Don Easterbrook parties like it is 1855

Posted by Tim Lambert on January 6, 2011
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Hey, remember how Don Easterbrook deliberately falsified a baseline to make it look like past temperatures were warmer than current ones? Well, he’s at it again. He has taken a graph of temperature proxies for Greenland and used the value for 1855 as the “present”. Gareth Renowden comments

1855 — Easterbrook’s “present†— was not warmer than 1934, 1998 or 2010 in Greenland, let alone around the world. His claim that 9,100 out of the last 10,500 years were warmer than recent peak years is — to put it bluntly — pure bullshit, based on a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of data. He should withdraw his article, and apologise to those he has misled.

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Comments

  1. #1 Ben Haslem
    January 7, 2011

    I saw the Fig 5 graph on Tim Blair’s blog a few days ago and thought: what a load of crock!

  2. #2 gallopingcamel
    January 12, 2011

    Easterbrook said that 9,000 of the last 10,000 years were warmer than 1855.

    You can check this very easily by plotting the GISP2 data available from:
    ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/isotopes/gisp2_temp_accum_alley2000.txt

    Gareth Renowden owes Easterbrook an apology. Tim Lambert should also apologize but I guess that would be a first.

  3. #3 Chris O'Neill
    January 12, 2011

    gallopingcamel:

    Easterbrook said that 9,000 of the last 10,000 years were warmer than 1855.

    Maybe, but what he was actually being criticised for was, among other things, this statement:

    What both of these temperature curves show is that virtually all of the past 10,000 years has been warmer than the present.

    You should apologize for implying Renowden and Lambert weren’t making a genuine criticism.

  4. #4 jakerman
    January 12, 2011

    >*Easterbrook said that 9,000 of the last 10,000 years were warmer than 1855.*

    Wrong camel, Easterbook does exactly what Tim and Gareth said. Easterbrook falsely claims that:

    >*Of the past 10,500 years, 9,100 were warmer than 1934/1998/2010*

    You owe Gareth and Tim both an apology, a first if you do provide it.

  5. #5 NikFromNYC
    May 21, 2011

    This very misleading graphical debunking of Easterbrook fails to switch to the required anomaly scale instead of an absolute scale to deal with the mismatch between his chosen recent temperature reconstruction and the long ice core. He plots TWO 1855 temperatures instead of one! If you actually match up the 1855 temperatures, as any sincere effort would require, you get exactly what skeptics claim history is like: a just as hot MWP and a hotter Roman period.

    http://oi53.tinypic.com/sg2wav.jpg

    At best he has corrected an error that the ice core ends in 1855 instead of 2000 (or 1950), even though the raw data file claims it’s 2000. Whew! I had been posting a GIF animation of the Greenland ice core far and wide and this “debunking” gave me pause. I may have to edit it a bit now though to increase the instrumental “hockey stick” blade from the animation I did not make myself.