Don J. Easterbrook is a geology professor emeritus at Western Washington University. From that perspective, he is skeptical of global warming. He has criticized Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth[1] and IPCC temperature projections[2] and has appeared on the Headline News program Glenn Beck[3] and in the New York Times[1] as a global warming skeptic.
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Easterbrook gave a speech at the 2006 Geological Society of America annual meeting, in which he stated:
"If the cycles continue as in the past, the current warm cycle should end soon and global temperatures should cool slightly until about 2035, then warm about 0.5°C from ~2035 to ~2065, and cool slightly until 2100. The total increase in global warming for the century should be ~0.3 °C, rather than the catastrophic warming of 3-6°C (4-11°F) predicted by the IPCC."[2]
While IPCC was predicting global warming, Easterbrook (2001) predicted three decades of cooling due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) shifting from its warm to cool phase.[4] He correlated PDO with climatic changes over the last 500 years.[5]
"The IPCC has predicted a global temperature increase of 0.6°C (1°F) by 2011 and 1.2°C (2°F) by 2038, whereas Easterbrook (2001) predicted the beginning of global cooling by 2007 (± 3 yrs) and cooling of about 0.3–0.5°C by 2040."
He presented his research on "Glacier fluctuations, global climate change, and ocean temperature changes."[6] at the International Conference on Climate Change NY, 2009. In a summary of this work, [7] Easterbrook wrote: "We are entering a solar cycle of much reduced sunspots, very similar to that which accompanied the change from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age, which virtually all scientists agree was caused by solar variation. Thus, we seem to be headed for cooler temperatures as a result of reduced solar irradiance."
