Gordon Fulks PhD Physics, Gets Smacked

Oregon climate change skeptic denier had an op-ed in the Oregonian the other day, "The changing climate of climate change." It contains the usual distortions

The evidence causing great grief is the refusal of the global temperature to increase for the past 15 years. It sloshes back and forth as one would expect on a planet with vast oceans and atmosphere that are never in equilibrium, but does not warm as some claimed it would with slowly increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Consequently, cracks are developing in the scientific facade supporting the dogma.

and the usual histrionics

Reading the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is much like reading Pravda during the Cold War: You do not look for beliefs, but for hints of change.

ending with the usual bullshit

Although the public has little knowledge of science and too easily falls for scams, scientists know that they cannot hold onto theories in the face of contravening evidence, even with vast government largess hanging in the balance. Those who have struck a Faustian bargain are beginning to worry that the devil may one day come to collect.

Today's paper has a letter from Oregon State University climate scientist Andreas Schmittner that gives Fulks a failing grade in science:

As a climate scientist who actively works and publishes in this field, I know what most of my colleagues also know. Temperatures and sea levels are rising, glaciers and sea ice are melting, and man-made greenhouse gases are to blame.

Gordon Fulks, however, in his Jan. 20 column ("The changing climate of climate change"), disagrees. Can he be right? Let's examine his arguments.

Fulks claims that global temperatures have not risen during the past 15 years. This is not true. Most heat trapped by carbon dioxide and other gases added to the atmosphere is absorbed by the oceans, as clearly seen in measurements available at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website. Could the warming observed during the past 100 years be from heat that "sloshes back and forth" between the oceans and the atmosphere, as Fulks claims, or changes in the sun? No.

Even former climate skeptic Richard Muller, who has recently re-examined the surface temperature measurements, comes to the same conclusions as other climate scientists before him: Humans are the main cause.

Fulks flunks climate science. He cherry-picks information that supports his conclusion and ignores the rest. That's not science. Could it be that Fulks is right and a new ice age is imminent and all the academies of sciences that predict further warming are wrong? Of course.

But it is similarly unlikely that smoking is healthy and all medical associations are conspiring to fool you with their "radical" views on tobacco.

ANDREAS SCHMITTNER
Corvallis
Schmittner is an associate professor in Oregon State University's College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences.

Schmittner is a climate modeler, and the lead author of this 2011 paper in Science that combined paleoclimate data with a climate model and found a lower than usual value (2.3 K) for climate sensitivity, with a lower uncertainty range (1.7 - 2.6 K, with 66% probability).

There are several other letters in the paper, too, none of them in support.

You really have to wonder why a paper like the Oregonian keeps publishing this kind of stuff. My theory is that it attracts a lot of traffic from debating commenters (so far, 233 on the original article), but maybe I'm just cynical.

Oh yeah -- Fulks wants you to know he has a doctorate in physics. He really wants you to remember that, even announcing it before he asked a question at a seminar (who does that kind of thing?), though there's no evidence he has legally changed his name (yet) to "Gordon Fulks PhD Physics."