Easterbrook disputes WWU faculty global warming opinions

Whatcom Opinion Columns | The Bellingham Herald

The past 10,000 years were warmer than present;

Multiple periods of intense warming (20 times more intense than recent warming) occurred 10,000-to-15,000 years ago. All of these happened long before rise in carbon dioxide, so could not possibly have been caused by carbon dioxide.

The Bellingham Herald opinion column is a diatribe against me personally (just read the slurs and innuendos) containing misrepresentations, no real data to support their contentions, and displays an abysmal ignorance of published literature. The reason becomes apparent when you realize that not a single one of the 13 Western Washington University authors has ever published a single paper on global climate change and none have any expertise whatsoever in climate issues.

Their claim that my publications "have not passed through rigorous peer review" is false. Virtually all of my 180 publications were peer-reviewed. The real joke here is they "fully support the 2007 IPCC report," but Donna Laframboise in 2011 documented that 30 percent of the references used were not peer-reviewed, so using their own standard, they would be forced to reject the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report!

The authors claim that "CO2 is a powerful greenhouse gas" that has "significant and measureable impact on surface temperature." Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, but it has little impact on temperature because it makes up only 0.038 percent of the atmosphere, has changed only 0.008 percent since carbon dioxide rose after 1945 (if you double nothing, you still have nothing), and accounts for only 3.6 percent of greenhouse warming. Carbon dioxide is incapable of changing global temperature by more than a fraction of a degree.