Cooling-gate: Easterbrook defends the indefensible

Don Easterbrook seems to have decided that when under pressure, attack is the best form of defence. He’s replied to my original post and Tim Lambert’s added exposure of his statistical sleight of hand in this document (pdf)apparently composed as a reply to a query from Andy Revkin of the New York TimesDot Earth blog. Here’s how he ends his piece (it’s all in caps because that’s the way it is in his document, and I wouldn’t want to alter the data…):

CONCLUSION — THE ‘FAKE DATA’ CHARGE BY THE ‘TRUFFLE GROWER’ IS A COMPLETE LIE–THE DATA COMES FROM THE WORLD STANDARD OXYGEN ISOTOPE RECORD FROM THE GREENLAND ICE CORES, AND THE RECENT TEMPERATURE DATA IS FROM SATELLITES. ALL OF THIS DATA IS EASILY AVAILABLE FOR ANYONE WHO WANTS TO PLOT THEIR OWN GRAPHS. THE CHARGE THAT THIS DATA HAS BEEN ALTERED IS A DISPICABLE LIE.

Unfortunately for Easterbrook’s credibility, all he’s done is confirm his own mistakes. He not only attempts to defend the wrong graph, but confuses me with Tim Lambert and underlines the considerable statistical naivety in his analysis of recent global temperatures. To make matters worse, a pixel-by-pixel comparison of Easterbrook’s slide nine and the Global Warming Art equivalent shows that they are a perfect match — confirming my original charge: that Easterbrook had crudely altered the GWA original to better suit his storyline.

Continue reading “Cooling-gate: Easterbrook defends the indefensible”

Cooling-gate! Easterbrook fakes his figures, hides the incline

Don Easterbrook, the retired geology professor who predicted that the world was headed for decades of global cooling at the recent Heartland climate sceptic conference, appears to have crudely faked one of the key graphs in his presentation in order to reduce modern temperatures and make historical climate look warmer than justified. Looking through Easterbrook’s slides, it seems he has taken a graph of Holocene temperature variations prepared by Global Warming Art (used at Wikipedia), and altered it to fraudulently bolster his case.

Here’s Easterbrook’s graph (slide 9, ppt file available here):

Easterbrookholocene.009.jpg

When I saw that graphic, it struck me as strangely familiar. The typefaces and presentation are reminiscent of graphs prepared by Robert A Rohde for Global Warming Art. So I checked, and this is what I found:

Continue reading “Cooling-gate! Easterbrook fakes his figures, hides the incline”

Greasy Heart(land)

And so the party’s over, the tables in the ballroom at the Magnificent Mile Marriot Hotel in Chicago have been tidied up and the carpet vacuumed. The Monckton fan club have drifted away from their vigil in the shade of the trees on the sidewalk outside the lobby, and the speakers assembled from around the world have gone home — except for the ones still waiting in line outside Hot Doug’s for the duck fat fries and andouille special (Fridays & Saturdays only, well worth waiting for, I can assure you).

Luckily for us, however, Heartland are promising to make all the talks available on video, so we won’t have to miss any of the highlights. At the moment they only have the keynotes available, but there are quite a few Powerpoints available for download. I’ve been poking around in some of those…

Continue reading “Greasy Heart(land)”

The thing we need to fix is ourselves

If you have 18 minutes to spare, spend them watching coral reef ecologist Jeremy Jackson’s recent TED talk about the ways in which humanity is wrecking the world’s oceans. Climate change is only one of the factors driving the massive changes being seen in the global ocean, and if we’re to have any hope of dealing with them we have to work out how, as Jackson puts it, we’re going to put Humpty together again. And we won’t manage that unless we fix ourselves first. Compelling, unsettling viewing.

Hat tip: Resilience Science.

Fools rush in…

At the Heartland climate crank conference in Chicago a speaker predicts global cooling, and immediately becomes headline news for Morano and the denial echo machine. At the very same time, NOAA releases its global climate report for April, and notes that not only is April the warmest in the long term record, but that January to April is also the warmest start to any year. If you were gambling on 2010 becoming the undisputed warmest year ever, the odds just shortened considerably. As Joe Romm noted yesterday, the last 12 months is already warmer than any other 12 month period…

On the other hand, this is what Don Easterbrook thinks will happen:

Easterbrookcooling.jpg

Interesting graph. It might need some work, given that he seems to start all his blue lines almost 0.5ºC below where 2010 is likely to end up. I’ll bet it got warm applause from the crank crowd…

Meanwhile, Jeff Masters notes the continuing high sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic: “an eye-opening 1.46°C above average during April.” Not good news for the hurricane season…

Hat tip to Andy Revkin, first to note the delicious irony.

[Ricky Nelson]