[author’s note: this article was originally submitted as a “letter to the editor” to the Bellingham Herald, a newspaper that published an attack on Dr. Don Easterbrook. The Herald refused to publish my rebuttal. The executive editor, July Shirley (julie.shirley@bellinghamherald.com) explained “We only print letters from residents of Whatcom County. We are not publishing your letter.”]
Letter to the Editor by Dr. David Deming
I write in rebuttal to the March 31 letter by WWU geology faculty criticizing Dr. Don Easterbrook. I have a Ph.D in geophysics and have published research papers on climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. In 2006 I testified before the US Senate on global warming. Additionally, I am the author of a three-volume history of science.
I have never met Don Easterbrook. I write not so much to defend him as to expose the ignorance exhibited in the letter authored by WWU geology faculty. Their attack on Dr. Easterbrook is the most egregious example of pedantic buffoonery since the Pigeon League conspired against Galileo in the seventeenth century. Skepticism is essential to science. But the goal of the geology faculty at WWU seems to be to suppress critical inquiry and insist on dogmatic adherence to ideology.
The WWU faculty never defined the term “global warming” but described it as “very real,” as if it were possible for something to be more real than real. They claimed that the evidence in support of this “very real” global warming was “overwhelming.” Yet they could not find space in their letter to cite a single specific fact that supports their thesis.
There is significant evidence that would tend to falsify global warming. The mean global air temperature has not risen for the last fifteen years. At the end of March the global extent of sea ice was above the long-term average and higher than it was in March of 1980. Last December, snow cover in the northern hemisphere was at the highest level since record keeping began in 1966. The UK just experienced the coldest March of the last fifty years. There has been no increase in droughts or wildfires. Worldwide hurricane and cyclone activity is near a forty-year low.
One might think that the foregoing facts would raise doubts in scientists interested in pursuing objective truth. But global warming is not so much a scientific theory subject to empirical falsification as it is a political ideology that must be fiercely defended in defiance of every fact to the contrary. In the past few years we have been told that not only hot weather but cold weather is caused by global warming. The blizzards that struck the east coast of the US in 2010 were attributed to global warming. Every weather event–hot, cold, wet or dry–is said to be caused by global warming. The theory that explains everything explains nothing.
Among the gems in the endless litany of nonsense we are subjected to are claims that global warming causes earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions. Last year we were warned that global warming would turn us all into hobbits, the mythical creatures from J. R. R. Tolkien’s novels. I am not aware of any member of the WWU geology faculty criticizing these ridiculous claims. Their vehemence seems to be reserved for honest skeptics like Dr. Easterbrook who advance science by asking hard questions.
At the heart of the WWU geology faculty criticisms was the claim that peer review creates objective and reliable knowledge. Nonsense. Peer review produces opinions. Scientists, like other people, have political beliefs, ideological orientations, and personal views that strain their scientific objectivity. One of the most disgusting things to emerge from the 2009 Climategate emails was the revelation of an attempt to subvert the peer-review process by suppressing the publication of work that was scientifically sound but contrary to the reviewer’s personal views.
The infamous phrase “hide the decline” refers to an instance where a global warming alarmist omitted data that contradicted his personal belief that the world was warming. This sort of bias is not limited but pervasive. Neither is science a foolproof method for producing absolute truth. Scientific knowledge is always tentative and subject to revision. The entire history of science is littered with discarded theories once thought to be incontrovertible truths.
The WWU geology faculty letter asserted that technological advances arise from application of the scientific method. They claimed that airplanes were invented by scientists. But the Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics–not scientists. The modern age of personal computing began in a suburban California garage in 1976. The most significant technological advance in human history was the Industrial Revolution in Britain that occurred from 1760 through 1830. When Adam Smith toured factories and inquired as to who had invented the new machinery, the answer was always the same: the common workman. Antibiotics were not discovered through the rigorous application of scientific methodology but serendipitously when Fleming noticed in 1928 that mold suppressed bacterial growth.
Dr. Easterbrook’s contributions have furthered the advance of scientific knowledge and the progress of the human race. It matters not if a multitude of professors oppose him. As Galileo explained, it is “certain that the number of those who reason well in difficult matters is much smaller than the number of those who reason badly….reasoning is like running and not like carrying, and one Arab steed will outrun a hundred jackasses.”
David Deming
Professor of Arts & Sciences
University of Oklahoma
email: ddeming [at] ou.edu
==============================================================
A list of Dr. Easterbrook’s credentials are listed here:
http://myweb.wwu.edu/dbunny/dje_cv.html
Lack of warming over a certain period of time is INDEED a sign that models may be inaccurate. This isn’t my opinion but the opinion of the very scientists Cliff likes to like. Cliff, you seem to be in need of the message being delivered by the 3 fingers pointing back at you.
The WWU letter states, “ We concur with the vast consensus of science community that recent global warming is very real…..”Claims to the contrary fly in the face of an over whelming body of rigorous scientific literature.
Both the consensus of scientific community and rigorous scientific literature turned out to be quite unreliable and perhaps wrong to date as the globe has not warmed for 16 years, is actually cooling the last 10 years and the latest predictions are that there will be no warming for 5 years more [and possibly 2-3 decades thereafter ]. So much for “consensus of scientific community” being the only source of truth in this case . Even the public are seeing through this apparent flawed science as they trust it less and less in various polls.
It would appear that WWU is perhaps out of touch with the real climate temperature status and are in no position to criticize their fellow academic who got it right all along. This looks to me more like another academic jealousy motivated letter by the global warming alarmist camp rather than an honest debate about global warming . I am amazed how badly they treated their fellow academic.
Dodgy Geezer says:
April 8, 2013 at 2:27 pm
Theo Goodwin says:
Thank you, Glynn. I do credit Galileo with the creation and championing of scientific method.
“What about Roger Bacon?”
Bacon was a good thinker who did much to focus on empirical science. But he did not benefit from Newton’s synthesis of Kepler’s Three Laws and Galileo’s exposition of scientific method. In my opinion, Bacon was short on the theoretical side of empirical science.
Mike McMillan says:
April 8, 2013 at 4:32 pm
Excellent post. What Kepler accomplished in the conditions that he suffered is nothing short of miraculous.
Ryan says:
Is it normal for this site to give webspace to evolution deniers?
Well, since WUWT posted your imbecilic comment, apparently NOT!
Is that all you’ve got, you drive by troll?
Dr. Deming:
A superb letter. I’ve used chapters from your excellent second volume of the Science and Technology in World History in my courses and heartily endorse your contributions to that field to WUWT readers (your book contains a superb summary of the contributions of Chinese technology in the context of Confucian and Taoist influences in China).
As a fellow historian of science I am delighted to see a principled and rational, clearly argued defense of CAGW skepticism by another practitioner in the field. Well done, sir!
Another weak argument that the WWU letter makes is that Don Easterbrook used the temperature records derived from ice cores from central Greenland to make his case and that these records did not represent the globe . Yet we hear every day currently where the case is being for global warming by looking only at regional events like the melting of glaciers in Greenland or the drought in Texas or rains in Australia , all isolated short term events but the argumentis gets falsely stretched into a global event . You cannot argue rationally by having it both ways . The public sees through this false reasoning. Another point is possible errors in the graphs . Yet how many errors have been exposed on this blog about the global warming data sets , or the famous hockey stick or monthly changes to historical data sets globally. Yet they claim their science is solid .It would appear that rigourous peer reviewed science seems to be just as prone to mistakes as we saw with the wrong projected global tempertures for just the first two decades of their forecast . This was supposed to be the center piece of their science
Dodgy Geezer says:
April 8, 2013 at 12:43
You should read Wilber and Orville by Fred Howard, Dodgy Geezer. They invented what we know and love as the modern airplane in 1902 when they attached a moveable rudder to that year’s glider. That was when control of a heavier-than-air craft was finally solved. When Wilber demonstrated their aeroplane to the French six years later (nous sommes battus), the French were still using the rudder to make long laborious turns in still air. Would someone else have eventually solved the problem? I’m not so sure. The French had pictures of the Wright 1902 glider, Chanute’s (somewhat mistaken) description of the control surfaces, their patents, a lot of incentive (talk about nationalistic pride) and six years of trying. They still couldn’t find the trick. After Wilber’s demonstration of a working flying machine in 1908 near Le Mans, the progress of the airplane was rapid. Before that, it was a few flashy daredevils wearing goggles with colorful scarfs tossed over their shoulder making short hops in ridiculous crafts that had no hope of control over three axis.
I wrote to the WWU Geology dept. chair, Dr.Bernie Housen to tell him that Dr. David Deming has it quite right about the dept’s lame “position” statement. I told Dr. Housen, a paleomagnetitics expert, that they really stepped in it.
As a student (some decades ago) of glacial and Pleistocene geology, I have the the same skeptical view of the climate science mainstream that WWU emeritus professor Don Easterbrook has. The CAGW mania has damaged basic earth science research (through funding trends) in ways that will cripple our society’s advancement for generations to come.
btw, Louis H – get a life.
Kevin Phelan
Cliff Mass, considering the pathetic level of discourse of your own blog http://cliffmass.blogspot.ca/2013/03/why-dont-we-get-rain-and-wind-at-same.html
you should be well inspired in refraining criticizing Dr. Easterbrook.
Honestly, the letter from the WWU smacks of “denunciation”, “delation”, “public shaming” typical of totalitarian regimes and its authors should be ashamed of themselves. What’s next WWU people in your arsenal? How low are you planning to go?
TomRude….what are marvelously descriptive name! So my blog has a “pathetic level of discourse”. That comments REALLY has a lot to do about my criticism of Easterbrook’s work. And the letter from WWU “smacks of a totalitarian regime” because they are unhappy with Easterbrook’s opinions. I am surprised Anthony Watts would allow such a comment..cliff mass
REPLY: Cliff, we have a team of moderators here, and I don’t see every comment that passes through. That said, I don’t agree with that description, but at the same time I think maybe you are over the top on Dr. Easterbrook. I’ve never seen him this angry. – Anthony
I sent a link to your reply to @ralph_schwartz. Mr. Schwartz is a political reporter at the Bellingham Herald. the link is here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/08/rebuttal-to-the-attack-on-dr-don-easterbrook/
Cliff,
I guess your nasty remark “Easterbrook has often deviated from the facts or has made unsupported claims” made me a bit grumpy. But you still haven’t said what is wrong with my data. Your computer models can’t ‘prove’ anything–garbage in garbage out–and when they fail as miserably as yours have, your arguments lack credibility. You could learn some useful things from geologists–for example repeating patterns and cycles are quite useful as a predictive tool. My predictions since 2000 have so far been on target. Yours have failed badly. Should be a message there.
I wouldn’t call your statement about my ‘deviation from facts’ and ‘unsupported claims’ a ‘respectful tone,’ but I’ll give it a try if you will.
When we debated some years ago, you were absolutely certain that your models showed accelerating global warming and were predicting gloom and doom. Now you say that even as CO2 continues to rise, CO2-caused warming is weak? Why is that? Why do you continue to ignore the numerous periods of global warming in the past when CO2 could not have the cause? Can we hear from you about that?
May I also suggest that you bring yourself up to date on the mechanism of solar influence on climate? It’s not TSI so your comment is meaningless. Read Svensmark and you will understand.
Cliff M says:
The end of the century will be different
Perhaps Mr. M can back up this statement with some source citing ? Or, perhaps he can just retreat to his ‘closed’ blog. There, he can safely continue to deliver such sermon material to the watermelons of seattle.
People, the eco facists will cling to this CO2 causes ‘insert any claim you want’ until they are dead. This is more now of a war, having nothing to do with current climate science or solar physics. It’s about the same tired talking points, complete lack of source citing, deriding of those who would dare to ask another question and a current administration making a mockery of ‘transparency’ ! The CO2 propaganda methods and preaching by the media would make Goebbels quite proud.
Don,
There could well have been warmings and coolings in the past that were not caused by human-moderated CO2 levels in the atmosphere. I am NOT ignoring these other periods. Just because there are warming periods in the past that mankind did not cause, DOES NOT mean mankind can not be the cause of warming in the next century. There is a big logical weakness in your argument there.
I have said and still believe that there will be major warming later in this century as CO2 levels rise. But global warming due to mankind’s CO2 is weak NOW and natural variability can easily dominate it at this point. That is why we have had the decade or so hiatus. Why you and others think this is a big weakness in the global warming argument escapes me., and is an usupportable claim. Anyway, I am being very consistent here…please try to understand what I am saying.
And your appending of the PDO from past decades to the record to predict what will happen in the future is really wrong and deceptive. Yes, an unsupported claim. I stand by that characterization because it is true. And regarding the solar output and its effects, I have confirmed my statements with solar and radiation experts here at the UW. Solar variability cannot explain the temperatures evolution of the past few hundred years and will not protect us from major warming later in this century. Would you like to talk to them in person?…happy to arrange it.
As I have stated in my blog many times, the hyping of global warming has been a big problem and I appreciate the efforts of WUWT and Climate Audit to deal with it. This blog plays a very important role in keeping folks honest. But sometimes it seems to me that too many commentors on this blog believe that just because some folks exaggerate the threat and you can prove they are exaggerating, there is no issue. ..cliff
Thankfully there are other sources available (like WUWT) for those of us who prefer not to live, read and listen in echo chambers. Regretfully I am ashamed of my local university for their treatment of Dr. Easterbrook and beyond embarassed at the local print media’s refusal to print Dr. Deming’s rebuttal.
If anyone else from Bellingham, Whatcom County and Washington State have the time to share this article and your opinion with the Herald, WWU and “all” of our city, county and state political representatives; perhaps we can make amends for the closed minds that prevailed on the hill.
Professor Donald Easterbrook schools the Washington State Legislature
Washington State Legislature
Anthony, if I may answer:
First, I did link to a specific prosaic post of yours Cliff Mass, which read like Monsieur Jourdain being surprised to know he was speaking in prose! There were plenty of others to choose from.
Second, a letter by a group of scientists “unhappy with Easterbrook’s opinions” as you say so candidly does indeed smack of public denunciations, especially these days when those who dare disagree are branded either sociological cases or simply erased from Wikipedia courtesy of the likes of Connolley. Read the 20th century history, when and where such tactics were used and where it led!
Thirdly, I find repulsive the WWU group way of chastising a scientist while displaying allegiance to the power to be. That you would found it a perfect opportunity to pile up on Dr. Easterbrook could not elicit my sympathy, hence my initial comment. I should have refrained and I shall in the future avoid your cyclonic trough.
Cliff Mass:
In conducting your irrational assault on Don Easterbrook you have ignored all except his refutations of your nonsense. Why is that? Is it because you are aware you are making a complete fool of yourself?
For example, this piece of ludicrous twaddle which you posted at April 8, 2013 at 10:59 pm.
NO! The only “logical weakness” is yours!
The “warming periods in the past” demonstrate that there is no need to invoke an anthropogenic explanation of the warming period which ended a decade or two ago.
And the fact that pigs have not done anything unusual in the past “DOES NOT mean” pigs cannot fly in the next century. But so what?
Your version of astrology for telling the future has no more validity than any other when – as you admit – your version is not needed as an explanation of past “warming periods”.
And when that is pointed out then you have the gall to reply there is “logical weakness in your argument”. Unbelievable!
Richard
Good letter. I read it and thank you for it…. Bugger what the Herald said. They and their readership is the poorer.
What an excellent letter. Thanks for posting it. I would bet that if that letter was to congratulate their crit. of Dr Easterbrook it would have been published.
An excellent reply (though I think the Fleming example was a bit borderline – the mould was still “discovered” by a scientist, in that a scientist noticed the phenomenon).
I like your point about warm and cold weather. I enjoy taunting alarmists who claim global warming causes extremes of all types – I ask them “since global warming causes extreme cold and extreme heat, lets try inverting this prediction – if the world was cooling, would you expect to see abnormally average weather?
@ttfn says:
…You should read Wilber and Orville by Fred Howard…
Um. I suspect that there is little point reading this book if they assert that adding a rudder to an airframe (a control surface whose characteristics had been known for thousands of years) somehow resulted in the ‘invention of the airplane’. That is simply untrue.
The principles of an aircraft had been precisely described by Cayley 50 years earlier, covering structure, control and propulsion. The development of a practical airframe depended on engineering instantiation of those principles. Structural techniques were well established by the 1880s, adequate propulsion power was just about there around 1905, and control surface development was ongoing from about 1840.
The Wrights were working in the field of aircraft development in order to make money, and attempted to apply expansive patents to their control surface developments in order to monopolise the field. Elevators and rudders were well understood – the Wrights had used wing warping in order to provide lateral control, and they tried to assert that this was ‘the key to flight’.
In fact, longitudinal roll control is an essential part of aircraft control, but by no means the only important feature. And such control requirements were well understood – English inventor Matthew Piers Watt Boulton patented the first aileron-type device for lateral control via ‘flexed’ wings in 1868, so they had not even done anything new here. More importantly, wing-warping is not scaleable, while hinged surfaces are. Esnault-Pelterie was using such surfaces in 1904 – these are the lateral control systems we use nowadays. It is not a coincidence that the word we use for them – aileron – is French. They were the inventors, owing nothing to the Wrights.
The Wrights tried to enforce world-wide licensing fees of up to $1000 per day for ANY aircraft using ANY kind of lateral control ( a phenomenal figure for the early 1900s), and stifled any chance the US had of developing an aircraft industry until the US Government stepped in to the argument when they entered WW1. This is the major reason why the Wrights had so much publicity as ‘inventors of the aircraft’.
The assertions that the Wrights ‘invented’ the aircraft can be traced to the legal in-fighting over this patent war. They certainly developed the first ‘practical’ aircraft (by a short head over several other independent developers), but one whose control systems were not capable of further development. The French had independently invented a much better answer to the problem of lateral control, one we are still using today.
The WWU letter recommends to the Federal and State governments that they should only rely on rigorous peer reviewed science when it comes to global warming. Yet it is this so called ‘rigorous peer reviewed’ global warming science that has gotten the climate science so wrong by predicting doom and gloom and unprecedented temperature rises when the globe has done exactly the opposite the last 16 years . If I was a government official and a body of science approached me with such a request and I took a look at their dreadful track record, would you take them seriously? Would you invest with an investment firm that has predicted its stock wrong for 16 years? Can the world take such a risk when so much of the world welfare hangs on the balance? Ask the people of UK, Eastern Europe and ASIA after 5-6 years of brutal cold winters whether they think that global warming is real and should they only prepare for unprecedented global warming. Thousands are no longer alive as they died prematurely because of the extreme cold and the failure of their governments in not heeding possible global cooling warnings such as Don Easterbrook made years ago. Peer reviewed process is not a panacea to get at the truth if the process is restricted and controlled by a few individuals who use in ways not intended as we saw with the Climategate experience.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/?s=peer+review
Dodgy Geezer says:
April 9, 2013 at 5:28 am
“Um. I suspect that there is little point reading this book if they assert that adding a rudder to an airframe (a control surface whose characteristics had been known for thousands of years) somehow resulted in the ‘invention of the airplane’. That is simply untrue.”
Sigh… until 1902, they assumed a fixed rudder would be adequate. Making it moveable solved their final problem of control, which they called well-digging. I can appreciate your disdain for their not-invented-here attitude, but their patent was way more deserved than Bell’s which beat some poor hapless Brit to the office by mere hours. Consider the time-line:
1902 – They invented the first truly controllable aircraft.
1904 – Santos-Dumont lamented in Dans l’Air that man wouldn’t achieve flight for 50 years.
1905 – The Wrights were flying circles for over an hour at a time.
1906 – The Wrights patent was finally approved, so they boxed up their airplane and began marketing it (badly).
1906 – Santos-Dumont decided he may have been too hasty in writing off the airplane and began work on the 14-bis.
1908 – The French were making fairly long hops and attempting to turn the aircraft using the rudder. They were still under the impression that its purpose was the same as the rudder on a boat.
1908 – The Wrights, spooked by the progress in France, lowered their demands and demonstrated the first true airplane in both France and the US. By all accounts, the French were quite impressed. After that, aviation progress finally took off.
There’s more to an airplane than its component parts. Yeah, Santos-Dumont added little wings to try to keep his big wings level. Yeah, plenty of people saw how a boat turned and added a rudder to their airship. But only the Wrights understood each part’s true purpose. If Cayley really had worked out the problem of control as you claim, he certainly failed to make it clear. I’ve gone off-thread long enough. Take your best shot and then read just about any book on the Wrights. You may discover that what they accomplished from 1900 thru 1905 while working on the problem part-time was really quite impressive.