Dr. Don Easterbrook’s Letter to Andy Revkin, New York Times Story

Dr. Don Easterbrook’s Letter to Andy Revkin, New York Times Story

Posted on ICECAP

Dr. Don Easterbrook’s letter to Andy Revkin, New York Times

Andy

I was flying home all day yesterday and just now saw your story on some of the things I said at the conference in NY.  You very astutely got my point that no matter what the cause of global warming, the world is going to face huge energy and other resource problems (e.g., food production, water, etc.) in the coming decades with fewer and fewer resources.  But that isn’t the whole story – take a look at the attached satellite image of March 9, 2009 and compare it to the satellite image of June, 2008.  Notice that cool water in the Pacific that extends from the equator all the way up the west coast of North America into the Gulf of Alaska is still firmly entrenched.  This is the cool water phase of the PDO and it isn�t going to change for at least 2-3 decades (at least it never has in the past)and it is unaffected by atmospheric CO2 as shown by the three PDO switches this century that occurred before atmospheric CO2 increased significantly.  What this means is that no matter what the cause of global warming and cooling, we cannot escape the conclusion that the Earth is in for global cooling for the next 2-3 decades and will bring increasing energy and resource demands at a time of rapidly escalating population growth.

Satellite image of March 9, 2009 show the cool PDO in the eastern Pacific firmly entrenched.

Satellite image of June 19, 2008 show the cool PDO in the eastern Pacific.

Here is where Holdren and I part company – he wants carbon cap and trade that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to curb ‘global warming’ that the PDO shows isn’t going to happen in the next several decades (no matter what the cause).  The PDO data shows conclusively that global cooling is going to continue for several decades, causing increasing demands of energy and resources (while population escalates), but if we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on cap and trade (as Holdren is pushing), we will have little left with which to handle the real problems of increasing demands on dwindling resources.  Holdren’s path will lead to a real global catastrophe.

Dr. Don Easterbrook