Guest post by David Middleton
Back in my early days of “debating” climate change on the Internet, I ran across this New York Times article:
From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype
By WILLIAM J. BROADMARCH 13, 2007
Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which won an Academy Award for best documentary. So do many environmentalists, who praise him as a visionary, and many scientists, who laud him for raising public awareness of climate change.
But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.
“I don’t want to pick on Al Gore,” Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. “But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data.”
[…]
In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore’s claim that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this” threatened change.
Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.”
Getting personal, he mocked Mr. Gore’s assertion that scientists agreed on global warming except those industry had corrupted. “I’ve never been paid a nickel by an oil company,” Dr. Easterbrook told the group. “And I’m not a Republican.”
[…]
Don J. Easterbrook… Where had I seen that name before? Funny thing: I remember the names of the authors of many of my college (1976-1980) textbooks.
- The Oceans by Sverdrup, Johnson & Fleming
- Principles of Geology by Press & Siever
- Principles of Sedimentology by Friedman & Sanders
- Structural Geology by Billings
- Manual of Field Geology by Compton
- Evolution of the Earth by Dott & Batten
- Mineralogy by Berry & Mason
- Petrology of Igneous and Metamorphic Rocks by Hyndman
- Meteorology by Donn
- Principles of Geomorphology by Don J. Easterbrook
Who could have guessed that 30+ years later, I would be “fighting” alongside Dr. Easterbrook in the Internet climate change wars?
If that isn’t cool enough, my introduction to climatology occurred in my first semester of college, when I took a course in physical geography.
One day, I was curious as to what my physical geography textbook had to say about the greenhouse effect and global warming… So I dug it out of a box in the garage and opened it to find…
The late Reid Bryson was known as the “father of scientific climatology” and a prominent AGW skeptic. This is what they had to say about the so-called greenhouse effect…
This was only 14 years before Al Gore and James Hansen “invented” Anthropogenic Gorebal Warming!
“As a planet, the Earth is not warming or cooling appreciably on average…”
The book was published in 1974, just before Earth was nearly plunged into an ice age.
The rate of warming from 1975-2010 is almost identical to the rate of warming from 1910-1945 (smack in the middle of “not warming or cooling appreciably on average” climate).
This leads to the following equation:
- Green = “not warming or cooling appreciably on average”
- Red = Gorebal Warming crisis.
Green ≈ Red
Therfore AGW is 
QED
wow.
seriously dumb textbook.
we knew more in 1896 than that textbook.
Steve… I think I might still have at least one of my English textbooks… 😉
“WE” knew more?
Just how old are you? 😎
And of course in fifty years time nobody is going to be saying that about the textbooks you endorse today…
A peek at Science in 1896.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/1896/02-15/
PS Not to demean what were advances in 1896.
But this is 2017.
“The Hockey Stick” is not an advance.
Computers can calculate much faster than anyone could calculate in 1896. They can also produce error much faster.
(PS What program do you use to store historical data? Does it drop values that don’t pass the software’s “test”? Who programs the “tests”?”
“The Coming Ice Age” will soon be resurrected/rehabilitated/refurbished/renovated/re-imagined/redeployed…
A true scientific detective story
I find old textbooks fascinating, too, and have found many gems and bargains on abebooks.com (am not affiliated with them). For example, several copies of Don Easterbrook’s book are on sale right now for less than 10 bucks (but plus shipping).
For some obscure reason, I still have my old uni test books.
Last time I checked in, Newton’s laws hadn’t changed AND CO2 was harmless, odourless gas which assisted plant growth.
The CO2 horsesh*t has to stop.
I have observed that much academic activity these days ignores anything that is not in digital format. It’s effect is to airbrush out those works that form the background and evidence base for many disciplines, enabling modern day academics to re-invent that discipline.
I’ve got an old geology textbook from the early 60s too.
It has no mention of plate tectonics and its descriptions of orogeny are thus bizarre to the modern reader…
Science moves on… even climate science
Geosynclinal orogeny ROCKS!
How can it when consensus is the proof that something is right?
At 3.00 on this video you will hear the Australian FM, Julie Bishop, discussing the impact of AGW in her region:
http://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2017/09/20/intv-amanpour-julie-bishop-unga.cnn/video/playlists/amanpour/
I was at Earth Day I in Madtown, when Bryson was both alive and an advocate of Climate Change, from the cooling side. I believe it was he who gave a lecture stating that, at the rate of airline traffic in 1970, that before the turn of the 21st century, the contrails would merge into one big cloud, so that the sun would rarely be seen by the year 2000.
Not only was that wrong, it was spectacularly wrong, in that shortly after ED I, airlines were de-regulated and airline traffic grew exponentially, so that, if Bryson was correct, his predicted result should have happened much earlier.
I also believe Bryson was wrong on the effect of aerosols on the atmosphere.
Before he died, Bryson turned on his heels and became a Warmist. THat should have destroyed his reputation, given his earlier pro-cooling stance, but alas, it did not.
I too remember the pre-hockey stick climagte graph, showing both mideaval warming and Little Ice Age, which Mann “destroyed” with his “hockey stick” nonsense. I read one of his early papers on that, and in less than 15 minutes had to conclude that he and his “study” were frauds, largely because they “eliminated” the previously mentioned climate phenomena.
When I took intro Geology or “rocks” (I was a C student in that class, I’m afraid), the prof talked a lot about plate tectonics, to some extent still a recent discovery in 1973; he also said there was speculation about whether the earth is moving toward another ice age, or away from one. What’s the latest on that?
I am a 1978 geology grad (U of Western Ontario). Took “glaciology” from Driemanis. We recognized our expectations of climate changes were the lower frequency changes. High frequency, natural events as post-1979 may well have been much greater than recent – and new Greenland ice core data indicates this to be true.
There is nothing unusual historically in the post-50s temperature rise. The claim of a unique attribution to CO2 is what is unusual.
Geologists are the hated skeptics because we have technically based context. We know things change bigtime and quickly for unknown reasons. We accept large uncertainty. The alarmists KNOW. Al Gore is RIGHT. There is no middle ground.
“This was only 14 years before Al Gore and James Hansen “invented” Anthropogenic Gorebal Warming!”
I recently re-read “Asimov: On Chemistry” a collection of Asimov’s essays on the subject. I was surprised to find one on global warming, as I mistakenly remembered reading it elsewhere.
Regardless, I was highly surprised to read the original date of publication of that piece of 1959. The theory and the panic has been around quite a while.
For the record, it is one of the worst pieces in the book, Asimov dutifully accepts calculations as fact, not challenging that the _known_ uncertainty in those calculations was larger than the final result, and that there existed a host of unknowns where rough assumptions were made. Little, if any, experimental or empirical work was provided for support.
My guess is that kids aren’t getting taught climate basics, but climate change. You can tell you’re arguing with one because they will deny we have opposing seasons in the northern and southern hemisphere; they will deny that climate is determined by location; they will deny there are climate zones, etc. It is an exercise in futility to argue with them. They were taught that CO2 determines climate, period. They have never heard of climate biomes/zones. they think the planet has only one climate, and CO2 controls it. I just got through talking with another one a little while ago.
I love this site! This comment thread in particular has been very enjoyable to read. Although I have no scientific background, I have always cultivated a healthy scepticism about most of what I read in newspapers, or I hear on the Biased Broadcasting Corporation here in the UK. I never bought the idea of AGW, for the same reason I was never convinced that the ozone hole would allow cosmic rays to give us all skin cancer, or that acid rain would destroy all the forests in Northern Europe and Russia, or ocean acidification was going to turn our seas into a toxic soup; that kind of stuff. It’s great to read fact-based opinions from educated people who have no hidden agenda. Thanks, WUWT commenters, you’ll do for me!
When I took intro geology or “rocks” (I was a C pupil in that course of study, I’m afraid(p)), the prof talked a luck about scale tectonics, to some extent still a recent breakthrough in 1973; he also said there was venture about whether the world is moving toward another frappe age, or away from one.
I never witness AGW proponents referencing textbooks that excuse the numerical cornerstone for any of their claims.