Mixing religion, government, environmentalism explosive device.

Global Warming Doesn't Track CO2 for 11,700 Years

by Lewis Loflin

It's interesting that a shipload of "climate change" advocates are stuck in ice in Antarctica in summer and even ice breakers are unable to reach them. They went there to document proof of climate change - seems they found it.

Climate change is easy to document - the historical and geological record proves that. So why are global warming alarmists so adamant in ignoring the data?

We have Dr. James Hansen of NASA. His background is astrophysics and computer modeling and he has studied Venus. He has no credentials that I can find in earth science. He has been an advisor to Al Gore. Hansen is a paid political activist. In 2010 he earned as much as $1.2 million. He's another climate millionaire.

Dr. Don Easterbrook professor emeritus of geology at Western Washington University. He holds a bachelors degree, master's degree and PhD in geology. He has studied climate for over 50 years. He is not earning millions of dollars for political activism nor does he advocate prison time for those that disagree with him.

Yet I've tracked Dr. Easterbrook for years and he has never engaged in this kind of nonsense. I have no clue to his religious or political beliefs - that is the proper role of a scientist. He predicted based on scientific proof alone what we are seeing right now - climate change is normal and humans have little or no control over it.

He is the author of eight books and more than 150 journal publications, including "Evidence-Based Climate" published September 2011. In an interview with Josh Holloway January 13, 2012 said the following:

"My whole approach is to look at the data. Unfortunately, a lot of politics has gotten involved with the sciences that relate to climate change...My message is look at the data and make up your own mind."

The data is very clear. What the data is saying is that global climate changes have been going on since the beginning of geologic time, and especially in the last 10,000 years. We've had ice ages, and we've had warming periods. Most of the last 10,000 years have been warmer than it is now, for example.

We can dig this out of the geologic record. We can say that the past is really the key to the future. We can determine patterns that are replicated over and over and over again, and we can project those into the future to see what's likely to happen. What this is telling us is that the climate has oscillated back and forth: warm, cold, warm, cold, warm, cold.

Science is based on proof, not opinion and nobody has been able to dispute the facts he presents. Perhaps Dr. Easterbrook should be tried for heresy? The temperature changes we've seen are due to normal cycles related to the oceans, solar cycles, volcanism, etc. Yet environmental activists claim carbon dioxide equals global warming (now climate change since that hypothesis failed) are left confused that's not the case. But don't take my word on the lack of temperature rise with a rise in carbon dioxide.

From http://www.pnas.org vol. 108 no. 29 Robert K. Kaufmann, 11790-11793, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1102467108 says:

Given the widely noted increase in the warming effects of rising greenhouse gas concentrations, it has been unclear why global surface temperatures did not rise between 1998 and 2008. We find that this hiatus in warming coincides with a period of little increase in the sum of anthropogenic and natural forcings...Data for global surface temperature indicate little warming between 1998 and 2008 (1). Furthermore, global surface temperature declines 0.2 degrees C between 2005 and 2008.

Although temperature increases in 2009 and 2010, the lack of a clear increase in global surface temperature between 1998 and 2008 (1), combined with rising concentrations of atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases, prompts some popular commentators (2, 3) to doubt the existing understanding of the relationship among radiative forcing, internal variability, and global surface temperature. This seeming disconnect may be one reason why the public is increasingly sceptical about anthropogenic climate change...

Seeming disconnect??? Yet empirical proof tends to breed skepticism when the hypothesis is not proven. That was the National Academy of Sciences with egg on their collective faces. It was theirs and Dr Hansen's models that were proven wrong - Dr. Easterbrook right again. To continue with the man that got it right:

If there is one thing constant about climate it is that it's not constant. It's always changing. It has always changed. We are coming out of what has been called a "Little Ice Age," which happened about 500 years ago. For 10,000 years before that, the climate was actually warmer than it is right now, then we plunged into that Little Ice Age. We've been coming out of a hole ever since.

The last 400 years we've been thawing out of the Little Ice Age, if you like. So yeah, it's been getting warmer about one degree a century. It's been going on. There's nothing new about it. So the warming we saw, which lasted only from 1978 to 1998, is something that is predictable and expectable. When the ocean changed temperatures, global cooling is almost a slam dunk. You can expect to find about 25 to 30 years yet ahead of us before it starts to warm up again. It might even be more than that.

We've had 27 climate changes in the last 400 years: warm, cold, warm, cold. There have been four in this past century that have nothing to do with CO2, because CO2 wasn't a factor hundreds of thousands of years ago. We know that those are not at all related to CO2.

So why would we expect climate change today to be related to CO2? Well, if you can prove it, fine, but there is no single piece of real evidence that points to CO2. And the bottom line of this is that global warming ended in 1998.

We've had no global warming above the temperatures of 1998 since then - despite the fact that the U.N. group Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,predicted that there was going to be a one degree rise of temperature by 2010, it actually got cooler. Not by a lot, but a little bit.

We have been in a cooling trend now that's related to ocean temperatures offshore that have happened. The Pacific changes modes from warm to cool to warm, there's nothing in between. It's like an off/on switch. It switched from cool to warm in 1977, and we had 20 years of global warming. There is no doubt that we have had global warming - that's not the issue. Everybody agrees there has been. The question is what's causing it.

This is hardly "settled" but before we allow government to impose crushing economic controls some are advocating they better present proof that fits the facts - not computer models or silly religion.

I'm not interested in the usual attacks on Dr. Easterbrook, let's stick with the science I have observed as an amateur earth scientist for the last 45 years.
Dr. Easterbrook's website is http://myweb.wwu.edu/dbunny/
Ref. http://www.westernfrontonline.net/news/article_bafa1460-b553-52fc-a0fd-2d849ca44848.html

Religious Articles Index
Origins Christianity