A surprisingly balanaced look at GW in NYT

I was flabbergasted that this story appeared in the NYT. They keep this up, I might have to rescind my comments about liberal bias.

"Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet," Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. "Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change."

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."

Mind you, all of the opposing scientists they quote are oil company shills...right Robear?

Mind you, all of the opposing scientists they quote are oil company shills...right Robear?

At this stage of the discussion, that constitutes a cheap shot.

At this stage of the discussion, that constitutes a cheap shot.

Then accept my apologies. It was intended only in jest.

Thanks. You may not have noticed I'm getting nibbled to death in some of these conversations.

So what did you think of the overall conclusion, that Gore's movie paints the big picture correctly? Any reason to doubt the authorities on that? Will that incline you to consider it as something useful in, say, educating the public? Since I haven't seen it, I still regard it as something of a propaganda piece.

Having trouble finding Dr. Don Easterbrook's papers, except that he's noted as a leader of the abrupt climate change advocates. GW is a slow process in the mainstream analysis. The abrupt change movement is described as very new.

In particular, I'd like to see his 15,000 year temperature trends and related analysis. Maybe that will be one of the things that shows up on his website's download section.

Gore is like a walking talking strawman. His movie had some flaws, and some inaccuracies, but like Robear said, his general idea flows with the mainstream science. Of course, I've not seen it - for all I know, it could be comprised entirely of penguins singing and dancing.

Robear wrote:

Having trouble finding Dr. Don Easterbrook's papers, except that he's noted as a leader of the abrupt climate change advocates. GW is a slow process in the mainstream analysis. The abrupt change movement is described as very new.

If you get me a standard format reference, I can probably pull the articles, provided they are either a western journal or a mainstream foreign one. Can't reprint content obviously, but I can take a look-see or post the abstracts, which I don't believe constitutes infringement.

So here's a look at temps sourced from the Vostok station ice cores. Graph goes back about 160,000 years. It shows a variability from the current norm (15C) of as much as 9 degrees below to three degrees above. Currently, the warming has been 1C from about 1860 to about 1990. So that's 150 years.

Dr. Don Easterbrook is entirely correct when he says we've seen temperature changes on the order of 20 times the currently observed one in the past.

However. Look at the long-term graph. That temperature change he refers to took place all right - over about 20,000 years. At a rate of 1 degree per hundred fifty years, we will mirror that change in 1800 years. That's ten times the largest rate of change in the long-term records.

Now, Johnny's mentioned in a conversation today that during the Late Dryas period, or somesuch, there was a change of about 20 degrees in just seven years. My question is this: what effects did it have? If we could figure that out, we'd have a better handle on this issue.

Or would we? The issue with that is, we know we are not seeing decadal swings of anything like that magnitude, even century swings, within that usual period of near-term study (say, 400 years). So even if abrupt change of that sort is possible, it isn't happening now. And that's an important thing to remember.

Sorry guys, I think we need to get this particular debate under some kind of control. I'm going to lock up the various Global Warming threads and create one for the entire discussion so that there's not a new GW thread every few minutes.

Hope that doesn't seem unreasonable.

Please redirect all GW discussion here.