Professor Don Easterbrook in the local newspaper again.

Last March I wrote about how Dr. Don Easterbrook had testified to one of our Senators and because of that, some of his colleagues at Western wrote this little hit-piece that was published in the Opinion column at our local Bellingham Herald: His reply was published today:

Easterbrook disputes WWU faculty global warming opinions
"WWU faculty find overwhelming scientific evidence to support global warming." Of course there is overwhelming evidence of global warming! Everyone agrees! But that doesn't prove it was caused by carbon dioxide! The authors fail to understand:

• Of the two periods of global warming this century, the first, and warmest, occurred before rise in carbon dioxide;
• Twenty periods of global warming occurred over the past five centuries;
• 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.

There is more at the site including this wonderful little zinger:

The WWU faculty was challenged to debate the issues. The response from David Hirsh was: "I don't want the media to present both sides of an issue." "Well, the problem is it's not 'my' science. I do not now, nor have I claimed to be an expert in climate science. The question was would I support a debate-type forum to be hosted at WWU? I would not." He went on to say that he didn't want to debate because he had not addressed any of the scientific issues, but supported the personal attack.

The response from David Hirsh was: "I don't want the media to present both sides of an issue." Kind of sums things up right there...