Readers may recall that WUWT published this defense of Dr. Don Easterbrook last week:
Rebuttal to the attack on Dr. Don Easterbrook by Dr. David Deming
I enjoyed this passage from Dr. Deming:
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.
Dr. Deming rebuttal was an unsolicited response to a March 31 letter by WWU geology faculty in the Bellingham Herald.
In response to criticisms of that letter, one of the original signers of the letter critical of Dr. Don Easterbrook’s testimony before the Washington State Senate Energy, Environment and Telecommunications Committee, Dr. David Hirsh wrote this stunning response:
“I don’t want the media to present both sides of an issue.”
It is hard to imagine a more small minded response from an academic.
Despite Dr. Hirsch’s small mindededness, it seems that both sides got an airing after all. The Bellingham Herald has published Dr. Easterbrook’s response.
This part caught my eye:
The Bellingham Herald opinion column is a diatribe against me personally (just read the slurs and innuendos) containing misrepresentations, no real data to support their contentions, and displays an abysmal ignorance of published literature. The reason becomes apparent when you realize that not a single one of the 13 Western Washington University authors has ever published a single paper on global climate change and none have any expertise whatsoever in climate issues.
Read the whole response here:
http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2013/04/14/2958336/easterbrook-disputes-wwu-faculty.html
I followed the link and read the letter through the comments.
Well at least as many as I could navigate.
What they were saying was bad enough (almost all pure Ad Hoc) but trying to follow their arguments through the threads was near impossible.
Thanks Anthony for this wordpress commenting method.
Good choice.
cn
Easterbrook uses an incorrect argument in his reply though.
Increasing CO2 has very little warming effect not because there is so little of it, but because there is so much of it that it already absorbs most of the energy available, ie its close to saturation.
The first 30ppm absorbs 50% of the radiation, then each doubling absorbs half of the remainder as per the beer lambert equation.
Of course the IPCC claims each doubling causes the same forcing because some idiot doesn’t know the difference between absorption and absorbance!
Dr. Hirsch is a disgrace to scientific inquiry, but a champion to censorship.
Don Easterbrook has enlighten a nice little town and the Bellingham Herald, plus millions more through the WUWT and the internet. The lie expands, collapses and the warmist fall flat on their faces. Once more.Dr. Hirsch set fellow warmist and himself up and opened the door for Don to set him right. Another case of foot in mouth solved. Great job Dr. Deming and thanks to Don.
I echo:
stan stendera says:
April 14, 2013 at 10:02 am
Good for the Bellingham Hearald publishing Dr. Easterbrooks reply. Good on Dr. Easterbrook for going on the attack as I urged in the thread below this one. Good on WUWT for bringing the WWU nonsense to our attention.
You can click on a drop-down list at the head of the comments to select the most popular ones. Those are skeptical.
The Bellingham Herald owes Dr Easterbrook and Anthony a huge thank you. I bet their readership has never been as high, or as wide, before.
Anyway, good on them for giving Dr E. a platform to respond to the anti-intellectual, schoolyard bullying tactics of people who are a disgrace to the tradition of scholarship. And that applies irrespective of whether Dr E. is right or wrong.
Why has my comment above been put into moderation? If I have broken a rule, what is it?
As I commented previously on this blog, history will prove that Don Easterbrook was among the first group of scientists who pointed out that based on geological history, our climate would more likely cool rather than experience unprecedented warming for the next several decades and that the global climate would experience alternating periods of cooling and warming leading to 2100 rather than straight line warming of 3-6 degrees C. . The fact that global temperatures have now stopped rising and are actually in decline clearly proves the validity of his extensive research. Rather than smearing a fellow professor from your own University, any normal University would honor and recognize his valued contribution to climate science and the university . Unfortunately things do not seem that normal at WWU and their geology department.
WWU Campus Reads Book for 2013-14…Early Warming: Crises and Response in Climate Changed North by Nancy Lords. The Authors credentials seem to be that she was a lecturer on adventure cruise ships. The description appears to be anecotal accounts. This might give you an idea as to where this university’s focus is.
As a major contributor to the WWU Foundation, I ended my contributions several decades ago. WWU is functionally about getting the money, big salaries, and promoting their progressive agendas. The funding from the state has decreased substantially by the same officials they elected. The CAGW groupies of course are applying for funding around CAGW research, so how dare anyone point out flaws in their Titanic mind set, especially one of their own. Thus the circled wagon approach to smear and defame.
Rob JM says “Easterbrook uses an incorrect argument in his reply though.
Increasing CO2 has very little warming effect not because there is so little of it, but because there is so much of it that it already absorbs most of the energy available, ie its close to saturation.”
Rob, while what you say about saturation and subsequent doublings of greenhouse gas is true, what Dr Easterbrook was drawing attention to was the small amount of actual greenhouse work is done by CO2. It is water vaper that is king of the greenhouse. WV covers a much larger spectum than CO2 and except in a very narrow bandwidth WV covers all absorption bandwidths where CO2 is active. This means that CO2 is a bit player in the greenhouse effect. I think the more this is pointed out to laymen the better. This is where the lukewarmers like Mosher get it wrong. If there was a significant positive feedback in the atmosphere then we would already have seen it. The greenhouse effect is fast it does not take days, weeks, months or years for IR to move up through the atmosphere on the mean free path. Then there are other things which impact significantly more than the GHE such as day and night, and seasonal changes. The Earths climate system seems to have a low response to CO2 changes.
Ed a little more:
WWU’s Western Reads Selects ‘Early Warming: Crisis and Response in the Climate-Changed North’ as its 2013-14 Book
“The book will be given to all incoming Western freshmen and will be available for sale at the Western Associated Students Bookstore. Programming related to the book topic will be held through the academic year.”
Our schools have become a cesspool of one sided propaganda! A programming related to the books topic will be held, yet no opposing views will be allowed.
Hmmm. I’m no legal expert, but it seems to me that Dr. Easterbrook has been libeled. I think I would be contacting an attorney if I was him. Couldn’t both the WWU faculty members and the Bellingham Herald be held accountable for this?
wwb
What really is troublesome beyond the fact that the freshman classes are required to read this kind of what I would call a feel good documentary, is that the Geologic Department apparently supports the author’s assumptions on sea level increases. In looking at the faculty at least those that gave bios it’s pretty vanilla. It looks weighted toward structure and tectonics and not much paleontology. Although a number of staff did not show a bio maybe they are TA’s. Anyhow as someone else observed not much if any paleoclimatology. So why were they so adamently opposed to Easterbrook? It does not at first light make a lot of sense unless the Administration was giving leverage.
herkimer says:
April 15, 2013 at 4:43 am
” Rather than smearing a fellow professor from your own University, any normal University would honor and recognize his valued contribution to climate science and the university.”
Imagine, when the last CAGW lie collapses, so many academics are going to wish theirs was the first university to abandon the false AGW theory.
Only one can be the first. after that the bandwagon will fill up quickly.
BTW, Mr Watts and CO. , This new posting method is fantastic. Ones’ corrections (I’m always correcting myself. I should proofread better.) appear immediately below the goof.
KUTGW.
Would be nice if the “CAGW lie collapses,” but I doubt it. Social movements, mass hysterias, etc., just don’t rise and fall that way. Typically, they have a long-ish gestational period followed by a rapid rise, a peak of several years, and then a long-tailed decline. You might respond that this case is different because never before has a popular delusion been so well financed and pushed so hard, but neither has there ever been such a hard push-back from the realist minority (and the ‘net is on both sides of the equation, so it just cancels out).
Realists need to get over the comforting delusion that a day of reckoning is at hand, take some pride that their good efforts have saved the industrialized world from complete economic suicide, and accept that its pushers will likely not be called to accounts, but are on a slow & well-deserved slide into obscurity.
The trouble with scientists – and probably with everybody else – is that when they get an idea into their heads that they can understand it is almost impossible to dislodge. New data, new interpretations, new ideas, none of them seem to to have much effect. About the only time change occurs is when the current ‘status quo’ is “We don’t know”. Thus geologists were wedded to “land bridges” which mysteriously rose and fell to explain animals and plants crossing the Behring Strait, and even the Atlantic. New idea – continental drift? Can’t happen. Took another 40 years till the data re seafloor magnetic reversal patterns showed continental drift was a reality, and only because nobody really believed in “land bridges” anyway. It is even worse when a reputable scientist from the “wrong” discipline upsets very long held ideas, such as Dr Velikovsky did with his suggestion of the recent origin of Venus, and his revision of Egyptian chronology – where many, if not most, consider the “Accepted” chronology as being in grievous error, even if no-one can agree on what the correct chronology should be.
One little point, at one time, all the carbon locked up in coal beds, oil deposits, gas fields and the like had to be in the form of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for the trees to extract it, grow and then turn into coal, oil, gas, etc. And all the foraminifera, diatoms, and the like, had to extract CO2 from seawater to build their shells to turn into chalk, limestone, gypsum and marble. And where did the oceans get the CO2 from to replace the depletion of dissolved CO2 from? The atmosphere! So what was the then concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere before the coal beds and limestones, etc were laid down? And what was the global temperature? Presumably it must have been rather supportive of life or the forests could not have grown nor were the oceans boiling.