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The Global Warming Myth
Topic Started: Jul 14 2009, 09:52 PM (294 Views)
Main Man
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Meet the man who has exposed the great climate change con trick
James Delingpole
Wednesday, 8th July 2009

James Delingpole talks to Professor Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist, whose new book shows that ‘anthropogenic global warming’ is a dangerous, ruinously expensive fiction, a ‘first-world luxury’ with no basis in scientific fact. Shame on the publishers who rejected the book
Imagine how wonderful the world would be if man-made global warming were just a figment of Al Gore’s imagination. No more ugly wind farms to darken our sunlit uplands. No more whopping electricity bills, artificially inflated by EU-imposed carbon taxes. No longer any need to treat each warm, sunny day as though it were some terrible harbinger of ecological doom. And definitely no need for the $7.4 trillion cap and trade (carbon-trading) bill — the largest tax in American history — which President Obama and his cohorts are so assiduously trying to impose on the US economy.
Imagine no more, for your fairy godmother is here. His name is Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology at Adelaide University, and he has recently published the landmark book Heaven And Earth, which is going to change forever the way we think about climate change.
‘The hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology and geology,’ says Plimer, and while his thesis is not new, you’re unlikely to have heard it expressed with quite such vigour, certitude or wide-ranging scientific authority. Where fellow sceptics like Bjorn Lomborg or Lord Lawson of Blaby are prepared cautiously to endorse the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) more modest predictions, Plimer will cede no ground whatsoever. Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory, he argues, is the biggest, most dangerous and ruinously expensive con trick in history.
To find out why, let’s meet the good professor. He’s a tanned, rugged, white-haired sixtysomething — courteous and jolly but combative when he needs to be — glowing with the health of a man who spends half his life on field expeditions to Iran, Turkey and his beloved Outback. And he’s sitting in my garden drinking tea on exactly the kind of day the likes of the Guardian’s George Monbiot would probably like to ban. A lovely warm sunny one.
So go on then, Prof. What makes you sure that you’re right and all those scientists out there saying the opposite are wrong? ‘I’m a geologist. We geologists have always recognised that climate changes over time. Where we differ from a lot of people pushing AGW is in our understanding of scale. They’re only interested in the last 150 years. Our time frame is 4,567 million years. So what they’re doing is the equivalent of trying to extrapolate the plot of Casablanca from one tiny bit of the love scene. And you can’t. It doesn’t work.’
What Heaven And Earth sets out to do is restore a sense of scientific perspective to a debate which has been hijacked by ‘politicians, environmental activists and opportunists’. It points out, for example, that polar ice has been present on earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time; that extinctions of life are normal; that climate changes are cyclical and random; that the CO2 in the atmosphere — to which human activity contributes the tiniest fraction — is only 0.001 per cent of the total CO2 held in the oceans, surface rocks, air, soils and life; that CO2 is not a pollutant but a plant food; that the earth’s warmer periods — such as when the Romans grew grapes and citrus trees as far north as Hadrian’s Wall — were times of wealth and plenty.
All this is scientific fact — which is more than you can say for any of the computer models turning out doomsday scenarios about inexorably rising temperatures, sinking islands and collapsing ice shelves. Plimer doesn’t trust them because they seem to have little if any basis in observed reality.
‘I’m a natural scientist. I’m out there every day, buried up to my neck in sh**, collecting raw data. And that’s why I’m so sceptical of these models, which have nothing to do with science or empiricism but are about torturing the data till it finally confesses. None of them predicted this current period we’re in of global cooling. There is no problem with global warming. It stopped in 1998. The last two years of global cooling have erased nearly 30 years of temperature increase.’
Plimer’s uncompromising position has not made him popular. ‘They say I rape cows, eat babies, that I know nothing about anything. My favourite letter was the one that said: “Dear sir, drop dead”. I’ve also had a demo in Sydney outside one of my book launches, and I’ve had mothers coming up to me with two-year-old children in their arms saying: “Don’t you have any kind of morality? This child’s future is being destroyed.’’’ Plimer’s response to the last one is typically robust. ‘If you’re so concerned, why did you breed?’
This no-nonsense approach may owe something to the young Ian’s straitened Sydney upbringing. His father was crippled with MS, leaving his mother to raise three children on a schoolteacher’s wage. ‘We couldn’t afford a TV — not that TV even arrived in Australia till 1956. We’d use the same brown paper bag over and over again for our school lunches, always turn off the lights, not because of some moral imperative but out of sheer bloody necessity.’
One of the things that so irks him about modern environmentalism is that it is driven by people who are ‘too wealthy’. ‘When I try explaining “global warming” to people in Iran or Turkey they have no idea what I’m talking about. Their life is about getting through to the next day, finding their next meal. Eco-guilt is a first-world luxury. It’s the new religion for urban populations which have lost their faith in Christianity. The IPCC report is their Bible. Al Gore and Lord Stern are their prophets.’
Heaven And Earth is the offspring of a pop science book Plimer published in 2001 called A Short History of Planet Earth. It was based on ten years’ worth of broadcasts for ABC radio aimed mainly at people in rural areas. Though the book was a bestseller and won a Eureka prize, ABC refused to publish the follow-up; so did all the other major publishers he approached: ‘There’s a lot of fear out there. No one wants to go against the popular paradigm.’
Then someone put him in touch with a tiny publishing outfit in the middle of the bush — ‘husband, wife, three kids, so poor they didn’t even have curtains’ — and they said yes. Plimer couldn’t bring himself to accept an advance they clearly couldn’t afford. But then something remarkable happened. In just two days, the book sold out its 5,000 print run. Five further editions followed in swift succession. It has now sold 26,500 copies in Australia alone — with similarly exciting prospects in Britain and the US. There’s even an edition coming out in ultra-green Germany.
But surely Aussies of all people, with their bushfires and prolonged droughts, ought to be the last to buy into his message? ‘Ah, but the average punter is not a fool. I get sometimes as many as 1,000 letters and emails a day from people who feel helpless and disenfranchised and just bloody sick of all the nonsense they hear about global warming from metropolitan liberals who don’t even know where meat or milk comes from.’
Besides which, Australia’s economy is peculiarly vulnerable to the effects of climate change alarmism. ‘Though we have 40 per cent of the world’s uranium, we don’t have nuclear energy. We’re reliant mainly on bucketloads of cheap coal. Eighty per cent of our electricity is coal-generated and clustered around our coalfields are our aluminium producers. The very last thing the Australian economy needs is the cap and trade legislation being proposed by Kevin Rudd. If it gets passed, the country will go broke.’
Not for one second does Plimer believe it will get passed. As with its US equivalent the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill, Kevin Rudd’s Emission Trading Scheme legislation narrowly squeaked its way through the House of Representatives. But again as in America, the real challenge lies with the upper house, the Senate. Thanks in good measure to the influence of Plimer and his book — ‘I have politicians ringing me all the time’ — the Senate looks likely to reject the bill. If it does so twice, then the Australian government will collapse, a ‘double dissolution’ will be forced and a general election called. ‘Australia is at a very interesting point in the climate change debate,’ says Plimer.
The potential repercussions outside Oz, of course, are even greater. Until this year, environmental legislation has enjoyed a pretty easy ride through the parliaments of the Anglosphere and the Eurosphere, with greener-than-thou politicians (from Dave ‘Windmill’ Cameron to Dave ‘climate change deniers are the flat-earthers of the 21st century’ Miliband) queuing up to impose ever more stringent carbon emissions targets and taxes on their hapless electorates.
In the days when most people felt rich enough to absorb these extra costs and guilty enough to think they probably deserved them, the politicians could get away with it. But the global economic meltdown has changed all that. As countless opinion surveys have shown, the poorer people feel, the lower down their list of priorities ecological righteousness sinks. ‘It’s one of the few good things to come out of this recession,’ says Plimer. ‘People are starting to ask themselves: “Can we really afford this green legislation?”’
Reading Plimer’s Heaven And Earth is at once an enlightening and terrifying experience. Enlightening because, after 500 pages of heavily annotated prose (the fruit of five years’ research), you are left in no doubt that man’s contribution to the thing they now call ‘climate change’ was, is and probably always will be negligible. Terrifying, because you cannot but be appalled by how much money has been wasted, how much unnecessary regulation drafted because of a ‘problem’ that doesn’t actually exist. (South Park, as so often, was probably the first to point this out in a memorable episode where Al Gore turns up to warn the school kids about a terrible beast, looking a bit like the Gruffalo, known as ManBearPig.)
Has it come in time to save the day, though? If there’s any justice, Heaven And Earth will do for the cause of climate change realism what Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change alarmism. But as Plimer well knows, there is now a powerful and very extensive body of vested interests up against him: governments like President Obama’s, which intend to use ‘global warming’ as an excuse for greater taxation, regulation and protectionism; energy companies and investors who stand to make a fortune from scams like carbon trading; charitable bodies like Greenpeace which depend for their funding on public anxiety; environmental correspondents who need constantly to talk up the threat to justify their jobs.
Does he really believe his message will ever get through? Plimer smiles. ‘If you’d asked any scientist or doctor 30 years ago where stomach ulcers come from, they would all have given the same answer: obviously it comes from the acid brought on by too much stress. All of them apart from two scientists who were pilloried for their crazy, whacko theory that it was caused by a bacteria. In 2005 they won the Nobel prize. The “consensus” was wrong.’

Ian Plimer’s Heaven And Earth: Global Warming — the Missing Science is published by Quartet (£25).

http://www.spectator.co.uk/
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jf1acai

Good article!

I sure hope more people are beginning to pull their heads out and realize that the global warming scare is in fact a huge con job.

Working to reduce pollution, conserve energy, and improve alternative sources of energy is a good thing, and should be encouraged. But the whole AGW BS is nothing but BS, intended only to enrich governments and some individuals.
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Main Man
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AGW is the snake oil of the 21st Century and is being pushed by watermelons to destroy the production infrastructure of this and many other 1st world countries.
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Hello again
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It's funny how they have changed the lingo from Global Warming to Climate Change. Anthropogenic global warming is a bogus term. It's funny how all of the weather folks are having wet dreams about El Nino this year. They use their data from the past 40 years to come up with the term "the phenomenon known as El Nino is caused by the warming of the ocean water." Really, how do we know it's a phenomenon and not a climate cycle that has always existed?

The junk science of those teaching evolution and global warming clashes...for instance, the evolutionist scientist say that the earth is 60 millions years old, right? They teach that the earth is a million years old. So if we take the data of the past 100 years, how do we even know we have a good sample? Certainly it's not a statistic sample.

The temperature gain has been documented at .08 degrees in the last 100 years. Who cares? How do we even know that the data collected prior to the 1940's is even accurate? For the most part, the temperatures were collected by different individuals with a mercury thermometer. How could they even have truly accurate data with a mercury thermometer? They are tough to read for a true degree temperature.

I remember in my teenage years working for a radio station and it was an official weather station of my home town. We would go out to read that stupid thermometer and have the time we were rounding it up. The mercury was somewhere in middle of 70 and 75 degrees- so we might read it as 72 or 74 or even 73. How many of you have done that?

I also think it's interesting how the media plays up a heat streak! It's the headlines, it's the top story, it's a special report, it gets double coverage, etc. I was watching the NBC owned The Weather Channel (NBC has ruined this channel) and the other day...the headlines was nothing more than "THE HEAT CONTINUES!" for about four states in the US...in the meantime a significant portion of the US has experienced a cool and wet summer.

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Gringa
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I think El Nino and La Nina have always existed - normal changes in water temps.
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Bigtoe
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:ROFL: I can't believe anyone would post this piece of crap as anything but an example of how some people will buy any line of bullshit as long as it supports their own ignorant world view.

Quote:
 
Seldom has a book been more cleanly murdered by scientists than Ian Plimer's Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth, which purports to show that manmade climate change is nonsense. Since its publication in Australia it has been ridiculed for a hilarious series of schoolboy errors, and its fudging and manipulation of the data. Here is what the reviews have said.

Professor David Karoly, University of Melbourne's School of Earth Sciences:

"Given the errors, the non-science, and the nonsense in this book, it should be classified as science fiction in any library that wastes its funds buying it. The book can then be placed on the shelves alongside Michael Crichton's State of Fear, another science fiction book about climate change with many footnotes. The only difference is that there are fewer scientific errors in State of Fear."

Michael Ashley, professor of astrophysics at the University of NSW:

"Plimer has done an enormous disservice to science, and the dedicated scientists who are trying to understand climate and the influence of humans, by publishing this book. It is not "merely" atmospheric scientists that would have to be wrong for Plimer to be right. It would require a rewriting of biology, geology, physics, oceanography, astronomy and statistics. Plimer's book deserves to languish on the shelves along with similar pseudo-science such as the writings of Immanuel Velikovsky and Erich von Daniken. "

Professor Kurt Lambeck, earth scientist and President of the Australian Academy of Science:

"If this had been written by an honours student, I would have failed it with the comment: You have obviously trawled through a lot of material but the critical analysis is missing. Supporting arguments and unsupported arguments in the literature are not distinguished or properly referenced, and you have left the impression that you have not developed an understanding of the processes involved. Rewrite!"

Here are a few examples of the nonsense in this book (thanks mostly to Tim Lambert at Scienceblogs):

1. Plimer uses a graph, without attribution, produced for the Great Global Warming Swindle on Channel 4. The programme altered the timeline, creating the false impression that most of the rise in temperature last century took place before 1940. After an outcry by scientists, subsequent editions of the programme corrected the timeline. But Plimer leaves the graph – and its convenient error – intact.

2. He claims that Arctic sea ice is growing. Oh no it isn't.

3. He claims that Mount Pinatubo released "very large quantities of chloroflourocarbons, the gases that destroy the ozone layer." It didn't.

4. Like the Great Global Warming Swindle (from which several of the claims in his book appear to originate), he claims that volcanoes produce more CO2 than humans. In fact humans produce 130 times more CO2 than volcanoes.

5. He claims that only 4% of the CO2 in the atmosphere is produced by humans. In fact the pre-industrial concentration was roughly 280 parts per million. Human activities have now raised this to 387ppm. Work it out for yourself.

6. He says "it is not possible to ascribe a carbon dioxide increase to human activity". As David Karoly points out, "burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide enriched with carbon isotope 12C and reduced 13C and essentially no 14C, and it decreases atmospheric oxygen": in other words you can ascribe the increase directly to human activity.

7. Professor Michael Ashley noticed in Plimer's book: "an almost word-for-word reproduction of the abstract from a well-known loony paper entitled "The Sun is a plasma diffuser that sorts atoms by mass". This paper argues that the sun isn't composed of 98 per cent hydrogen and helium, as astronomers have confirmed through a century of observation and theory, but is instead similar in composition to a meteorite. It is hard to understate the depth of scientific ignorance that the inclusion of this information demonstrates. It is comparable to a biologist claiming that plants obtain energy from magnetism rather than photosynthesis."

8. He confuses the Sun's rotation with orbital motion around the solar system's centre of gravity.

There are dozens like this. Ian Enting shows that Plimer:

- misrepresents the content of IPCC reports on at least 13 occasions as well as misrepresenting the operation of the IPCC and the authorship of IPCC reports;
- has at least 17 other instances of misrepresenting the content of cited sources;
- has at least 2 graphs where checks show that the original is a plot of something other than what Plimer claims and many others where data are misrepresented;
- has at least 6 cases of misrepresenting data records in addition to some instances (included in the total above) of misrepresenting data from cited source.

You'd think all this would be enough to bury the book. You'd be wrong. In one of the gravest misjudgments in journalism this year, today the Spectator has made the book's British publication its cover story, with the headline "Relax: Global Warming is all a myth". Its story consists of a hagiography of Plimer by James Delingpole, a man who knows – and cares - less about science than I do about Formula One. Plimer's book, he says, is "going to change forever the way we think about climate change", as it demonstrates that anthropogenic global warming "is the biggest, most dangerous and ruinously expensive con trick in history." Delingpole takes the opportunity to cite the usual conspiracy theories about the "powerful and very extensive body of vested interests" working to suppress the truth, which presumably now includes virtually the entire scientific community and everyone from Shell to Greenpeace and The Sun to Science magazine. That took some organising.

I have come to expect this sort of rubbish from Delingpole but I'm amazed that the Spectator is prepared to run a story like this on its cover when a quick check would have shown that it's utter nonsense.

What this story shows is that climate change denial is a matter of religious conviction. The quality of the evidence has nothing to do with it. It doesn't matter how comprehensively the sources have been discredited, or how ridiculous the claims are. People like Plimer and Delingpole will cling onto anything, however improbable, that allows them to maintain their view of the world.

monbiot.com


http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/jul/09/george-monbiot-ian-plimer
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Main Man
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Bigtoe
Jul 16 2009, 12:22 PM
:ROFL: I can't believe anyone would post this piece of crap as anything but an example of how some people will buy any line of bullshit as long as it supports their own ignorant world view.



http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/jul/09/george-monbiot-ian-plimer
Hey microdick, is all you can come with the ranting of a another microdick like monbiot. He is a fucking environmental and leftwing political wacko. Writing crap like
The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order.
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dumblonde
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I notice you didn't post any of the condemnations and explanations from scientists Mini. Afraid of facts.
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