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July 10, 2009
Meet Ian Plimer
He's an Australian geologist, and the man who has exposed the great climate change con trick:
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.
...
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.’
The article is a fascinating read, the story behind the publishing of the book is no less than amazing on its own. It made me sit up a little straighter, it made my fingers twitch, the activist in me was re-activated and I once again wanted to do something to stop this stupidity. And that's just from reading the article. I'd probably go nuts if I read the book.
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.’
What a dose of reality that is. We do have that magical number 60, and all the activism in the world is not going to get around it. Why? Because there are too many idiots out there:
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?’
What will the United States of America be like after 30 years of cap and trade, socialism and spreading the wealth? Take a good hard look at Cuba, I fear therein lies the answer.
Posted by LindaSoG at July 10, 2009 06:50 AM
Comments
Fascinating topic Linda, I love your Cuba analogy, I fear it's deadly accurate.
When I lived in Alaska one of my pastimes was prospecting, mostly the known gold fields and some really off the wall locations. In one remote area I found fine gold in black sand on a glacial stream, not enough to make it a worthwhile labor, as we were leaving I looked up the sheer wall of the canyon, some 50 ft up was a mossy shelf, I crawled up there and ripped off the moss, panned it and found two nice but tiny nuggets, well worth the effort. I'm no geologist but I'm fascinated by Geology and still study it. It poses more questions than answers but it can pique the imagination. Here are two fascinations I've witnessed, Lake George Breakout and
Black Rapids Glacier. During the development of the Prudhoe Bay oil field on the North Slope of the Alaska Range, it is a treeless plain over 75 miles North from the nearest tree, mostly flat like a Louisiana rice field, yet the drillers at depths of over 2000 feet were bringing up 'fresh' Cottonwood pieces from that depth, indicating not a slow burial of a temperate zone species but some cataclysmic event that trapped living trees under a 2000 foot depth of overburden. Temperatures at that depth are in excess of 200 degrees F. with surface temperatures as cozy as minus 60 degrees. Oil is trapped in permafrost near the surface in frozen layers, hard as asphalt and nearly un extractable.
Global warming, is to me anyway, like the discovery of "Piltdown Man" but unlike him it's true, the cycle of warming and cooling is timeless and by all indications we may be entering a cooling phase. So much for AL Gore's magic mushrooms, the envirowhacko's mind numbing following cult of peculiar and anthropomorphic creatures.
Posted by: Jack at July 10, 2009 11:21 AM
You don't know the half of it.
Since every human exhales CO2, and since CO2 is a "polutant," something will have to be done about that, too.
Posted by: yonason at July 10, 2009 01:33 PM
arrrrgh. OK, I will try again...
Here's the link. It speaks for itself.
http://zombietime.com/john_holdren/
Posted by: yonason at July 10, 2009 01:37 PM
yonason -
So THAT'S what Justice Gensburg was talking about!
Too many breathing people!
((Gallows humor, in case anyone missed it))
Posted by: Foxfier at July 10, 2009 02:51 PM
Thanks yonason, Holdren is one of Obama's unconstitutional Czars and a supports Obama's very dangerous trend.Welcome to the Gulag!!!
Posted by: Jack at July 11, 2009 12:00 AM
Must be this guy knows what he's talking about. All the tree-huggers dove onto his book page on Amazon to trash him.
If that isn't a vote of confidence, I don't know what is.
Posted by: Kevin M at July 14, 2009 09:32 PM
Well Kevin. That's a "well-duh" moment for me. I never thought to look on Amazon for his book. I'd like to give it try but I confess, I'm not one for technical books, and "500 pages of heavily annontated prose" is somewhat intimidating to me.
Posted by: LindaSoG at July 14, 2009 10:01 PM
Unfortunately, Ian Plimer is unreliable on climate change, just as he has been unreliable in his criticism of creationism. I think his basic position in opposition to creationism was correct, but he is not to be relied upon in the arguments and evidence he uses to argue against it. Conversely, I think his position in opposition to climate change is incorrect, and he's also not to be relied upon in the arguments and evidence he uses to argue against it.
In both cases, he's apparently engaged in plagiarism, as well--at the very least, he's sloppy about accurately citing his sources and placing quotation marks around direct quotes.
If you click the link on my name you'll get a summary of why I think this is the case, including a link to a point-by-point critique of errors in his book.
Posted by: Jim Lippard at November 25, 2009 12:32 PM