Comments on: Cooling-gate: the 100 years of warming Easterbrook wants you to ignore

By: Gareth

Gareth — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 22:38:31 +0000

That's an interesting point. It's not clear from the header to the data file whether Alley uses 1950 or 2000. I assumed 2000 because that was when his original paper (Alley, R.B. 2000. The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland. Quaternary Science Reviews 19:213-226.) was published. If it really is 1950=P, then Easterbrook's being even more deceptive!

By: Phil.

Phil. — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 22:16:46 +0000

I was wondering why you were referring to 1905, my understanding is that it is 95 years before present, but Alley's data uses the conventional 1950 = present so it should be 1855.

By: Glacier Guy

Glacier Guy — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 17:21:03 +0000

I am fairly certain Easterbrook's motivation isn't political, ideological, or financial (he's apparently well off enough to donate a substantial endowment to the Geol. Soc. of America for a research award in his name, so he doesn't need money). Having heard him speak, and talked to others, his primary motivation seems to be ego, and the sense that he's never gotten the scientific recognition he seems to think he deserves. If you read his email to Mauri Pelto in Gareth's recent post on "caught red handed," note that Easterbrook states that he started measuring mass-balance on Mt. Baker glaciers well ahead of Mauri (he didn't…one of his students did some work on it, which he takes credit for, but not with field measurements like Mauri has). Easterbrook's territorial instincts appear to be driven by a rather enormous need to "own" an area scientifically (i.e., ego).

By: » AÃ° fela nÃºverandi hlÃ½nun Loftslag.is

» AÃ° fela nÃºverandi hlÃ½nun Loftslag.is — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 09:58:45 +0000

[...] Cooling-gate: the 100 years of warming Easterbrook wants you to ignore [...]

By: Gareth

Gareth — Mon, 31 May 2010 23:35:05 +0000

Ah, I see what you mean. I drew the arrow to point to the line, not to replicate its precise position on Easterbrook's original. I'll follow up by email. Cheers.

By: A Bryant

A Bryant — Mon, 31 May 2010 23:18:55 +0000

Thanks Gareth,
The plot of Alley's data is accurate (I also used original data…thank you MartinM).

My nit-pick is that the red label (and arrow) showing Easterbrook's "present day" is plotted too far to the left. Alley's reconstruction endpoint (year=1905) should be located at 0.095 on the X axis (i.e., exactly where your estimated 2.5ºC/Century incline begins). As it stands the red arrow points towards 3k years BP. That is incorrect.

Again, thanks for a terrific website. It is one I enjoy following. Send me a pm and I would be happy to help. And yes, I do have the necessary skills to do so.

By: Gareth

Gareth — Mon, 31 May 2010 22:18:21 +0000

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for the kind comment. If you take a look at the bigger version of my graph (click on the one in the post), you can see more clearly where the Alley data stops and my straight line begins. It should be at 100 yBP, give or take a gnat's whisker. Re the temperature at the GISP2 core site, see the paper referred to in MartinM's comment above. It suggests that 2.5ºC is about right for the warming there. In any event, and as you say, the precise detail doesn't change the central message – that Easterbrook is begin deliberately misleading when he calls 1905 "modern".

By: A Bryant

A Bryant — Mon, 31 May 2010 20:35:01 +0000

Gareth, you (and Martin M and others) have done some very good detective work here…much appreciated! Your plot of Alley's (2000) data is accurate (or at least I get the same result when I did it). However you have plotted Easterbrook's "present =1905" too far to the left…it should be very close to the right-hand Y axis (the year 1905 equates to 0.095 thousand years before 2000).

I also downloaded the GISS anomalies for the Angmagssalik station. The trend over the 1905-2004 period is not significantly upwards or downwards. However the average value over that century is -30.6 degrees C, with 95% confidence intervals of -30.8 to -30.4 degrees. This is a little less that a 1 degree above Alley's ice-core record temperature reconstruction that ends in 1905.

The key message is that Easterbrook demonstrably plagiarized material, modified it and mis-represented it as something that it wasn't. I was always taught that in science this kind of behaviour is generally frowned upon.

Bravo, and keep up the great work.

By: Neven

Neven — Sun, 30 May 2010 18:42:10 +0000

Thanks for the answer, ctg. I knew I had seen that graph before.

By: Whose lie is it anyway? Easterbrook caught red-handed â€” Hot Topic

Whose lie is it anyway? Easterbrook caught red-handed â€” Hot Topic — Sun, 30 May 2010 09:04:54 +0000

[...] proxies”, drew a new baseline (based, by the look of it on an attempt to replicate the 1905 “present” he prefers to use), and labelled the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice [...]