Interview with Don Easterbrook, a human-caused global warming skeptic.

Here's the end of the interview...

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.
KLC: With regard to Al Gore’s comments, what is your response?
DJE: It reminds me of what went on with the Pope and Galileo. The Pope didn’t like the idea that the earth was round or that it went around the sun and that the earth was not the center of the universe. At that point the Pope declared that the debate was over and anybody that disagreed would get burned at the stake. 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.
KLC: You’d agree there is a small effect of CO2; the insulating blanket effect.
DJE: That’s why we have a nice, warm, cozy planet.
KLC: They’re careful in the way they parse words. Everyone believes CO2 affects our surface temperature.
DJE: That’s why we have a warm planet.
KLC: The question is, how much? Is it significant?
DJE: The CO2 effect is tiny. The eight one-thousandths of one-percent contributed by human activity won’t do much. Human–caused warming is dogma, pure and simple. That Al Gore won’t debate scientists, won’t talk to the press, and all he’ll say is ‘The debate is over, stupid,’ says a lot for the validity of the argument. There is a list of ten things in his movie, The Inconvenient Truth, that are totally false. I have verified those myself—the Gore assertions are false. To be unkind, they are lies he won’t back off from. Hansen, his principal advisor, is upping the ante by saying the sea level change might not be twenty feet, instead, it might be 250. Al Gore will go probably down in history as the guy who claimed to have invented the Internet and human-caused Global Warming, and they’re both bogus claims. It’s a hoax, frankly.
KLC: Seymour Garte wrote an optimistic book called Where we Stand about the state of our planet. He gives you good news that the air has gotten cleaner, the water has gotten cleaner, then he gives you the bad news, I wanted to get your response to this paragraph titled The Bad News.
The major bad news for environmental quality is found in a trend that has been discussed first by scientists and then by activists for many years. Global warming, caused by an excess of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other gaseous byproducts of industrial human society, has been controversial in the past, but it is no longer. The evidence that we are entering a strong and dramatic period of global climate change has been mounting on a continuous basis to the point where it is now certain. There are still many questions about how bad things will get and how reversible the climate-change trends are. But the fact that the climate is changing is quite real. I prefer the term climate change to global warming because even though it is warming that causes the climate change, we are already feeling the climate change, even if the warming itself is still hard to detect for the average person.
Where We Stand, A Surprising Look at the Real State of Our Planet, Seymour Garte, PhD.

DJE: Certain, ha. The question I have for people like this is, ‘please tell me what is the real, physical evidence that CO2 is the cause of AGW?’ Tell me. There isn’t any. There is no correlation between CO2 and warming temperatures in the historical record except for the last 30 years which is an absolute coincidence. For 30 warm/cold cycles before that, with far greater amplitude than what we’re seeing now, there’s no correlation. Why read anything into the last 30 years? It’s like saying there’s a full moon tonight and it’s clear, so the full moon must cause clear skies, right? They occurred together. It doesn’t prove anything. There are two lines of evidence used to say human-caused global warming is certain. One is that CO2 has gone up in the last 30 years and so has temperature, but that does not prove anything. The second claim, based on computer modeling, they can reproduce what’s happened in the past, and they can project into the future, and clearly show CO2 as the driving factor. They don’t tell you, that, in their computer models, it’s assumed that CO2 drives global warming. In other words, you assume the result and say the computer model proves we were right. It’s garbage in, garbage out. If you don’t program the computers to cause temperatures to rise with CO2, then you have nothing.
KLC: It’s a perfect circular argument.
DJE: It is. In other words, if it is so damned certain, what’s the proof? I’ve asked this question in debates with CO2 people, and asked that they show the evidence. There isn’t any. It’s guilt by association. They say the last 30 years proves it.
KLC: We have fields of expertise. This guy’s a good toxicologist, but in his book, he ventured away from his expertise, and instead of exploring the science himself, he takes the things being said at face value.
DJE: I arranged a global warming symposium along with the national meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver and we invited a half-dozen eminent scientists, all world-class people, to give papers with data to show what’s going on. The idea was to get away from the hype and look at the data and see what’s going on. When it was all over, one guy stood up and said ‘How dare you contradict Al Gore, don’t you know the debate is over?’ And another guy stood up and said ‘Why are you pointing out all of this data to cast doubt? You’re just going to confuse our students.’ Guilty!
Anytime you deal with dogma, where people say ‘shut up, you can’t argue anymore because we’re right and there’s nothing you can say that will change anything, therefore, you’re wrong’, attacking the dogma will invariably get you in trouble.
KLC: Here’s something new. This is that Six Degrees guy, Martin Lynas. I would like your response. This cute, hand-drawn plot was captured from an ABC news clip, which shows history, today, and talks about the warming pipeline. No matter what we do, we’ll get warming to about 2050 where the tipping point appears. The tipping point is the point where actions now can still influence warming at the end of the century.
DJE: The strength of any assertion is only as strong as the foundation it’s built upon. This has no foundation. This assumes that CO2 drives the temperature increase. If it’s not, then this means absolutely nothing. You have to prove the basic tenet that CO2 drives temperature before this means anything at all.
You might as well be talking about the moon being made of green cheese. Until you go there and look at it and see what’s there, you can say whatever you want. If you look at the reality of what has happened in the past, which is what I do, and transfer that into the future, you don’t get this at all. It turns out that, again, time is on my side, because we’re getting closer and closer to my projection and farther and farther away from the IPCC’s. We’re diverging from this Lynas plot. They predict by 2050 we should be two degrees warmer than today. In three years they say we’ll be one degree warmer than today. Well, that’s not happening. This may be an unusually cold year, not necessarily typical of what we have to look forward to, for the simple reason this is a La Nina year, so it probably tacks on a little extra cooling, but the interesting thing is that we haven’t had this low a sunspot cycle since the Maunder Minimum. There are astrophysicists, Russian, Canadian, Willie Soon and other Americans who say ‘Look out’ because we haven’t seen this since the Little Ice Age, about 4 degrees colder than it is right now. That’s one scenario, a possibility.
Another possibility is that the coming cold period that I’ve projected will be more like the last one from 1945 to 1977, which was half a degree colder than now. Or, it might be more like the one from 1880 to 1910 which was deeper. We might be headed toward one of the deeper ones, like the turn of the last century, but there’s no evidence to prove it, so we’ll have to wait until we get there to see. We have the possibility of another LIA, the last time we had so few sunspots. Or we have the possibility of a cooling spell like 1890, or one like we had between 1945 and 1977, which was mild. Or, we might have nothing at all. Or, we might have soaring temperatures. Of those options, I think we’ll have something deep like 1890. But, we don’t know and we’re not going to know until we get there.
The other thing, which is what the Manhattan and Bali Declarations are all about, is, when we get to 2050, the IPCC predicts two additional degrees of warmth, and the population will increased by up to three billion people. We’re projected to be nine billion by 2050. What are we going to do with three billion more people demanding resources? If there is a two degree temperature change, that will be a big problem. So, my view is that, the population explosion is a way bigger problem than a half a degree of temperature change. We need to get control of the population, and we’re not doing it.
By the time we get to 2050, we’ll have so many more demands for natural resources that, even if the two degree temperature change doesn’t happen, if we’re flat or cooler, we still have a really big problem. Instead of spending trillions of dollars on reducing carbon, which does nothing, we should prepare for the population that’s coming. My view has always been that we need to plan ahead. We may have a thirty year grace period when things cool off. If it’s only half a degree of cooling, we have breathing space to get ready for what’s coming. By my projection: we’ll be a half a degree warmer from about 2040 to 2070, but the population will be 50 percent bigger, so it’s going to be a way bigger problem than what we’re looking at today.
Forget about the CO2 trap. If you bet all of your resources, trillions of dollars, on stopping global warming by not putting carbon into the atmosphere, we lose when we get to 2050. In other words, it’s a consequential bet. You’ll hear the CO2 people saying ‘Well, just to be safe, we’ve got to do it this way’, but that’s not true because if you put all the money into curbing CO2 and you don’t do any of the other things necessary to get ready for increasing population, you have a bigger problem than global warming. That’s what the Manhattan Declaration is about. We need to get ready. We should reduce pollution–There are far more bad things going into the atmosphere via emissions than CO2−Sulfur compounds, all kinds of stuff. We ought to reduce those. On that, I’m on the same side of the coin as Al Gore.
Suppose that we totally stop CO2 emissions, take it not to the Kyoto limit but to zero. No heavy breathing. No cars. Would that stop global warming? Will that stop global warming? The answer is ‘No.’ It takes five-hundred years or thereabouts for the atmosphere to equilibrate with the oceans. Even Hansen will admit that. There’s nothing we can do by stopping CO2 emissions that will affect climate in the next several hundred years. Nothing. We should bring emissions down, but not for that reason.
KLC: Take Lynas for example. He’s says we have to act now with expensive programs, or else.
DJE: The consensus among scientists who think as I do is that the tipping point scenario is invalid. It assumes that CO2 causes significant warming. A lot of people will make a lot of money if we do the carbon cap and trade program.
KLC: My thought, from talking to you today, is, if we want to do something useful for the climate, we should pray for sunspots.
DJE: Or pray for very few sunspots. You got it. That would work.
KLC: At least the idea won’t bankrupt us.
DJE: I see you have a printout of Mann’s hockey stick. That is totally discredited now.
KLC: I like the idea someone came up with of ‘treenometers’.
DJE: Treenometers? I like that. Al Gore makes the statement that if we go back far enough in time we see ups and downs in temperature and the CO2 goes up and down too, which is absolutely true, but what he didn’t tell you is, that the temperature change precedes the CO2 change by about 800 years. He makes it sound like the CO2 causes temperature changes, which is totally bogus. No geologist, no scientist I know, believes that. But, he’s still says it and won’t back off on any off it.
KLC: If you want to scare me, show me a plot where we’re warm for very little and then cold, during ice ages, for a very long time. That’s not good for humankind.
DJE: Actually, it’s probably the other way around−the glacial periods are probably shorter than the interglacials.
KLC: When can we expect the next ice age?
DJE: There’s a really strong correlation between wine production, wheat production, all kinds of things, especially in Europe, correlated to climate which is correlated to sunspot activity.
KLC: Highly correlated to health and societal unrest…
DJE: Absolutely. There is an idea that the French Revolution was brought on by the stress caused by starving people because of climate change and that’s what led to the overthrow of the royal family.
KLC: Let them eat cake…
DJE: Here’s a snippet I found interesting. The Farmer’s Almanac predicted it would be a cold winter. And how do they do that? Do they talk to squirrels or something? It turns out, they apparently look at sunspot cycles. Their projections are apparently based on sunspot cycles!
KLC: Online, I said I’d rather believe in Farmer’s Almanac predictions instead of the IPCC, at least they have an algorithm, but I didn’t know what it was.
DJE: Somebody behind the scenes said ‘Yeah, we use the sunspot cycles to make the long term prediction in the Almanac.’
KLC: Looking at this plot, there are regular changes in the ocean level between more than 100 feet higher than now and 300 feet lower than now.
DJE: The rising and falling reoccurs, there is no doubt about that.
KLC: I see areas where the climate is good to us and other areas where it’s not.
DJE: These illustrate the Milankovich cycles, though it was not Milankovich that originated the idea, it was actually a Scot, James Croll–Milankovich applied numbers to the earlier idea, so they’re widely known as Milankovich cycles. Milankovich cannot explain the Younger Dryas climate changes because the Milankovich cycles occur on the scale of tens of thousands of years…
KLC: Yes, about 100-thousand years—
DJE: But in the Younger Dryas period you go from an ice age to a non–ice age in a hundred years. This can’t be explained by orbital forcing. Milankovich does not work for the Younger Dryas cooling period so why should it work for any of the others? So you start to think, if it’s not Milankovich, what is it? The first isotope measurements on ice cores in Antarctica showed sudden temperature changes and blew us all away. Boom−one minute it’s hot then it’s cold, clearly not explainable by orbital forcing. The idea came up that it all starts in the North Atlantic with the deep current being turned on and shut off. The question is, if this drives the Ice Ages, quick changes observed in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres should have a lag. It would take 500 to 2,000 years for the effect in the North Atlantic to be felt in the South Pacific or the North Pacific, because it has to go all around the world. You can’t transmit heat or cold across the tropical low of the equator via the atmosphere. If glaciations in the Northern Hemisphere are exactly synchronous with glaciations in the Southern Hemisphere, the North Atlantic current theory doesn’t work.
Most of my research has been in various parts of North America, New Zealand and South America and what we’ve found is that the glaciations are not only synchronous, they’re almost exactly synchronous. They are way more sensitively tuned in both hemispheres to occur simultaneously than we ever imagined. It blows the North Atlantic Current theory out of the water, which means you can no longer use current theory tacked onto Milankovich Cycles. It suggests Milankovich Cycles are not right either. Most glacial geologists would tell you the debate is over, but a number of people doing the kind of research I do that say the facts don’t work. What we see is unexplained, so there must be something else.
Yes, there’s something else. A growing number of us think the climate driver is solar. If you plot temperature versus time, it’s warm now and 10,000 years back, it was cold. The temperature goes up and down. If we look at the production rate of Carbon-14 and Beryllium-10, it follows temperatures for 10,000 years, not just the last 100 years, or the last 500 years. There was an anomaly at the time of the Younger Dryas, which lasted about a thousand years, and led to a return to the Ice Age. Then it melted like crazy, then it flipped back into cold. The significance of this is when you plot the isotopic values, the isotopes do the same thing and you can’t get simultaneous glaciations in both hemispheres if you have to rely on the North Atlantic deep current. The historic climate changes are probably driven by changes in solar activity.
There’s not enough data to make any kind of argument for still earlier climate cycles. We need more Beryllium-10 data. You can get carbon data out of the ice bubbles in the ice cores, but once you get beyond about 100,000 years, there’s very little data. You can’t prove anything one way or another. In a nutshell, I don’t believe in orbital forcing as a cause of glaciation. Most glacial geologists do, but I don’t for the reasons I just explained. The data doesn’t fit. A growing number of scientists realize this.
KLC: Here’s a chart that shows ocean levels spend a lot of time 300 feet lower than they are now and 100 feet higher than they are now. Does this match what you know about ocean levels?
DJE: Oceans rise and fall depending on how much ice there is on land. There’s a clear connection. In order to get significant change in ocean level, you have to tie up a lot of water in ice on the continents. The continental glaciers covered almost all of North America, clear down to Ohio, Kentucky and it was like the Antarctic ice cap, 10 to 15 thousand feet thick. Huge volumes of ice. The same thing in Europe, the same thing in Russia, Siberia. If you melt all of that ice, you get about 120 meters of sea level rise. That’s the difference. The fluctuation of 100 meters of sea level can be explained very nicely by ice volumes found during the Ice Age. People made calculations to see how much water was tied up in the glaciers, and what that should do to sea levels and so on. In terms of amount, a sea level change between 20 meters and 100 meters is what you’ll get during an interglacial period.
KLC: There’s so much talk about sea level changes, particularly increasing. Where are we in the one-thousand or five-thousand year cycle?
DJE: Nobody knows. There are suggestions. If the main driver is solar, there are long term solar cycles, but the trouble is long term solar cycles are hard to find because they don’t leave much evidence behind, unless it’s climate. Then you argue: ‘How do you know the root cause is solar?’ The lesson here is, until you solve the problem of what causes the ice ages, you won’t be sure about where we’re headed in the future. In my opinion, the odds are that the climate changes are driven by solar influences because of the isotope records, since correlation doesn’t work for North Atlantic Current theory and Milankovich Cycles. If recent climate changes aren’t caused by orbital forcing or deep ocean current or solar radiance, then what is it? You run out of options. It used to be that physicists would tell us that solar output was immutable, never changing, forever. Now physicists say they were wrong and solar constants aren’t constant, they really do change. You can get good correlation to 11-year sunspot cycles and solar irradiance. They are right on top of each other. They follow each other beautifully. When is the next ice age coming? Who knows?
KLC: For the record, Don, if you gave a gift to the world and controlled the thermostat, where would you place us with regard to climate history?
DJE: If I had to pick a climate that was good for the whole world, the perfect climate would be around the Medieval Warm Period…
KLC: Which is similar to where we are now…
DJE: We’re slightly below it. It depends on who you believe. When the Mann hockey stick curve was all the rage, they said the MWP didn’t happen. But we know it did happen. During this time, civilizations flourished in Europe because of the long growing season and other things. There is good reason to believe if you’re in that range, the growing season is longer, you can grow more food, you can grow more food in Northern latitudes, and you’ll support a more robust civilization. People will have more free time because they’re not starving to death, they can do more things, like art—
KLC: And study the climate—
DJE: Right, like study the climate, that sort of thing. If I had to pick a climate that would be a nice thing for the whole world, I’d say somewhere close to the MWP.
KLC: A little bit warmer than now…
DJE: Yes, a little bit warmer than now, but not much. There’s an interesting parallel. If you look at the temperature curves, we’ve been coming out of the LIA for about 400 or 500 years at a rate of a degree a century. Will we do this forever? A degree a century? We have the thirty-year wiggles in there, but when do we top out and start cooling again? During the early part of the Holocene, it was warmer than now. In fact, during the Climactic Optimum; it was warmer than it is now. If we are on an overall rising temperature curve coming out of the LIA, when we get to the temperature of the MWP, will we get another LIA, something really big or something in–between, like the 1880-1910 cooling? The answer is, we don’t know, we’ll have to wait and see. Until we have a better understanding of what causes climactic fluctuations, solar or not solar, and if it is solar, what the impact of solar fluctuations are, there are a lot of things we don’t know. Until we understand the mechanisms better, we don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know anybody who does know.
KLC: I had a bias going in. I didn’t believe any of the AGW-crap, but I was challenged to study and follow the arguments. I said, ‘I’ll open my mind as much as I can, see what they’re saying, and accept that maybe I’m wrong in my bias.’ But, that’s not the conclusion I came to.
DJE: If I were hard-pressed to give my overall assessment of the whole Gore-phenomenon, I would say two things, A, that it’s an out-and-out hoax, and B, it is probably the biggest scientific boondoggle since the days of Galileo. There is so much dogma and pressure put on scientists. Gore has so little proof, it’s disgraceful to the scientific world.
KLC: I think it’s more than that. There is self-loathing, they believe that man’s works are inevitably bad, so they contort to prove that result.
DJE: Follow the money. It’s big bucks. We’re talking about billions of dollars. If we’re headed toward catastrophic global warming, we have to do all these things they want. It will prove to be the biggest boondoggle since the religious dogmas of Galileo’s time.

Here is commentary on my interview with Human-Caused Global Warming skeptic Don Easterbrook:

This is absolutely the best thing I have read. It needs wide distribution.

- S. Fred Singer, PhD (Physics, Princeton, 1948)

His 12 books include Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming's Unfinished Debate, New York Times best seller Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years (with Dennis Avery) and The Scientific Case Against the Global Climate Treaty.

As background, Fred was the founding director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, founding dean of the School of Environmental and Planetary Sciences at the University of Miami, Professor emeritus of Environmental Sciences (University of Virginia), the director of the Center for Atmospheric and Space Physics, and Chief Scientist, U.S. Department of Transportation. Currently, he is the President of the Science & Environmental Policy Project (http://www.sepp.org)

Yes, I'm pleased and proud of the reception this interview has received. I'm ready for arguments and insults, fire away...

A year later, I asked Don for an update...

Ken: Hello Don. It has been nearly a year since your interview and I would like an update. Is there anything new that confirms or denies the thoughts we discussed last year? In my view, we had a year of a quiet sun and cooler temperatures, but that's just an observed (and interesting) correlation. Any comments are welcome.

Hi Ken, yup, the sun has behaved like this for 200 years. Cycle 23 now has more sunspotless days than all but the Dalton Minimum (when we had a Little Ice Age!) and we seem to be headed for the same thing. Some data is attached. Cheers, Don

Ohh... Ken, Ken, Ken - you're in for it now....

Good information - thank you for sharing this! It won't change an opinion if the person is closed minded and there are many... but as you correctly gave reference: " 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."

I use solar - it's a cheap way to heat water in the summer and I support the use of alternative energy because it makes sense and the emmissions from oil and fossil fuels don't do my lungs any good - but it's amazing to me the millions of people who dismiss any scientist that speaks against the global warming theory.

Why? I've said this before and I'll say it with your story - How can we expect to understand the truth if we're only open to hearing one opinion?

Thanks for the article and lastly...

[Burlington, Washington]
"Dr. Don Easterbrook, Professor Emeritus Geology, Western Washington University, author of 8 books, 150 journal publications with focus on geomorphology; glacial geology; Pleistocene geochronology; environmental and engineering geology.
Ken Coffman is the author of Hartz String Theory and other novels."

Got any proof that he has any education in this subject matter? (sarcasm...)

this is fake. i mean seriously

Mr. 4856, I don't think it could be any clearer how Dr. Easterbrook thinks and why. He's a real person...not hiding behind an alias...and neither am I. If you have a technical point to make or dispute any of the data, then make your case. Otherwise, you might get more out of spending your time preparing for another tough winter and praying for sunspots.

this news is an eye-opener..