A Doozy Denier Don from Anthony Watts: Medieval Warming was 11,500 years ago!

If anyone is under the wrong impression that Anthony Watts knows something about climate science, this will set you straight. He doesn't. You might have thought that he doesn't "believe" a lot of what he posts. It seems he does. Even the silliest nonsense. I used to think that he didn't read anything he posted, but it appears that he does. Only sometimes. But mostly not. And I was wondering the other day when we were going to get another article from him. He writes so rarely these days, leaving it all up to other people that I was beginning to think that he had quit altogether.

Today he's written a short piece (archived here). What he has called a Quote of the Week. It's not a bad quote I suppose, but there's no reason for a denier to pull it out as a quote of the week unless they are a hard core denier.

Now I've said before that when Anthony Watts decides to write something himself, he usually gets things dreadfully wrong. Today is no exception. He's done a doozy. And he's proven that he does read some of what he posts. He must have read some Denier Don Easterbrook. Or maybe this is a homage to Don.

Behind the times (in Greenland) at WUWT. The year is not 1855, it's 2014!

Anthony Watts has put up another shonky chart of GISP2 temperatures (archived here). No-one's complained so far, but he's got the current temperature in central Greenland as being about as cold as the Little Ice Age or colder.

Here is GISP2 from the Richard Alley data (Cuffey and Clow). These data go from 95 years BP to almost 50,000 years ago. I've only included the past 20,000 years or so. 95 years before present is 95 years before 1950, which is 1855. I've put in the average temperature at the summit for the decade 2001-2010, which was 29.9°C, as indicated in Kobashi et al (2011), which I discuss a bit further down.

Data source: Alley, R.B..  2004. GISP2 Ice Core Temperature and Accumulation Data. IGBP PAGES/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology Data Contribution Series #2004-013. NOAA/NGDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder CO, USA.

Here is the WUWT chart:

See how Anthony Watts reckons that it's as cold as the coldest period in the Little Ice Age? He's put the "present temperature" and "present global warming" the same as the temperature back in 1855.

Look more closely. You'd have thought Anthony and his merry band would have known when the denier's favourite periods, the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period took place. But he gets those wrong, too. [h/t a few people]

He's been told about this over and over and over again. But he won't take any notice. At WUWT it's whatever you can get away with to reject science.

Here are charts from the 2011 paper by Takuro Kobashi and colleagues, showing surface temperatures in Greenland over the past 4,000 years.

Figure 1. (top) Reconstructed Greenland snow surface temperatures for the past 4000 years and air temperature over the past 170 years (1840–2010) from three records. The thick blue line and blue band represents the reconstructed Greenland temperature and 1s error, respectively (this study). The reconstruction was made by two different methods before and after 1950. The “gas method” is as described in section 2, and the “forward model” is described by Kobashi et al. [2010]. Thick and thin black lines are the inversion!adjusted reconstructed Summit annual air temperatures and 10!year moving average temperatures, respectively [Box et al., 2009]. Thin and thick red lines are the inversion adjusted annual and 10!year moving average AWS temperature records, respectively [Stearns and Weidner, 1991; Shuman et al., 2001; Steffen and Box, 2001; Vaarby!Laursen, 2010]. (middle) Past 1000 years of Greenland temperature. Thick blue line and band are the same as above. Black and red lines are the Summit [Box et al., 2009] and AWS [Stearns and Weidner, 1991; Shuman et al., 2001; Steffen and Box, 2001; Vaarby!Laursen, 2010] decadal average temperatures as above. (bottom) Past 4000 years of Greenland temperature. Thick blue line and band are the same as above. Thick green line represents 100!year moving averages. Black and red lines are the Summit [Box et al., 2009] and AWS [Stearns and Weidner, 1991; Shuman et al., 2001; Steffen and Box, 2001; Vaarby!Laursen, 2010] decadal average temperature, respectively. Blue and pink rectangles are the periods of 1000–2010 C.E. (Figure 1, middle) and 1840–2010 C.E. (Figure 1, top), respectively. Present temperature is calculated from the inversion adjusted AWS decadal average temperature (2001–2010) as −29.9°C (Figure 1, top). Present temperature and ±2s are illustrated by lines in the plots. Green circles are the current decadal average temperature as above (−29.9°C, 2001–2010). Source: 

A cosmic event, but no certainty

Anthony's shonky chart was to illustrate a press release about a new paper in the Journal of Geology, which is about the distribution of nanodiamonds, which the authors say support the hypothesis that the Younger Dryas cooling was caused by a cosmic collision, perhaps a comet, crashing here on Earth.

You can read the press release here. If you've a subscription, you can read the paper here.

Neither the press release nor the paper makes the strong claim of Anthony's headline, which was: "Younger Dryas climate event solved via nanodiamonds – it was a planetary impact event". The press release and the paper talk about the evidence being consistent with the cooling 12,800 years ago being caused by a cosmic impact, and inconsistent with it being caused by "natural terrestrial processes".

I'm not making any comment on the paper. Feel free to talk about it if you want to. I was mainly writing this article to talk about the mislabelled chart that keeps resurfacing at WUWT in one guise or other.

From the WUWT comments

By the time I'd finished writing, I see that finally at least one person commented on Anthony's chart. Greg asked:

August 29, 2014 at 9:20 am
What’s the source of the Greenland temp graph in this article?
Showing current temperatures almost as low as LIA :?

gary gulrud would like to see other evidence of a cosmic impact. That's not an unreasonable request.

August 29, 2014 at 10:19 am
Not an expert but 13,000 years is like geologic yesterday. Point me to the crater, please?

There were various other comments and speculation. The deniers are playing sceptic (for a change).

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Kobashi, Takuro, Kenji Kawamura, Jeffrey P. Severinghaus, Jean‐Marc Barnola, Toshiyuki Nakaegawa, Bo M. Vinther, Sigfús J. Johnsen, and Jason E. Box. "High variability of Greenland surface temperature over the past 4000 years estimated from trapped air in an ice core." Geophysical Research Letters 38, no. 21 (2011). DOI: 10.1029/2011GL049444

Charles R. Kinzie et al "Nanodiamond-Rich Layer across Three Continents Consistent with Major Cosmic Impact at 12,800 Cal BP" The Journal of Geology. Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/677046

Denier Don is Angry

Don and his cooling fetish

Another gem from WUWT.  David Deming is sticking up for Don Easterbrook, who apparently gave a presentation to the Washington State Senate Energy, Environment and Telecommunications Committee.  In response, faculty members of the Western Washington University geology department wrote a letter to the Bellingham Herald (see below).  This isn't the first time.  Don's a repeat offender and has to know it.

Greenland is not the whole world

From reading the letter to the Bellingham Herald, it appears that the Emeritus Professor tried to convince the government committee that local temperature trends on a summit high in Central Greenland are the same as temperature trends for the entire world.  This is the WUWT chart Don trots out from time to time and probably the one referred to by the WWU Geology Faculty :

When Don refers to Central Greenland temperatures he writes stuff like this:

Keep in mind that these are temperatures in Greenland, not global temperatures. However, correlation of the ice core temperatures with world-wide glacial fluctuations and correlation of modern Greenland temperatures with global temperatures confirms that the ice core record does indeed follow global temperature trends and is an excellent proxy for global changes.

Umm, no, Don - not at all.  Arctic amplification operates in the Arctic and the temperature record on the summit of Greenland is an excellent proxy for the enormous ice sheet way up on the summit in Central Greenland!

Here is what Marcott et al wrote in their FAQ on Realclimate.org recently:

Just as it would not be reasonable to use the recent instrumental temperature history from Greenland (for example) as being representative of the planet as a whole...

Not only that, but after years and many, many people pointing out another persistent error Don makes, he still refuses to fix the incorrect label on his 'chart'.  The record is for 'Years before present' which in this case follows the convention of being 1950.  So the chart starts in 1855 not 1915.

How Don loses his cool (prediction)

Anyway, of all people Cliff Mass took Don to task and Don responded with a lot of bluster and shouting and waving of arms.  As Anthony Watts observed:

I’ve never seen him this angry. – Anthony

Here is one of the charts to which Cliff Mass referred when he criticised Don's liberality with facts and his delusion about global cooling:

SkepticalScience has done some analyses of Don and his 'cooling' predictions, for example, here.

(Don also has some strange notion that Cliff Mass has some 'models' that predict a rise in global surface temperature of one degree Fahrenheit per decade.  I don't know where Don got that idea from - probably the same place as his 'cooling' predictions.)

Here is a chart of actual warming from NASA's GISS Surface Temperature Analysis:

The Letter from the WWU Geology Faculty

Here is the letter to which David Deming objected.  I had to get this from google's webcache because the Bellingham Herald site seems to be down:

By WWU GEOLOGY FACULTY — COURTESY TO THE BELLINGHAM HERALD

On March 26, 2013, a long-retired faculty member of our department, Don Easterbrook, presented his opinions on human-caused global climate change to the Washington State Senate Energy, Environment and Telecommunications Committee at the invitation of the committee chair Sen. Doug Ericksen, R.-Ferndale. We, the active faculty of the Geology Department at Western Washington University, express our unanimous and significant concerns regarding the views espoused by Easterbrook, who holds a doctorate in geology; they are neither scientifically valid nor supported by the overwhelming preponderance of evidence on the topic. We also decry the injection of such poor quality science into the public discourse regarding important policy decisions for our state's future; the chair of the committee was presented with numerous options and opportunities to invite current experts to present the best-available science on this subject, and chose instead to, apparently, appeal to a narrow partisan element with his choice of speaker.

We concur with the vast consensus of the science community that recent global warming is very real, human greenhouse-gas emissions are the primary cause, and their environmental and economic impacts on our society will likely be severe if we don't make significant efforts to address the problem. Claims to the contrary fly in the face of an overwhelming body of rigorous scientific literature.

We intend no disrespect to Easterbrook personally. We appreciate his previous service to our department and to Western. His present appointment as emeritus professor was made in light of his long-standing history at WWU. But people of the state of Washington need to understand that Easterbrook's ideas on anthropogenic global warming have not passed through rigorous peer review in the scientific literature. Additionally, Easterbrook's claims in this forum and elsewhere require the existence of a broad, decades-long conspiracy amongst literally thousands of scientists to falsify climate data and to prevent publication of opposing research. This opinion demonstrates a profound rejection of the scientific process and the fundamental value of rigorous peer review, and is also simply wrong.

Science thrives on controversies; it rewards innovative, unexpected findings, but only when they are backed by rigorous, painstaking evidence and reasoning. Without such standards, science would be ineffective as a tool to improve our society. It is worth acknowledging that nearly every technological advance in modern society is a direct result of that same scientific method (think the Internet, airplanes, antibiotics, and even your smartphone).

Easterbrook's views, as exemplified by his Senate presentation, are a stark contrast to that standard; they are filled with misrepresentations, misuse of data and repeated mixing of local vs. global records. Nearly every graphic in the hours-long presentation to the Senate was flawed, as was Easterbrook's discussion of them. For example, more than 100 years of research in physics, chemistry, atmospheric science and oceanography has, via experiments, numerous physical observations and theoretic calculations, clearly demonstrate - and have communicated via the scientific literature - that carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas; its presence and variations in Earth's atmosphere have significant and measureable impacts on the surface temperature of our planet. Alternatively, you can take Easterbrook's word - not supported by any published science - that the concentration and effects of carbon dioxide are so small as to not matter a bit.

In a specific example, Easterbrook referred to a graph of temperatures from an ice core of the Greenland ice sheet to claim that global temperatures were warmer than present over most of the last 10,000 years. First, this record is of temperature from a single spot on Earth, central Greenland (thus it is not a "global record"). Second, and perhaps more importantly, Easterbrook's definition of "present temperature" in the graph is based on the most recent data point in that record, which is actually 1855, more than 150 years ago when the world was still in the depths of the Little Ice Age, and well before any hint of human-caused climate change.

As the active faculty of the Western Washington University Geology Department that he lists as his affiliation, we conclude that Easterbrook's presentation clearly does not represent the best-available science on this subject, and urge the Senate, our state government, and the citizens of Washington State to rely on rigorous peer-reviewed science rather than conspiracy-based ideas to steer their decisions on matters concerning our environment and economic future.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Western Washington University WWU Geology Department faculty members who authored this column are Douglas H. Clark, who holds a doctorate in geology; Bernard A. Housen, who is the department chair and holds a doctorate in geophysics; Susan Debari, who holds a doctorate in geology; Colin B. Amos, who holds a doctorate in geology; Scott R. Linneman, who holds a doctorate in geology; Robert J. Mitchell, who holds doctorates in engineering and geology; David M. Hirsch, who holds a doctorate in geology; Jaqueline Caplan-Auerbach, who holds a doctorate in geophysics; Pete Stelling, who holds a doctorate in geology; Elizabeth R. Schermer, who holds a doctorate in geology; Christopher Suczek, who holds a doctorate in geology; and Scott Babcock, who holds a doctorate in geology.

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Someone tell Don - don't get angry, Don, just get your facts straight and then people will stop laughing at you.

Someone tell Don and WUWT crowd - correcting the content of what people say is not (necessarily) the same as a "personal attack".

Update:

Don Easterbrook has responded with a few more fibs and putting forward Donna Laframboise, 'Steven Goddard' and the fake Oregon Petition as support. Really and truly, I kid you not.