I had the pleasure of meeting Prof. Plimer at a book signing at Abbey’s in Sydney this afternoon. There was a steady flow of people and Prof. Plimer took the time to discuss with several of us issues raised in his book Heaven + Earth: Global Warming – The missing science.

A knot of warm-mongers, clearly threatened by the contents of Prof. Plimer’s book, turned up as well and attempted to engage in “debate” with Prof. Plimer, although they didn’t look the type to be able to argue the science cogently or at all, and spent most of the time attempting to discourage the public from buying his book!

Thanks to Prof. Plimer for taking the time to put together such an excellent resource.

After all the ballyhoo about my post on Sunday deconstructing Michael Ashley’s review of Ian Plimer’s Heaven + Earth in The Weekend Australian, a timely article from Roy Spencer about the origins of CO2 in the atmosphere:

So, I keep coming back to the question: If warming of the oceans causes an increase in atmospheric CO2 on a year-to-year basis, is it possible that long-term warming of the oceans (say, due to a natural change in cloud cover) might be causing some portion of the long-term increase in atmospheric CO2?
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My primary purpose in presenting all of this is simply to stimulate debate. Are we really sure that ALL of the atmospheric increase in CO2 is from humanity’s emissions? After all, the natural sources and sinks of CO2 are about 20 times the anthropogenic source, so all it would take is a small imbalance in the natural flows to rival the anthropogenic source. And it is clear that there are natural imbalances of that magnitude on a year-to-year basis…

Read it here.

From The Daily Bayonet:

You just know it’s going to be a tough week for climate alarmists when it starts with the BBC debunking one of their favorite global warming claims, the warming of the Atlantic Ocean. Turns out it’s another entirely natural cause, nothing to do with global warming, or man, or a trace gas.

Now let’s see if the National Geographic corrects itself on this story, or this one, or this one, or this one that all pushed junk science the BBC now reports as dead wrong.

What terrifies greens about inconvenient news like this is that people will ask what else were they wrong about?

Read it here.

The Weekend Australian publishes a dismissive review of Ian Plimer’s book Heaven and Earth which has all the usual alarmist ingredients, in the following order:

1. ad hominem attacks (despite claims to the contrary);
2. choosing one isolated fact and then trying to discredit it;
3. extrapolating ingredient 2 to the entire book;
4. ignoring the main arguments completely; and
5. hints at censorship.

So firstly to ingredient 1, where the reviewer, Michael Ashley, a professor of astrophysics at UNSW, firstly associates Plimer with a bunch of scientific weirdos, then looks to the argument from authority to discredit his work:

ONE of the peculiar things about being an astronomer is that you receive, from time to time, monographs on topics such as “a new theory of the electric universe”, or “Einstein was wrong“, or “the moon landings were a hoax“.

The writings are always earnest, often involve conspiracy theories and are scientifically worthless.

One such document that arrived last week was Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth.
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Before reading any further, I examined Plimer’s publication list on the University of Adelaide website to see what he has published in refereed journals. There are a scant 17 such papers since 1994, two as first author with the titles “Manganoan garnet rocks associated with the Broken Hill Pb-Zn-Ag orebody” and “Kasolite from the British Empire Mine”. Absolutely nothing on climate science.

Tick in the box (and, P.S. nothing in yours either, although there is a hilarious photoshopped image of a binary star system rising picturesquely over Sydney…). Moving on to ingredient 2. The reviewer has chosen a minor issue, covered in about half a dozen pages, and attempts to discredit it, in preparation for using it to discredit the whole work – and what does he choose? Measurement of CO2. All I can say, is that if this is the best the reviewer can come up with, it’s weak as hell:

To appreciate the errors in Plimer’s book you don’t have to be a climate scientist. [That’s fortunate, because you aren’t – Ed] For example, take the measurement of the global average CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. This is obviously important, so scientists measure it with great care at many locations across the world.

Precision measurements have been made daily since 1958 at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, a mountain-top site with a clear airflow unaffected by local pollution. The data is in excellent agreement with ice cores from several sites in Antarctica and Greenland. Thousands of scientific papers have been written on the topic, hundreds of scientists are involved from many independent research groups.

Plimer, however, writes that a simple home experiment indoors can show that in a week, CO2 can vary by 75 parts per million by volume, equal to about 40 years’ worth of change at the present rate. He thinks this “rings alarm bells” on the veracity of the Mauna Loa data, which shows a smoothly rising concentration.

Actually, what Plimer says (if the reviewer had bothered to read it) is that measurement of CO2 is notoriously difficult. It was originally carried out by a careful chemical test (the Pettenkofer method) which accurately revealed the atmospheric concentration of CO2. This was abandoned in 1959 for a quick and dirty infra-red spectroscopy test, which has never been validated against the Pettenkofer method:

The raw data from Mauna Loa is “edited” by an operator who deletes what may be considered poor data. Some 82% of the raw infra-red CO2 measurement data is “edited” leaving just 18% of the raw data measurements for statistical analysis.
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Some infra-red equipment has a cold trap to remove water vapour. However, CO2 dissolves in cold water and some CO2 is also removed. These other gases are detected and measured as CO2. Gases such as CFCs, although as parts per billion in the atmosphere, have such a high infra-red absorption that they register as parts per million CO2. Unless all these other atmospheric gases are measured at the same time as CO2, then the analyses by infra-red techniques must be treated with great caution.
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The IPCC’s Third Assessment Report of 2001 argued that only infra-red CO2 measurements can be relied upon and prior measurements can be disregarded. The atmospheric CO2 measurements since 1812 do not show a steadily increasing atmospheric CO2 as shown by the Mauna Loa measurements. The IPCC chose to ignore 90,000 precise CO2 measurements compiled despite the fact that there is an overlap in time between the Pettenkofer method and the infra-red method at Mauna Loa. If a large body of validated historical data is to be ignored, then a well reasoned argument needs to be given. There was no explanation. Just silence.

Seems a perfectly reasonable questioning of the accuracy of CO2 measurement techniques to me. This is only a side issue, yet it is the focus of the review. The reviewer then moves on to ingredient 3, the extrapolation to the entire work:

Incredible as it may seem, this quality of argument is typical of the book. While the text is annotated profusely with footnotes and refers to papers in the top journals, thus giving it the veneer of scholarship, it is often the case that the cited articles do not support the text.
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All these ideas are so wrong as to be laughable: they do not offer an “alternative scientific perspective”.

If a reviewer dismisses something so casually, he should at least have the courtesy to provide explanations. But there are none.

Moving on to ingredient 4, the ignoring of the main arguments. The IPCC claim that the present “warming”, which has ceased since about 2001, is a direct result of anthropogenic CO2. Plimer uses the remaining 490 plus pages of the book to demonstrate that climate change is related to thousands of other factors, and has taken place for billions of years without man’s help, and that the anthropogenic signal (if there is one) is simply lost in the noise. Where is the reviewer’s response to that? Nowhere to be seen.

Finally, ingredient 5, hinting at censorship of publications which do not support the “consensus” (always remembering of course that science isn’t about consensus, but politics is…), because they do a “disservice to science”. And just to finish off, yet another ad hominem for good luck:

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 [see note below – Ed].

Unfortunately for you, Prof. Ashley, the publishers can’t print copies fast enough!

Read it here.

Note: For those that may not know, Immanuel Velikovsky proposed that that Earth has suffered catastrophic close-contacts with other planets (principally Venus and Mars) in ancient times. Erich von Daniken is one of the key f
igures responsible for popularising the paleocontact and ancient astronaut hypotheses. So you can see how offensive it is for the reviewer to link Plimer’s work with this genuine “pseudo-science”.

Ian Plimer will be at

• Abbey’s Bookshop, 131 York Street, Sydney, on
• Tuesday 12 May between 3.30 and 4.30pm,

where he will discuss his new bestseller Heaven and Earth – Global Warming, the Missing Science, and will be signing copies.

I hope to get along myself.

Link to Abbey’s Bookshop here.

Down from .206 to .091:

Read it here.

In Victoria this time, where students are “invited to imagine a world 20 years from now where environmental solutions have not yet been found to pressing issues including global warming” [Which stopped in about 2001 – Ed].

Steve Cook, campus principal at Williamstown High School which has trialled the education resource, said students had responded with optimism and creativity to the program.
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“The curriculum provides facts whilst capturing imaginations and developing skills to address environmental challenges.” [I wonder if it provides “facts” about the natural climate cycles the earth has gone through over billions of years, or maybe it will just focus on evil CO2 – what do you think? – Ed]

Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, the patron of curriculum developer the Global Green Plan Foundation, and federal Minister for Climate Change Penny Wong will launch the initiative.

Seems where the environment is concerned, the politicisation of education is just fine and dandy. Be thankful you don’t live in Victoria.

Read it here.

As reproduced in The Age.

CHINA has signalled its readiness to abandon its resistance to limits on its carbon emissions and wants to reach an international deal to fight global warming.

According to Britain’s Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, who met senior officials in Beijing this week, China is ready to “do business” with developed countries to reach an agreement to replace the Kyoto treaty.

Can’t quite see how that’s going to work, when China is building two new coal fired power stations each week, and has vowed to increase coal production by 30% by 2015…

Read it here.

As always, a great read!

Congratulations, Leigh – your second award (see the first here) for comparing the effect of a small amount of CO2 in the air to the effect of a small amount of cyanide gas in the air. And to cap it all, there’s a “D-word” alert. With science writers like this, there’s no hope. Here’s the winning quote:

He [Ian Plimer] says that as there’s less atmospheric CO2 than nitrogen or oxygen, a bit more won’t make much difference. Doubters of the small fraction-big action effect should try surviving with a whiff of cyanide in the room.

In a snide and snarky little article entitled “Denialist ark a wobbly craft”, Dayton attempts (and fails) to counter the arguments in Ian Plimer’s book, Heaven and Earth. Firstly, as always, the ad hominems, so let’s get them out of the way. Referring to Plimer’s case against a bunch of creationists:

Federal Court judge Ronald Sackville ultimately ruled that although the minister had indeed made false and misleading claims, they were not made in the course of trade or commerce. Plimer won the publicity war but lost the case and the family home.

Plimer brings this, uh, rock-solid track record of fighting for facts to the hot-button topic du jour: global warming.

Then we move on to reasoned argument:

It’s all a load of old codswallop. What on (heaven) and earth is Plimer thinking?

Gee, that’s convinced me. Dayton then goes on to misrepresent the science set out in Plimer’s book, and makes unsubstantiated claims without any reference to facts:

Given it’s incontrovertible that since the Industrial Revolution the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increased, it’s wishful thinking to believe nothing significant will happen as a result. Yet Plimer does just that.

And of course, then backs unquestioningly the corrupt and politicised IPCC:

Plimer also wrongly claims that IPCC reports are based largely on computer modelling. Not so. Observational and paleoclimate data is also included. The idea is to learn from the past, assess the present and make the best possible predictions about future trends.

A dismal effort.

Read it here (if you can bear it).