An Honest Climate Debate

Climate change ‘sceptic’ Ian Plimer argues CO2 is not causing global warming November 13, 2009

Climate change ‘sceptic’ Ian Plimer argues CO2 is not causing global warming

The Telegraph
November 12, 2009

Professor Ian Plimer, a geologist from Adelaide University, argues that a recent rise in temperature around the world is caused by solar cycles and other “extra terrestrial” forces.

He said carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, widely blamed for global warming, is a natural phenomenon caused by volcanoes erupting.

“We cannot stop carbon emissions because most of them come from volcanoes,” he said. “It is a normal element cycled around in the earth and my science, which is looking back in time, is saying we have had a planet that has been a green, warm wet planet 80 per cent of the time. We have had huge climate change in the past and to think the very slight variations we measure today are the result of our life – we really have to put ice blocks in our drinks.”

Most mainstream scientists agree that the recent warming period was caused by an increase in carbon dioxide since the industrial revolution.

However Prof Plimer said the world has experienced three periods of cooling since 1850 and furthermore carbon dioxide was increasing during many of those cooler periods.

“If we had only had warming, then there would be a connect between co2 and temperature, there is not,” he added.

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Creating catastrophe by Professor Ian Plimer August 25, 2009

Creating catastrophe

Professor Ian Plimer

By Professor Ian Plimer
Quadrant Online, August 24, 2009

Destroying the factory, building the bureaucracy

The government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme has the potential to ruin Australia’s productive economies and to build an even greater bureaucracy. Even the name of this bill should ring warning bells as carbon is the foundation of life and is not a pollutant.

It is claimed that there is a scientific consensus about human-induced climate change. Consensus is a process of politics not science. There is certainly no scientific consensus about human-induced climate change and the loudest voice does not win scientific discussions. Science is married to evidence, no matter how uncomfortable.

To argue that temperature has increased 0.8ºC since 1850 is misleading because the Little Ice Age ended in 1850 and it is absolutely no surprise that temperature increases after a long cold period. Since 1850, there has been temperature increase (1860-1880, 1910-1940, 1976-1998) and decrease (1880-1910, 1940-1976,1998-present) and the rate of the three periods of temperature increase has been the same. A simple question does not get asked: What part of warming and cooling since 1850 is natural? The first two warmings could not be related to human additions of CO2 from industry hence why wouldn’t the 1976-1998 warming also be due to natural processes?

It is claimed that, since 1950, human additions of CO2 has been the dominant cause of warming. The scales and rates of temperature change in the past have been far greater than when humans emitted CO2 from industry. What has caused the coolings (1940-1976 and 1998-present) or, by some tortured logic, is global cooling this century actually global warming cunningly disguised?

At present, atmospheric temperature is decreasing and CO2 is increasing again showing that CO2 is not the principal driver of climate change. Planet Earth is a warm wet greenhouse volcanic planet. The planet is dynamic, change is normal. Five of the six major ice ages occurred when the atmospheric CO2 content was up to 1,000 times higher than at present and for half of Earth history CO2 has been sequestered naturally into algal reefs, coral reefs, sediments, altered rocks, bacteria, plants, soils and oceans. This process is still taking place.

The hypothesis that high atmospheric CO2 drives global warming is therefore invalid. The Earth’s atmospheric CO2 initially derived from volcanic degassing. Much of it still does and the rest is recycled CO2 from the oceans, rocks and life.

The claim that warming will increase in the future has been disproved by the climate modellers’ own data. Climate models of the 1990s did not predict the El Niño of 1998 or the cooling in the 21st Century. If such models are inaccurate only 10 years into the future, how can they be accurate for longer-term predictions? Furthermore, when these models are run backwards they cannot be used to identify climate-driving processes involving a huge transfer of energy (e.g. El Niño), volcanoes, solar changes and supernovae. Models tell us more about the climatologists than they do about Nature.

Another claim is that climate cannot be reversed. This invokes a non-dynamic planet. The fact that previous warmings with an atmospheric temperature some 5ºC higher than now (e.g. Minoan, Roman, Medieval) were reversed is conveniently ignored as are the great climate cycles driven by the Sun, the Earth’s orbit, tectonics and tides seen on modern, archaeological and geological time scales.

‘Tipping points’ are another sensationalist unsubstantiated claim. In past times when atmospheric CO2 and temperature were far higher, there were no tipping points, climate disasters or runaway greenhouse. The climate catastrophists attempt to create fear by mentioning the carbon cycle but just happen to omit that significant oxygenation of the atmosphere took place when the planet was in middle age and this process of photosynthesis resulted the recycling and sequestration of carbon.

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Sceptics create a best-seller! August 6, 2009

Sceptics create a best-seller

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun
Thursday, August 06, 2009

Professor Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth, a bestseller here despite being rejected by four preachy publishers, has now been released in the US – and should do some damage to global warming alarmists there, too, to judge by its Amazon ranking:

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #132 in Books…

Popular in these categories:…

#1 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Biological Sciences > Ecology
#1 in Books > Science > Earth Sciences > Meteorology
#1 in Books > Science > Earth Sciences > Climatology > Climate Changes

Once more scientists and politicians realise there’s an audience for scepticism at the claims of warming alarmists, more will speak out.

Meanwhile, a new paper by Henrik Svensmark implicates the sun in global warming – and cooling:

Our results show global-scale evidence of conspicuous influences of solar variability on cloudiness and aerosols… From solar activity to cosmic ray ionization to aerosols and liquid-water clouds, a causal chain appears to operate on a global scale.

Anthony Watts explains:

This paper confirms 13 years of discoveries that suggest a key role for cosmic rays in climate change. It links observable variations in the world’s cloudiness to laboratory experiments in Copenhagen showing how cosmic rays help generate atmospheric aerosols. This is important, because it confirms the existence of a sun-earth atmospheric modulation mechanism for clouds and aerosols.

But there’s been a big jump in global temperature for July.

Global warming is the new religion of First World urban elites July 29, 2009

Global warming is the new religion of First World urban elites

By Jonathan Manthorpe,
Vancouver Sun, July 29, 2009

Geologist Ian Plimer takes a contrary view, arguing that man-made climate change is a con trick perpetuated by environmentalists

Ian Plimer has outraged the ayatollahs of purist environmentalism, the Torquemadas of the doctrine of global warming, and he seems to relish the damnation they heap on him.

Plimer is a geologist, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University, and he may well be Australia’s best-known and most notorious academic.

Plimer, you see, is an unremitting critic of “anthropogenic global warming” — man-made climate change to you and me — and the current environmental orthodoxy that if we change our polluting ways, global warming can be reversed.

It is, of course, not new to have a highly qualified scientist saying that global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon with many precedents in history. Many have made the argument, too, that it is rubbish to contend human behaviour is causing the current climate change. And it has often been well argued that it is totally ridiculous to suppose that changes in human behaviour — cleaning up our act through expensive slight-of-hand taxation tricks — can reverse the trend.

But most of these scientific and academic voices have fallen silent in the face of environmental Jacobinism. Purging humankind of its supposed sins of environmental degradation has become a religion with a fanatical and often intolerant priesthood, especially among the First World urban elites.

But Plimer shows no sign of giving way to this orthodoxy and has just published the latest of his six books and 60 academic papers on the subject of global warming. This book, Heaven and Earth — Global Warming: The Missing Science, draws together much of his previous work. It springs especially from A Short History of Plant Earth, which was based on a decade of radio broadcasts in Australia.

That book, published in 2001, was a best-seller and won several prizes. But Plimer found it hard to find anyone willing to publish this latest book, so intimidating has the environmental lobby become.

But he did eventually find a small publishing house willing to take the gamble and the book has already sold about 30,000 copies in Australia. It seems also to be doing well in Britain and the United States in the first days of publication.

Plimer presents the proposition that anthropogenic global warming is little more than a con trick on the public perpetrated by fundamentalist environmentalists and callously adopted by politicians and government officials who love nothing more than an issue that causes public anxiety.

While environmentalists for the most part draw their conclusions based on climate information gathered in the last few hundred years, geologists, Plimer says, have a time frame stretching back many thousands of millions of years.

The dynamic and changing character of the Earth’s climate has always been known by geologists. These changes are cyclical and random, he says. They are not caused or significantly affected by human behaviour.

Polar ice, for example, has been present on the Earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time, Plimer writes. Plus, animal extinctions are an entirely normal part of the Earth’s evolution.

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Hysteria is the real threat, not global warming July 9, 2009

Hysteria is the real threat, not global warming

By Andrew Alexander
The Daily Mail, July 9, 2009

With Tony Blair launching his own plan to save the world (groans), and the G8 leaders also unveiling their thoughts about global warming, this is a big week for environmental fanaticism.

Whatever he or they offer, it will not be enough to quell the warmists’ semi-religious fervour.

They are like medieval preachers, proclaiming to baying crowds that the end of the word is nigh.

Well, is it? There are two separate climate issues – the extent of global warming and the role that humanity plays in it.

Some facts help. The famous 1996 report by the International Panel on Climate Change predicted serious global warming and blamed mankind.

But, since then, the world has disobligingly stopped warming. And two years of global cooling erased nearly 30 years of recorded temperature rises.

What was the worrying rise in temperature – so exciting for those whose computer models used the past to predict a grim future?

Given the margin of error associated with the old-style thermometers which were, until only recently, used to record temperatures, it should be stated thus: over the past 100 years, temperature has risen by 0.7C – plus or minus 1.3 degrees!

The only importance the serious scientists can attach to such a figure is that less serious people think it meaningful.

My own science teacher would have kept me in after school for saying this was a valuable figure.

But, as you will have noticed, it worked. The catastrophists piled in – some of whom had previously flourished warnings about global cooling. For some, any figure will do, especially when it gives them a media profile (and grants for research)

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