Easterbrook's Messed Up Graphs Corrected

During his presentation to the Washington State Senate Committee Don Easterbrook put up a global cooling blizzard of what he termed as facts and graphs. His presentation triggered an editorial in the Bellingham Herald signed by every professor in the Western Washington Geology Department. I wrote up a bit of my own perspective the-don-easterbrook-problem and don-easterbrook-is-not-skeptic. 

The Geology Department editorial included this paragraph: 

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.

 The editorial did not come with the specific graph so here is the specific graph from the presentation:

Easterbrook graph presented to Washington State Senate

The image is not real clear as I got it via a screen shot off of a blurry TVW image of Easterbrook's Senate testimony. So I found essentially the same graph Easterbrook used in a 2010 post on a global warming skeptic blog.

Easterbrook graph from 2010 (2010 where-does-it-fit-in-the-warmest-year-list)

The graphs are essentially identical except that the clear graph shows a data source (a source that does not agree with Easterbrook).

When Easterbrook presented the graph to the Senate Committee he specifically stated that the right edge of the graph was present temperature. This statement is wrong and the way the graph is presented is not correct. The base of the graph states "Years Before Present (2000 AD)". This is wrong. The GISP2 ice core temperature ends at 95 years before present, but present in this case is 1950, not 2000 (This is the way the original data was presented and 1950 is frequently set as a base year for temperature anomalies). The most recent GISP2 ice core temperature is 1855.

Perhaps an innocent mistake, but....  Turns out this issue was brought to Dr. Easterbrook's attention before easterbrooks-wrong. Easterbrook's response to the wrong date issue:

The contention that the ice core only reaches 1905 is a complete lie (not unusual for AGW people). The top of the core is accurately dated by annual dust layers at 1987. There has been no significant warming from 1987 to the present, so the top of the core is representative of the present day climate in Greenland.

Yikes!

OK, so Easterbrook got a little confused about the ice core dates, What's the big deal?

Note that the title of the slide is "Almost all of the past 10,000 years was warmer than the present". But he got the present day temperature wrong. I thought I might help him out with his graph so I marked up the screen shot of his Senate Committee hearing testimony.

By adding the actual present temperature it becomes clear that "Almost all of the past 10,000 years was warmer than the present" no longer makes sense. Present temperatures are the warmest in well over 2,000 years and, with a few exceptions, is warmer than most of the last 10,000 years.

Eastertbrook has used this graph to claim before multiple audiences and now the Washington State Senate that "virtually all of the past 10,000 years has been warmer than the present". This claim is completely wrong because it is based on his not understanding of ice core temperature data and his refusal to include present temperature data on his graph. And as noted by the Geology Department, the graph does not represent global temperature; it represents one location on the entire planet. Yes, the site might reflect some global temperature trends, but Greenland temperatures vary a bit more wildly than the global temperatures and no single location should be used to determine global climate trends. 

This is by no means the first time Easterbrook has managed to not reveal where present temperatures are on a graph relative to past temperature reconstruction graphs. Three years ago Don Easterbrook made a presentation where he used the following graph:

Easterbrook altered Global Warming Art graph

Turns out he had taken a graph from globalwarmingart.com and altered it a bit. Gareth Renowden noted the similarity his-figures-hides-the-incline,  easterbrook-defends-the-indefensible.

The original is below:

Easterbrook removed the notation from the original graph that showed that present temperature is warmer than the highest average of the reconstructed temperature histories.

This is why peer review is important. Messed up graphs like the ones shown above would be very unlikely to pass through the peer review process of any reputable journal. But I do have to wonder about motivations when present day temperatures are left off illustrative graphs because they are an inconvenient truth.