll get a
differently-shaped curve. The point is, it has not gotten warmer since
1998; it has not continued to warm in the last ten years.
KLC: How can that be if CO2 is increasing?
DJE: You can take ground data or satellite data; they are not exactly
the same, but close. I took all the data, satellite and ground, averaged
it, and plotted a single curve from the average to show the trend and
the temperature stopped rising in 1998.
Look at history, where we are in 2008, and where we've been. If you go
back to the beginning of the century, there was a really deep cold
period from about 1880 to 1910, and then it warmed until about 1945.
Most of the global temperature records are set in the middle of the 1930's
when it was warmer than now. And the same is true in Greenland--the
temperatures in the 1930's were warmer than they are now. In ~1945, we
did a flip to thirty years of global cooling. The time of maximum CO2
emissions started in 1945 and temperatures should have shot up, but we
cooled off. That's an anti-correlation. In 1977, we got warmer and
warmer. If we look back 500 years, the trend of 1977 to 1998 is not
unique to this century. For about 500 years we have 30-year periods
where it gets warm/cold, warm/cold.
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. By the end of
the century, we'll have less than a half a degree temperature increase,
instead of the ten degrees or so predicted by IPCC. A huge differenc.
The IPCC projection says that by 2011 we should be one-degree warmer
than where we were in 2005. But, we're getting colder. We declined about
0.7 degrees in one year. We're going in the opposite direction. With
IPCC data and their graph, by 2011, the difference between my projection
and theirs is about one-degree and that's huge. Now, they have to
increase a degree in three years. If that doesn't happen, their
projection is wrong and mine is right. By 2038, the difference between
their prediction and mine is two degrees.
KLC: Around 2001 you predicted global cooling. That must have been a
tough thing to come out in public and say in those times.
DJE: I was a lone wolf howling in the wind in 1998. I gave a paper in
2001 in Boston at the national GSA [Geological Society of America]
meeting and you should have seen the
stunned look on people's faces. We'd just had the 1998 warm peak and
people were astonished. I said, look at the data and forget CO2. You
know how much change there's been in atmospheric CO2 since the advent of
big man-made emissions?
KLC: Maybe 100 PPM [Parts Per Million].
DJE: Normally it's been about 280 PPM. It crept up to about 300 by 1945,
which is not much-it had been naturally that high before, but in 1945 it
took off. Emissions went straight up. However, the total change was not
much compared to the volume of CO2 already in the atmosphere. Water
va**** is the main greenhouse gas and one of the things you won't hear
anywhere is that in order to get the global warming projected, the CO2
people can't get there with only CO2 because the effect isn't big
enough, so they say it will change the water va****. They rely on water
va**** to get their climate change, not CO2-CO2 is just enough to ****ge
it and water va**** does the rest.
KLC: At Real Climate [www.realclimate.org], I've said that the idea of
CO2 being a 'forcing' and water va**** being a 'feedback' is great
marketing, but bad science. You can imagine what response you get from
something like that.
DJE: Look at the difference. Man contributed eight one-thousandths of
one percent to the total CO2 that was present before the big upshoot. It
is instructive to think about emissions added to atmospheric content.
From 1870 to 1900, we had global cooling, then we had significant global
warming from about 1910 to 1945. That global warming is not accompanied
by any significant rise in CO2, so you can't blame CO2. Then CO2
increased while we had global cooling. You can't blame that on CO2. It's
only been the last 30 years there's been correlation between CO2 and
global warming. Everything before was uncorrelated. There's no doubt
there's been warming as we came out of the cold period from 1880 and
1910. The 1930's were warm, then we cooled from 1945. 1977 was a
turnaround year when temperatures started up and now we're headed down
again. We're right where we ought to be.
--
Warmest Regards
Bonzo
"CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on
long, medium and even short time scales." R. Timothy Patterson,
Professor Of Geology, Director Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center,
Carleton University, Canada
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