The Trib Spins The Climate - Again

I find it interesting, to say the least, that Richard Mellon Scaife's brain trust over at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (aka his editorial board) should ignore the National Research Council's reports on Climate Change in favor of a paper read at a Heartland Institute conference.

Here's what they write:

A geologist is debunking not only climatology's "science"-cloaked, blame-mankind, global-warming dogma but also the very notion of an inevitably warmer Earth.

Dr. Don Easterbrook, professor emeritus at Western Washington University, contends global warming is natural, but over, and global cooling has begun -- and is bad news. He presented a paper supporting his theory on May 16 at the fourth International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago.

The ICCC is hosted by the Heartland Institute.

The institute refuses to say who its current donors are but according to mediamatters, in the early 90s, it received more than $300,000 in Scaife Foundation money.

The braintrust continues:

He says the geologic record shows climate changes far more drastic than today's occurred long before man-made carbon dioxide. He attributes recent variations to Pacific Ocean surface temperature cycles -- related to solar changes and glaciers' movements -- that alternately warm and cool the globe every 25 to 30 years.

However, Dr Easterbrook is not without his own detractors. Ocean Expert at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab had this to say about Easterbrook's research:

The short answer is that global warming is here, sea level rise is accelerating and the PDO is not going save us by putting all of that on hold for 10 or 20 years. Its true that the PDO has brought cooler than normal temperatures to a big chunk of the Pacific off and on for most of the last 10 years. But the PDO is not just a big see-saw that rocks back and forth, cooling and then warming the whole planet every 20 years. Sometimes it flips back after just 5 years and sometimes it stays pretty much the same for 25 or so. Furthermore, the so-called "cold phase" of the PDO is not exclusively cold. It also involves warmer than normal waters in the western and northern parts of the Pacific. So the effect of the PDO on global temperatures is not nearly as clear as it is for its smaller and better known cousins, El Nino and La Nina.

Needless to say, it's a pretty wild statement to claim that the PDO data shows conclusively that global cooling will occur for the next 10 years. I'd say we have a better chance of seeing unemployment drop to 5% next month than we do of seeing 10 years of cooling.

So this is what the Trib's going with and not the legion of scientists in the National Research Council.

As I said, interesting.