© Rachel Howland
Professor emeritus Don Easterbrook is a specialist in glacial geology.
Professor emeritus Don Easterbrook is a specialist in glacial geology.
“I’ve been
on them, in them, under them and over them,” Easterbrook said.
Easterbrook
has studied climate change from the ice ages to the present day. His
focus is in studying the movements of glaciers from climate change, as
well as doing isotopic analysis of the elements found in ice cores.
He believes the Earth is currently in a cooling period. He continues to research climate change with an international team of over 50 members, including solar physicists, atmospheric physicists and glacial geologists. He is the author of eight books and more than 150 journal publications, including Evidence-Based Climate, which was published in September 2011.
How long have you been working or researching specifically climate change, and what is your background in the field?
I've been working on climate change 50 years. The way I approached it is by first studying the fluctuations of glaciers, both modern ones and ancient ones, which allow you to reconstruct what the climate was like when the glaciers were advancing and retreating. They're like very old paleo-thermometers. They allow you to determine what the climate was doing.
When the climate is cold and snowy the glaciers advance, and when it is warm and dry they retreat. They leave a footprint of where they have been. So you follow those footprints, and you can tell what the glaciers have been doing, which tells you what the climate was doing. I also work with isotopes. They too carry a signature footprint of old climates.
What are your current thoughts on climate change? There's a lot of talk in the media about how it's going to get drastically hotter. You say it's going to go the opposite way. Could you expand on that?
The whole issue of climate change rests with data. My whole approach is to look at the data. Unfortunately, a lot of politics has gotten involved with the sciences that relate to climate change, specifically because there are huge amounts of money involved, like hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars. There's a huge amount of power.
Climate change is being used as a lever to try to push for a world government. This is being done in international conferences sponsored by the United Nations that meet every year. The last one was just in Durban. So, unfortunately because of that, there is a lot of rhetoric and a lot of selective media coverage.
My message is look at the data and make up your own mind. My opinion versus somebody else's opinion is something that you can argue about all day. If you look at the data, the data will tell you way more than anything anybody's opinion will. I have worked with a lot of data that relates to the changing of climate. The data is very clear.
What the data is saying is that global climate changes have been going on since the beginning of geologic time, and especially in the last 10,000 years.
We've had ice ages, and we've had warming periods. Most of the last 10,000 years have been warmer than it is now, for example. We can dig this out of the geologic record. We can say that the past is really the key to the future. We can determine patterns that are replicated over and over and over again, and we can project those into the future to see what's likely to happen. What this is telling us is that the climate has oscillated back and forth: warm, cold, warm, cold, warm, cold.
He believes the Earth is currently in a cooling period. He continues to research climate change with an international team of over 50 members, including solar physicists, atmospheric physicists and glacial geologists. He is the author of eight books and more than 150 journal publications, including Evidence-Based Climate, which was published in September 2011.
How long have you been working or researching specifically climate change, and what is your background in the field?
I've been working on climate change 50 years. The way I approached it is by first studying the fluctuations of glaciers, both modern ones and ancient ones, which allow you to reconstruct what the climate was like when the glaciers were advancing and retreating. They're like very old paleo-thermometers. They allow you to determine what the climate was doing.
When the climate is cold and snowy the glaciers advance, and when it is warm and dry they retreat. They leave a footprint of where they have been. So you follow those footprints, and you can tell what the glaciers have been doing, which tells you what the climate was doing. I also work with isotopes. They too carry a signature footprint of old climates.
What are your current thoughts on climate change? There's a lot of talk in the media about how it's going to get drastically hotter. You say it's going to go the opposite way. Could you expand on that?
The whole issue of climate change rests with data. My whole approach is to look at the data. Unfortunately, a lot of politics has gotten involved with the sciences that relate to climate change, specifically because there are huge amounts of money involved, like hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars. There's a huge amount of power.
Climate change is being used as a lever to try to push for a world government. This is being done in international conferences sponsored by the United Nations that meet every year. The last one was just in Durban. So, unfortunately because of that, there is a lot of rhetoric and a lot of selective media coverage.
My message is look at the data and make up your own mind. My opinion versus somebody else's opinion is something that you can argue about all day. If you look at the data, the data will tell you way more than anything anybody's opinion will. I have worked with a lot of data that relates to the changing of climate. The data is very clear.
What the data is saying is that global climate changes have been going on since the beginning of geologic time, and especially in the last 10,000 years.
We've had ice ages, and we've had warming periods. Most of the last 10,000 years have been warmer than it is now, for example. We can dig this out of the geologic record. We can say that the past is really the key to the future. We can determine patterns that are replicated over and over and over again, and we can project those into the future to see what's likely to happen. What this is telling us is that the climate has oscillated back and forth: warm, cold, warm, cold, warm, cold.
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