Climategate: A Defiance of Arrogant Political Power

The average voter has had enough: no more being force-fed scenarios defying that rare commodity called common sense.

FROM- Pajamas Media

by Ian Plimer

The people are speaking. We are seeing a defiance of bureaucrats, officials, government propaganda, and funded climate catastrophe researchers. A scary scientific paradigm of human-induced climate change is collapsing because the cake has been over iced. The average voter has had enough of being talked down to by arrogant scientists with vested interests who present scenarios that defy that rare commodity called common sense.

It was only a short time ago that climate rationalists were told they were factually wrong, that their skepticism was evil, their views were akin to Holocaust denial, and that they should be tried for crimes against humanity. However, Climategate emails show that the coterie of two dozen leading climate comrades shared this skepticism in private — yet denounced skeptics in public. Various cap-and-trade systems have been shown to be an extra tax, which may end up being distributed by the sticky fingers of the UN.

Even more disturbingly, Climategate emails show two decades of systematic willful fraud. Since then, there has been the farce of Copenhagen, which the UK Taxpayers’ Alliance found cost the GDP of Malawi. (If such funds were used to provide electricity and potable water to Malawians, then this would have been a demonstration of true environmentalism.)
The allotted 10-minute speaking time for President Hugo Chavez became a one-hour rant against capitalism. He received a standing ovation. This is what Copenhagen was about.

Since Copenhagen there have been weekly revelations that the IPCC used non-valid sources for some of its exaggerated claims. If such activities took place in the corporate world, the courts would be full. All the poster displays of a forthcoming climate catastrophe such as Himalayan glaciers, Amazonian forests, inexorable rise in global temperature, Arctic ice, polar bears, retreating Kilimanjaro ice, etc., have been shown to be implausible, wrong, or fraudulent.

The lead actor in the Climategate scam, Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia, has admitted that some of his decades-old weather data was not well enough organized. Presumably he refers to the primary data that he did not destroy in attempts to avoid submitting data in response to Freedom of Information requests.

He stated that two periods in recent times had experienced similar warmings to the latest warming.

After years of hectoring skeptics, Jones now suggests that there has been no statistically significant warming, but like a drowning man clinging to a straw he still claims — contrary to his own evidence — that the recent warming is predominantly man-made. Jones just happened to omit that the rate of warming in 1860-1880, 1910-1940, and 1976-1998 were exactly the same. The only warming derived from industrialization could be 1976-1998, and yet his own data suggests that all these events were natural. Furthermore, Jones conceded that it was warmer in Roman and Medieval times — when there was no heavy industry.

I fingered Jones for fraud on pp. 481-482 in my book Heaven and Earth. If investigative journalists had not been advocates for the climate industry, they would have followed my lead and scooped the world. They didn’t because they were too busy trying to frighten us.


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Six things I've learnt about climate change

FROM-Douglas' Blog
Douglas Carswell MP for Harwich and Clampton

I'm now half-way through Ian Plimer's fascinating book on global warming, Heaven and Earth. Here are six things I hadn't previously known:

1. Over the past million years, way before industrial man came along, the climate has often changed very significantly, very quickly.

2. When climate changes, the shift is from being warm and wet to cold and dry. Or vice-versa. If global temperatures are rising, it's most likely getting wetter, not drier.

3. Warm-wet climates are generally better for life on earth than cold-dry climates.

4. CO2 levels have been far, far higher in the past - yet CO2 levels in the atmosphere don't seem to have been a significant driver of climate in the past.

5. Human activity accounts for a relatively tiny portion of global CO2 emissions. To quote Plimer, "One [submarine] hot spring can release far more CO2 than a 1000 mW coal-fired power station". There are many, many thousands of such springs.

6. Plimer suggests that the really significant drivers of climate change are the sun, ossiclations in the earth's orbit, and volcanic emissions of sulphur dioxide. Indeed, the 1784 eruption of Laki in Iceland put 150 million tonnes of SO2 into the atmosphere - which wiped out crops and caused famine in the northern hemisphere for a couple of years.

Apparently some climate change "experts" are now suggesting we put man-made SO2 particles in the atmosphere to cool the climate. Given what Plimer says about the effect of volcanic SO2 emissions on the climate in the past, that should seriously concern us.

Perhaps it's not climate change we should worry about, but the folly of our response to it. Once again, we presume ourselves to be at the centre of everything - rather than walk-on cameo players in the natural world.

UPDATE: Tom Harris MP has just posted an interesting blog in response to this, which seems to suggest that questioning man-made climate change rules me out as being any sort of "progressive". Seriously.

Surely a true progressive would always be willing to question established thinking? Being progressive is about devolving power over public policy away from the indolent and the self-serving in Westminster - and putting power in the hands of ordinary folk. Those same ordinary folk, incidentally, being forced to pick up the bill for all this action on climate change ...


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Creating catastrophe

FROM-Quadrant On Line

by Ian Plimer


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.

The atmosphere now contains 800 billion tonnes (Gt) of carbon as CO2, soils vegetation and humus contain 2,000 Gt carbon in various compounds, the oceans contain 39,000 Gt and limestone, a rock that contains 44% CO2, contains 65,000,000 Gt carbon. The atmosphere contains only 0.001% of all carbon at the surface of the Earth and far greater quantities are present in the lower crust and mantle of the Earth. Human additions of CO2 to the atmosphere must be taken into perspective. Over the last 250 years, humans have added just one part of CO2 in 10,000 to the atmosphere. One volcanic cough can do this in a day.

Climate chestnuts about polar ice are commonly raised. What is not raised is that ice is dynamic, it advances and retreats, while the Arctic is warming the Antarctic is cooling and vice versa and if ice did not retreat, then the planet would be covered in ice. For less than 20% of time Earth has had ice. The Antarctic ice sheet has been with us for 37 million years during which time there were extended periods of warmth and the ice sheet did not disappear. So too with the Greenland ice sheet which has enjoyed nearly 3 million years of expansion and contraction yet did not disappear in extended times far warmer than at present.

Sea level is also dynamic and has risen and fallen over time by at least 600 metres. Since the end of the glaciation 14,000 years ago, sea level has risen some 130 metres at almost 1 cm per year. It is now at about 1 mm per year. This sea level rise has flooded Bass Strait, the English Channel and destabilised the west Antarctic Ice Sheet. It is this sea level rise that has stimulated coral growth, created larger shallow water ecologies and changed the shape of landmasses.

The fear mongering suggestion that oceans will become acid is also misleading. The oceans are buffered by sediments and volcanic rocks on the sea floor and even in past times when atmospheric temperature and CO2 were far higher than at present, there were no acid oceans. If there had been, there would be no fossils with calcium carbonate shells. Although industrial aerosols are decreasing, the climate catastrophists omit to state that volcanic aerosols kill. At least three of the five major mass extinctions of complex life on Earth were probably due to aerosols.

If our climate catastrophists want to twiddle the dials and stop climate change, they need to play God and change radiation in the galaxy, the Sun, the Earth’s orbit, tidal cycles and plate tectonics. Once they have mastered volcanoes, then we can let them loose on climate change. In the interim, science and our great institutions are greatly damaged by the politicisation of science, the demonising of dissent and ad hominem attacks on matters of science.


Senator Wong argues that it is in the national interest to have a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. To which nation does she refer, because it is certainly not Australia? Australia faces the biggest financial decision since Federation yet there has not been an independent scientific and financial due diligence on an emissions trading scheme. Even the Regulations for this legislation have not been drafted so how can Australia even contemplate an emission trading scheme when the legislators do not know the details? It is this legislative time bomb that will destroy productive industries in rural and industrial Australia.
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'A Tax on Thin Air'

FROM-RCP

By Robert Tracinski and Tom Minchin

In a potential preview for America, the Australian Senate has just defeated that country's version of cap-and-trade by a vote of 42-30. Most of the overseas coverage of this event, however, has missed the most interesting feature of the defeat. The BBC report, for example, claims that the bill was blocked because "opposition senators...feared the legislation would harm the country's mining sector."

In fact, the bill was defeated because there is now serious disagreement in Australia on the very existence of human-caused global warming. That's the backbone behind the collapse of what was supposed to be bipartisan agreement. As Senator Nick Minchin put it in a blistering speech opposing the bill, "this whole extraordinary scheme, which would do so much damage to Australia, is based on the as yet unproven assertion that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are the main driver of global warming.... The Rudd government arrogantly refuses to acknowledge that there remains a very lively scientific debate about the extent of and the main causes of climate change, with thousands of highly reputable scientists around the world of the view that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are not and cannot be the main driver of the small degree of global warming that occurred in the last 30 years of the 20th century."

In a previous article, we have already described this "intellectual climate change" in Australia's global warming debate, and arguably no one is more responsible for the shift in opinion than University of Adelaide geologist Ian Plimer, whose new book Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science is an authoritative scientific refutation of the claims of human-caused global warming.

The influence of Plimer's book is particularly interesting because it is not a light introduction to the topic. It is a thick book, chock full of science. Plimer's prose is spirited, but there's so much detail it can be a lot take in. Yet that is part of the point of the book. If the book is comprehensive in its scope, that is because everything science has discovered about "history, archaeology, geology, astronomy, ocean sciences, atmospheric sciences, and the life sciences"-Plimer's list-refutes the global warming dogma.

What has Plimer been telling his Australian readers-including Australia's top journalists and politicians? Below are excerpts from Professor Plimer's responses in our interview with him, published last week in TIA Daily.

"The past is the key to the present. Previous rapid and large climate changes were not related to carbon dioxide.

"This has occurred on all scales of time. This century temperature has been decreasing, yet CO2 has been increasing. Over the last 150 years, temperature has increased (1860-1880, 1910-1940, 1976-1998) and decreased (1880-1910, 1940-1976, and 2002 to the present), yet CO2 has been increasing. If CO2 has been increasing, how can CO2-driven warming have driven cooling? Over historical times, there were the Minoan, Roman, and Medieval warmings, when temperature was a few degrees higher than at present. Sea level did not change. Over archaeological time, ice cores show that temperature peaks some 800 years before CO2 peaks, hence CO2 could not have driven temperature rise.

"In geological time, there have been six major ice ages. During five of these six, the CO2 content [of the atmosphere] was higher than now, and for two of these six, the CO2 content has been up to 1,000 times higher than now. If high atmospheric CO2 drives warming, then how could there be an ice age during times of high CO2? Furthermore, two of these six ice ages were at sea level at the equator.

"Over the history of time, climate changes have been driven by galactic, solar, orbital, tidal, and tectonic processes, and there has been no climate change in the past driven by CO2. The [current] rate of sea level change, CO2 release, and temperature rise and fall are well within variability, hence modern times are little different from past times....

"Geologists use integrated interdisciplinary science and look at planetary cycles over the history of time. Anything catastrophic that can happen has happened over the last 4,567 million years, and such events are preserved in the geological record. It is only if time is ignored that we can conclude that humans change climate by CO2 emissions...

"Climatology suffers from the same fads, fashions, dictators, and fraud that other fields of endeavor enjoy. In order to be funded well, climatology needs to be fashionable, and it is. The fundamental causes have been known for a long time, but predictions are only based on computer models that have very incomplete input. The IPCC models of 1990 and 1995 did not predict the 1998 El Nino nor the 21st-century cooling. So how can we use these to predict climate a century in advance?... The models have been spectacularly wrong, yet they are still used with no humility....

"The difficulty for politicians is that science is now politicized in the bureaucracy, universities, and research institutes and in many ways is forced to arrive at a predestined conclusion.... Most scientists are dependent upon governments for research funding, most universities have a large proportion of funding for climate research, and to challenge the popular paradigm is to guarantee [career] suicide. It is really only retired scientists or those few like me who are fearlessly independent who dare to question the popular paradigm [and] put up with the incessant ad hominem attacks....

"Environmentalism has many of the hallmarks of failed European socialism and Western (failed) Christianity. It has a holy book which few have read (IPCC reports), has prophets (Gore) who cannot be challenged, relies on dogma, ignores contrary evidence, has armies of wide-eyed missionaries...; imposes guilt, has a catastrophist view of the planet, and seeks indulgences."

When asked for his advice to politicians who are asked to make judgments on the science of global warming, he urges them "to understand that all science is contentious, where there is one theory there is a competing theory, and that as a legislator one must look to keeping maximum gainful employment of the electorate."

As for his advice to those who don't buy the global warming hysteria, he urges them to "Continually pester your politicians...write letters to the editor and start a groundswell of opinion. This needs to start like a guerilla war in rural, smokestack, and mining areas and to be brought into the cities, where there are queues lining up to make a fortune on cap-and-trade activities."

He concludes: "A tax on thin air is what we are being asked to approve."

Today, thanks in part to Professor Plimer, the people of Australia did not approve it.



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Looking up for answers

FROM-Objectivist Individualist:

The Sun Controls the Earth's Climate


The source of more or less energy for the Earth is the Sun. The output of UV radiation is particularly variable for the Sun with variations of 0.5 to 0.8%. This UV radiation affects the ozone concentrations in the atmosphere, the energy deposited in the upper atmosphere, and the winds in the upper atmosphere. It affects the amount of sulfur moved from the oceans into the atmosphere, which then affects lower atmosphere cloud cover, which then reflects light back into space. Overall, the energy from the Sun measured by satellites since 1979 has varied by 0.22%. The high to the low energy output were separated by only 7 years. This difference causes a surface temperature difference of at least 0.45 degree C, according to Ian Plimer. He also says the urban warming effect was 0.1 degree C for a total warming of 0.55 degree C. This is about equal to the late 20th Century temperature increase. This was an irradiance variation of about 0.53 Watts/meter squared.

Since most of this period has been one of relatively high solar activity and output, there is reason to believe that longer term measurements will show much larger variations in solar output. If the Sun's irradiance were to be only about 1 to 1.5 Watts/meter squared less than now, we would experience conditions equivalent to the very cold Maunder Minimum of the Little Ice Age. The 23rd Sun cycle was very short, being 10.0 years long rather than the average of 11.1 years, and resulted in a large decrease in solar irradiance. The quiet sunspot Cycle 24 has started and by September 2008 there were 200 consecutive days without sunspots. The very cold Dalton Minimum of the early 1800s was the last time something like this happened. Some astronomers believe that temperatures will start falling due to solar inactivity between 2012 to 2015 and reach a minimum in solar energy in 2040. This will result in the Earth being very cold around the period of 2055 - 2060.

If the temperature of the Earth is primarily due to the Sun's activities, then the other planets should be similarly affected. They are. In 1998, the Hubble telescope discovered that Triton, the moon of Neptune, had warmed since 1989 when a space probe visited it. Measurements on Pluto showed its temperature to have risen 2 degrees C. The Hubble telescope also measured a 1 degree C increase in the temperature of Jupiter in 2006. Mars has been found to have had a temperature increase of 0.65 degrees C between the 1970s and the 1990s, which is very close the 0.7 degree C increase in temperature on Earth in the last century.

Ian Plimer makes a very good case that the Earth's temperature responds primarily to changes in the activity of our Sun. The IPCC computer models greatly underestimate the effects of the Sun and greatly overestimate the effects of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. I again strongly recommend Ian Plimer's book Heaven and Earth.

Posted by Charles R. Anderson, Ph.D. at Thursday, August 13, 2009
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Hysteria is the real threat, not global warming

FROM-UK Daily Mail


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).

Those who worry about facts should look at the findings of NASA (see the website), whose up-to-date and sophisticated global surveys throw such doubt on the warmists' claims.

They should also read Heaven And Earth by Ian Plimer, Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences at The University of Melbourne and Professor of Mining Geology at The University of Adelaide.
It is the best book on science and scientists I have ever read. Piece by piece, he takes apart the work of the fanatics. Far from denying global warming, he stresses its regularity and occasional abruptness and how humans have had to adapt.

A millennium ago, Greenland was warm, with a rich agriculture - not much man-made carbon gas then. Over half of the past six million years, the climate was warmer than it is now.
He explains that the supposed consensus view of the IPCC is nonsense. The much-touted 2,500 scientists supposed to have backed its conclusion included many non-scientists or were even the same contributors counted twice.

The finding that human activity influenced global climate involved the deletion of an original passage saying they had no evidence that greenhouse gases played a role and that the best answer was 'we do not know'.

There is always a temptation to assume that anyone labelled a scientist thinks scientifically. Learned philosophers have discussed how experiments are regularly conducted to prove a desired conclusion rather than to ascertain truth.

Prof Plimer provides the sharp-end view of this. The use of computer models excites his particular disdain

He cites 17 areas of science, ranging from tectonics to meteorology, which need to be utilised in analysing climate change. No computer I have ever heard of can do this meaningfully.
In every area, conclusions, such as they are, are subject to wide margins of error (and often fierce debate).

Simple multiplication demonstrates that even modest margins of error must collectively become magnified into enormous final ones.

As he says: 'If computer models torture the data enough, the data will confess to anything.'
Yet all this leaves a big problem. If the data is really so inconclusive, not to say contradictory, why is the fanatics' message so successful?

This is a profoundly important phenomenon requiring the study of social, political, historical and even religious trends. Catastrophists have, of course, always been with us. There is something in humanity's psyche which delights in impending disaster.

Politicians are attracted because the cause must involve a great increase in the power of government.

The supposed danger has also provided fuel for those who are determined, come what may, to demonstrate that capitalism and industrialisation are the roots of our woe.
The religious instinct is satisfied by the opportunity for pious preaching and noisy protest. Yet the cause is so flawed.

Are we being conned? Yes, why not? Think of all the grand causes in our lifetime which have been bogus, starting with Iraq and Afghanistan and working backwards. Or consider the dishonesty in public affairs, as in MPs' expenses. Fraud is the common coinage of public affairs.
Think, too, that it is little over 200 years since Europe stopped the execution of witches, and less than that since Spain finally abolished the Inquisition. We are, of course, too enlightened now to be in danger of being carried away by superstition or hysteria - so we say.


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Climate Change-Phewy!

"That is, of course, if they still have any capacity to think."

via-An Honest Climate Debate
FROM- Spectator UK

The modern heresy of true science
by Melanie Phillips

Every so often, a book is published which, it is instantly clear, is the definitive last word on the subject. Such a book has just appeared on the global lunacy of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). In his devastating study Heaven and Earth. Global Warming: The Missing Science (Quartet) Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology at the University of Adelaide and previously Professor of Earth Sciences at the Universities of Melbourne and Newcastle systematically shreds the theory and the hallucinatory propaganda industry it has spawned. There is simply nothing left of it when he has finished – and he does so from the perspective of real science which the theory has so shockingly betrayed.

Having painstakingly out the actual scientific facts and evidence involved in the study of climate, he concludes his book with a sustained peroration of fury and contempt at the way such scientific evidence has been dismissed in a breathtaking campaign of ‘cognitive dissonance’. As he says, there is not one shred of actual scientific evidence to sustain the claim of AGW, which rests in its entirety upon charlatanry, fraud, ignorance and ideology. Here are some tasters of this invaluable book.

‘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’

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he writes. The world has been warming, slightly and intermittently, and also cooling, since the Little Ice Age. Nothing new there. Sea level, ice sheets and life on earth have also changed slightly. Nothing new there. The claims that the seas are rising and the ice retreating in any extraordinary fashion are all demonstrably false. The theory rests on the categorical assertion that rising carbon dioxide levels result in a warming of the atmosphere. Yet although carbon dioxide levels have been increasing, there has been no significant warming since 1995 and none at all since 1998.

That is because the claimed cause and effect between carbon dioxide and global warming is simply false. History shows us that there is no relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature. Proponents of the theory, he writes, have to explain why the Minoan Warming, Roman Warming and Medieval Warming all produced warmer temperatures than now. Why the temperature rose from 1860 to 1875, decreased from 1875 to 1890, rose until 1903, fell until 1918 and then rose dramatically until 1941. Why the rate and amount of warming at the beginning of the 20th century was greater than now despite lower carbon dioxide emissions. Why the world cooled from 1941-1976, the year of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Why the temperature rose from 1976 to 1998, then cooled. And so on.

As he says, the whole theory was created not by the scientific methods of observation and gathering actual evidence but by dubious computer modelling. These models suggested constant warming until the end of time but predicted neither post 1998 cooling nor El Nino events.

‘

This alone shows that the computer models are only sophisticated computer games with input based on the programmer’s predilections. The significant manipulation of the source data and the lack of use of many known variables exacerbate uncertainties and can produce the predestined outcome before the model can be run. This is a common flaw of mathematical modelling. Models with simulations, projections and predilections prove nothing. All a model shows is something about the model itself, normally its limitations. Data collection in science is derived from observation, measurement and experimentation, not from modelling...If computer models torture the date enough, the data will confess to anything.

... ‘How do you explain that global temperatures according to the IPCC have not increased since 1998 and that there has been no significant warming since 1995? Are you aware that even the IPCC does not consider climate models to be “predictions” or “forecasts” but merely “emission scenarios”? Are you aware of the numerous studies from science and history that show that in the Medieval Warming it was warmer than today and that this was a time with no cars or industrialisation? How do you explain that CO2 levels have been much higher in the earth’s history and have not coincided with extinctions and warm periods? Why has Greenland cooled since the 1940s? Why was the Arctic warmer than now in the 1920s and 1930s? What has Antarctic sea ice expanded to record levels in recent years? Why has Arctic sea ice expanded since 2008?’

The evidence is all around us that the theory is sheer bunkum from start to finish. But, writes Plimer – and this is the real cause of his burning anger -- scientific facts no longer seem to be necessary. They are simply dismissed, to create a belief system purporting to be ‘science’ but which is more akin to a religion sustained through the imposition of authority and intimidation – and anti-scientific claims of a settled ‘consensus’. Such a ‘consensus’ is itself bogus. It is claimed, for example, that the IPCC reports have been written by 2500 scientists. In fact, says Plimer, they are the product of a tiny number of people .

‘If governments had read the fine print of the crucial chapter 5 of IPCC AR4 (Humans Responsible for Climate Change) they would have realised that it is based on the opinions of just five independent scientists...whose computer models have not been able to accurately predict the cooling that has occurred since 1998.... What is not stated is that the predictions of climate scientists about a human-induced climate catastrophe are somewhat tainted by their own patronage arrangements with politicians, governments, NGOs and research organisations that have invested heavily in a global warming catastrophe'.

He concludes:

‘When science was born, the consensus at that time was driven by religion, politics, prejudice, mysticism and self-interested power. From Galileo to Newton and through the centuries, science debunked the consensus by experiment, calculation, observation, measurement, repeated validation, falsification and reason... Scientific fact now no longer seems to be necessary. Human-induced global warming is one such example, where one camp attempts to demolish the basic principles of science and install a new order based on political and sociological collectivism...There has been an uncritical, unthinking acceptance by the community of the media barrage about catastrophic climate change. For many, critical thinking is an anathema’.

Politicians -- not least the ludicrously styled ‘Ministers for Climate Change’-- along with the government’s Chief Scientist, the President of the Royal Society and the rest of the credulous intelligentsia should pack this book in their suitcases for their summer holiday reading. That is, of course, if they still have any capacity to think.

"The Rock of Ages"

FROM-The Australian

Hot-air doomsayers

IN Heaven and Earth - Global Warming: The Missing Science, I predicted that the critics would play the man and not discuss the science. Initial criticism appeared before the book was released three weeks ago.

Well-known catastrophists criticised the book before they actually received a review copy. Critics, who have everything to gain by frightening us witless with politicised science, have now shown their true colours. No critic has argued science with me. I have just enjoyed a fortnight of being thrashed with a feather.

Despite having four review copies, ABC's Lateline photocopied parts of chapters and sent them to an expert on gravity, a biologist and one who produces computer models. These critics did not read the book in its entirety. The compere of Lateline claimed that he had read the book yet his questions showed the opposite. When uncritical journalists have no science training, then it is little wonder doomsday scenarios can seduce them.

In The Age (Insight, May 2), David Karoly claims that my book "does not support the answers with sources". Considering that the book has 2311 footnotes as sources, Karoly clearly had not read the book. Maybe Karoly just read up to page 21, which showed that his published selective use of data showed warming but, when the complete set of data was used, no such warming was seen.

Robert Manne (The Weekend Australian, Inquirer, April 25-26) claims to be a great democrat yet demonises dissent on a matter of science. He is not a scientist. The gains made in the Enlightenment, the scientific method, history and integrated interdisciplinary science are all ignored in an ideological push to remodel the economy.

Primary producers should be very worried about an emissions trading scheme underpinned by incomplete science. Unions in industrial centres may even make conditional financial support of the ALP because the workforce they represent will be lambs to the slaughter with an ETS.

Capital city ABC and newspaper media outlets have treated the public with disdain. They have used arrogant pompous scientists who talk down to the public and yet these scientists forget that the public employs them. My critics are never asked: Who funds them? What have they to gain by following their party line? Why have they ignored a huge body of contrary science? What are their political associations? What unelected groups support them? Yet I am constantly asked these questions.

The huge number of recent letters tell me that there are winds of change. The average punter has been told for more than two decades that we are all going to fry. He is not stupid and is blessed with a rare commodity missing in many academic circles: common sense.

Life experiences of rural people are very different from those of city folk who have little first-hand experience of nature. My correspondents feel helpless and disenfranchised with the unending negative moralistic cacophony about climate change. They know it smells but they cannot find where the smell comes from. The reason why the book has been a publishing sensation is because the average person knows that they are being conned and finally they have a source reference.

The hypothesis tested in my book was that increased atmospheric CO2 creates global warming. This was shown to be invalid on all time scales and by a diversity of methods.

In the past, climate change has never been driven by CO2. Why should it be now driven by CO2 when the atmospheric CO2 content is low? The main greenhouse gas has always been water vapour. Once there is natural global warming, then CO2 in the atmosphere increases. CO2 is plant food, it is not a pollutant and it is misleading non-scientific spin to talk of carbon pollution. If we had carbon pollution, the skies would be black with fine particles of carbon. We couldn't see or breathe. Climate Change Minister Penny Wong appeals to science yet demonstrates she does not have a primary school understanding of science.

The atmosphere contains 800 billion tonnes of carbon in CO2. Soils and plants contain 2000 billion tonnes, the oceans 39,000 billion tonnes and rocks in the top few kilometres of the crust contain 65,000,000 billion tonnes of carbon in carbon compounds. The atmosphere only contains 0.001 per cent of the total carbon in the top few kilometres of the Earth.

If all the fossil fuel on Earth were burned, the atmospheric CO2 would double. The Earth has been there before and high atmospheric CO2 has accelerated plant growth and increased biodiversity. It is the sun, water vapour, rocks and oceans that have stopped a runaway greenhouse or a permanent snowball Earth.

I would like to see some fundamental questions answered by the climate catastrophists. If CO2 drives temperature, why were there past ice ages when the atmospheric CO2 content was many times greater than at present? Why has the role of clouds been ignored, especially as a 1per cent change in the amount of cloudiness could account for all the changes measured in the past 150 years? If natural forces drove warmings in Roman and medieval times, how do we know that the same natural forces did not drive the late 20th-century warming? Why didn't Earth have acid oceans and a runaway greenhouse when the atmospheric CO2 was hundreds of times higher than now? Is the present increase in atmospheric CO2 due to the medieval warming?

It is human arrogance to think that we can control climate, a process that transfers huge amounts of energy. Once we control the smaller amount of energy transferred by volcanoes and earthquakes, then we can try to control climate.

Until then, climate politics is just a load of ideological hot air.

To argue that human additions to atmospheric CO2, a trace gas in the atmosphere, changes climate requires an abandonment of all we know about history, archaeology, geology, solar physics, chemistry and astronomy. We ignore history at our peril.

I await the establishment of a Stalinist-type Truth and Retribution Commission to try me for my crimes against the established order and politicised science.

More...

"Gore’s film is Muzak compared with Plimer’s symphony."

FROM- Independent Weekly

via-Climate Fraud

Ian Plimer: A question of faith

History is littered with grand mistakes. Columbus thought the West
Indies looked distinctly oriental, Hitler and Napoleon believed the Russian winter would defrost like a fridge held open, and IBM chairman Tom Watson was convinced there’d be a world market for about five computers.

Then there’s the question of faith: that is, the belief in gods and deities. The world once had thousands of religions, and to challenge these beliefs meant death. Ancient Greeks built temples which started at Aphrodite and ended at Zeus, animists believed that plants had souls, and ancient hunter-gatherers held that rivers and mountains were created by giant crocodiles or snakes.


A giant cod did not dig the River Murray, and we know that because of the work of geologists and geographers. Since the beginnings of religion 300,000 years ago, science has challenged faith. Science is evidence, not belief, and scientists don’t burn other scientists at the stake because they disagree with each other. But the belief in human-caused global warming, says one scientist, has become the new religion.


“The history of the world is written in the rocks,” says Adelaide University geologist Professor Ian Plimer. “We can tell when the earth was born, when the atmosphere developed and the gases which comprised it. We know that continents drift and mountains uplift and erode. If you know the alphabet, if you can read the rocks, you can go back 4.567 billion years to the formation of the world itself.”


Plimer is a genial man, 62 years old and with the energy of a new-born gazelle. He’s rushing from television interviews to appointments on radio. He’s been to his printers and publishers and he’s in Adelaide between trips to Broken Hill and Wagga Wagga. It’s a busy schedule.More...


In the boot of his Mercedes he has a box of books, his new opus Heaven and Earth. He parks the car on a steep hill in Beaumont, hands a copy of the book to his passenger while he meets his wife Jill and a real estate agent. As he inspects the house for sale, the real estate agent’s parked car rolls down the hill and stops with a crunching noise at the first solid obstacle, which the rear of Jill’s car. The professor is unfazed.


“There’s space in that house for a library,” he says gleefully. “I’ve got 75 linear metres of books and Jill has the same. We need a house with space. The cars should have been parked with their wheels turned into the gutter on a slope like that but - there’s space for a library.”


And then the professor moves heaven and earth, literally and figuratively. The book, 500 pages of literature, is an argument against the belief or the faith, as Plimer sees it, that human activity causes global warming. A posse of critics from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, environmental groups and scientists from other disciplines are now out to lynch him. The mild-mannered professor’s Heaven and Earth is figuratively tearing his world apart.


“Start with science,” Plimer says. “Ignore faith. Science is evidence, not belief.” And then he starts with his history of the planet, beginning at the beginning and ending far into the future.


“The world’s climate has always changed and always will,” he says. “The speed and amount of modern climate change is neither unprecedented nor dangerous. The temperature range observed in the 20th century is in the range of normal variability.”


This sounds heretical. Don’t the world’s eminent scientists agree that humans are burning fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate, that this combustion is releasing carbon dioxide at a similarly unprecedented rate, and that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas? Won’t human-made global warming cause wild and unpredictable weather, melt polar icecaps and fry polar bears? Aren’t Pacific Islanders going to be flooded out of house and home? Won’t there be malarial mosquitoes up and down the high latitudes? Aren’t we doomed?


Plimer weaves the Mercedes through the traffic on the way to his next appointment. “Methane is the most potent greenhouse gas,” he says before answering. “The effect of driving a diesel car 10,000 kilometres is equivalent to the amount of methane a cow produces in a day.”


Yes, but what about polar bears? They don’t drive and they don’t chew cud.


Plimer stares through the windscreen, wondering where to begin. A starting point may be his previous book, A Short History of Planet Earth, published by ABC Books before the climate change debate really heated up. It talks about earth’s encounters with the killer asteroids, the rise and spread of the continents, the appearance of life, mass extinctions and really major climate changes that shaped the life and look of earth.


It even makes a passing reference to some minor animals known as hominids.


“For 80 per cent of the earth’s 4600 million years, our planet has been a warm, wet greenhouse planet. Greenhouse conditions are normal. Polar ice caps are abnormal,” he says.


“Even 2000 years ago the earth was considerably warmer than now. The Romans were scantily clad, and growing oranges and grapes in northern England.”


In Plimer’s geological timeframe, 2000 years is less than a modern meteorologist’s mini-second. Plimer sees the climate change much as we see changes in daily weather; it can be freezing in the morning, warming up towards noon with an afternoon thunderstorm, then rain and hail followed by a starry night with another frost.


To a man whose scientific discipline measures millions of years, the world’s climate is always changeable and variable. The reason we don’t notice is our incredibly short lifespan as a species and our incredibly short lives as individuals. If we’d been around as long as algal mats called stromatolites, like those at Shark Bay in West Australia which haven’t changed in 2724 million years, we’d have a truer perspective.


“The Dark Ages between 535 and 900 AD were a terrible time to be alive,” he writes in Heaven and Earth. “Sudden cooling took place. It was cold, there were famines, war, changes of empires and stressed humans succumbed to plague. Around 540 AD it was so cold trees almost stopped growing. This was a global event because it is also recorded in tree rings from Ireland, England, Siberia and North and South America.”


The Black Sea froze. Ice formed on the Nile. South America was gripped by drought; the Mayan civilisation collapsed.


The Dark Ages ended as quickly as they began and the world began to warm. This was the Medieval Warming from 900 to 1300 AD.


“The amount of land devoted to agriculture increased and fields crept up to higher altitudes where farming had not previously taken place. Europe was warm and rainfall was higher. New cities were built and the population increased from 30 million to 80 million. At the same time the thousands of temples at Angkor Wat in SE Asia were built. In China these warmer conditions led to a doubling of the population in 100 years. The Medieval Warming was the zenith of Muslim imperialism, culture and science. Economies boomed.”


And then came the Little Ice Age, and it all went wrong again. As Plimer tells it, the world warms and cools as quickly as a steaming hot bath goes tepid. He writes of giant undersea volcanoes spitting out more carbon dioxide than people have released since the start of the industrial revolution, of terrestrial volcanoes like the Toba eruption on Sumatra a mere 74,000 years ago which threw so much acid aerosols and dust into the atmosphere that the human population was reduced to as few as 4000 individuals. We were nearly wiped out, just like 99.99 per cent of all the world’s species have since life began. Becoming extinct is something most plants and animals do, and which the rest are still practising.


Unlike the ancient Greeks or the Stone Age hunters, Plimer doesn’t believe that gods or beasts created the earth or its life. Nevertheless there’s something of a missionary zeal about the man; he’d love to convert the listener. He talks of glaciers reaching down to the shores of the Mediterranean, of their retreat and the spread of hominids to the very north, of Viking settlements on a lush and pleasant Greenland. All these changes, hot and cold, happened well before Man started his lawn mower, before the internal combustion engine, before the Industrial Revolution or Emissions Trading.


So why is his voice seemingly the only one to argue that humans aren’t responsible for global warming? How can he be right and all the other scientists wrong?


If Plimer is irritated by the question he doesn’t show it. In fact, a smile spreads across his worldly face.


“Now that’s very interesting,” he says. “The media went into years of brouhaha about global warming and fellow travellers boarded the bandwagon at every opportunity. The cause became fashionable especially among climate experts such as Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, Meryl Streep and numerous other show business folk. Al Gore went from strength to strength and even compared ‘true believers’ such as himself to Galileo. Those who had other scientific views were attacked.


“The international panel on climate change gathered many climatologists, meteorologists, environmentalists and political activists. Its first report was in 1990. Three working groups had authors who contributed to a series of chapters under the guidance of lead authors. These people are touted as the 2500 scientific experts who constitute a consensus. In the 1996 report on the impact of global warming on health, one contributing author was an expert on the effectiveness of motorcycle helmets. That author had also written on the health effects of mobile phones. Other authors were environmental activists, one of whom had written on the health effects of mercury poisoning from land mines. If a land mine explodes, the last thing one thinks about is the health effects of mercury poisoning.


“The IPCC process is related to environmental activism, politics and opportunism. It is unrelated to science.”


There is much in Plimer’s book which could make the blood boil, if not the oceans evaporate. According to the geologist, deniers of human-caused global warming have become the new sceptics, the distrusted, the heretical.


IN THE EARLY 1980s, a team of palaeontologists and archaeologists was excavating a cave on the banks of the Franklin River in Tasmania. They found there evidence of Stone Age man dating back 22,000 years, the most southerly people on the planet at that time.


“Tasmania then was much colder and drier,” explained ANU archaeologist Dr Rhys Jones during the dig. “People had walked across a flat plain from what’s now Victoria to what is now Tasmania. They arrived in the (Tasmanian) south-west and sheltered in this cave, using it for more than 7000 years.


“Then the climate became much wetter and warmer. The grasslands on which the people depended gave way to thick, impenetrable forest. The forest squeezed out the people, and they were forced to leave.


“The scale of that warming was very quick, and the flooding of Bass Strait incredibly rapid. It would have been possible for a grandfather to sit on the shore of Tasmania, point across the vast sea that’s now Bass Strait, and say to his grandson: ‘I walked across there.’ It flooded in a generation.”


Now that’s climate change. Archaeologists have found the remains of villages on the bed of what’s now the Black Sea before it was either black or sea. There are rock paintings of people herding cattle in what’s now the Sahara Desert. Just a few hours north-east of Adelaide is the Mungo Lakes national park, where there’s evidence of some of the earliest hominid occupation on Australia around what was once a huge inland sea. There was a time when Lake Eyre and Lake Torrens were fresh, when the Murray River flowed out to sea near Port Pirie. And if you really want to imagine climate change, think of the Himalayas as a boring flat plain or of South America smacking into North America and stopping equatorial currents between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.


The story of climate change is the story of the earth itself, of life beginning and often ending, of asteroids and comets smacking into planets and wiping out up to 96 per cent of all marine genera. Were it not for climate change, we might still be shrews scurrying in the night to hide from carnivorous reptiles. Climate change, argues Plimer, is driven by the sun, by eccentricities in the earth’s orbit and rotation, by geological and astronomical forces so strong that humans’ influence is relatively puny.


But Plimer’s latest book, its kindest critic will acknowledge, stays away from sweeping adventures in geology. Desperate to avoid generalities, eager to explain every scientific nuance, it’s packed with 2311 footnotes, almost all of them scientific. Al Gore’s film is Muzak compared with Plimer’s symphony.


“Most scientists are anarchistic, bow to no authority and construct conclusions based on evidence,” he writes. “Matters of science cannot be solved by authority or consensus. Scientific evidence is unrelated to politics, ideology, popular paradigms, world views, fads, ethic, morality, religion and culture. If you are a Buddhist, Baha’i or Baptist, the speed of light is still about 299,792.5 kilometres per second. If it is dark, the speed of light is still about 299,792.5 kilometres per second.”


And that’s about the speed that human-caused climate change believers will respond to Professor Plimer’s tract. Few arguments ignite the passions as much as this. Religion comes close, and that too is a belief system where adherents of one faith are so convinced of their own god’s supremacy that they will go to war to win converts, is the most grievous mistake to litter history.



Just above Plimer’s own basement office at the University of Adelaide is more salubrious accommodation of Barry Brook, who sits in the Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change. They argue, they disagree, and they are equally stimulated by the other’s debate.


After all, we now know that the world’s circumference is three times the size Columbus thought it was, and that a northern summer will be followed by a Russian winter.


And we know IBM’s Tom Watson was wrong. Five computers will never be enough, even just to do climate modelling.

Farmers to the rescue

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NFF backs climate change dissenter


The National Farmers' Federation has thrown its backing behind controversial climate change dissenter, Professor Ian Plimer, whose new book aims to debunk the theories and dire predictions of some within the scientific fraternity.

In Heaven and Earth: Climate change – the real science, Prof Plimer, from the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Adelaide, notes that climatic change is "the norm", sea levels rise and fall all the time, and that climate cycles are driven by massive forces completely unrelated to carbon emissions.

"Climate changes in the past have been far greater and far more rapid than anything measured in the present," he writes.

"Not one previous climate change has ever been driven by carbon dioxide.

"To talk of carbon pollution shows an appalling ignorance of basic school science.

"Carbon dioxide is plant food, without it humans could not exist."

Prof Plimer will be a keynote speaker at the NFF's upcoming National Congress in Brisbane in June.

While not explicitly supporting the position Prof Plimer takes, NFF president David Crombie said it was time the climate change debate heard more from those with dissenting opinions.

"We've heard ad nauseam from those scientists convinced that climate change will ruin us all and, seemingly, hell-bent on making grim doomsday predictions," Mr Crombie said.

"But we've heard precious little from those experts for whom the jury is still out, or, in the case of Professor Plimer, say their research shows extreme climate change predictions are over-stated.

"Now, before I'm carted to a stake for public torching, I'm not saying Professor Plimer is right, nor that his colleagues with differing views are wrong.

"Just that it’s about time we had a balanced, informed discussion and debate... free from vilification of those who dare to question conventional wisdom."

In his book, Prof Plimer claims that every scientific argument ever used to show that humans change climate is wrong and cites over 2300 scientific references in support of his claims.

Breaking Through?

Beware the climate of conformity

What I am about to write questions much of what I have written in this space, in numerous columns, over the past five years. Perhaps what I have written can withstand this questioning. Perhaps not. The greater question is, am I - and you - capable of questioning our own orthodoxies and intellectual habits? Let's see.

The subject of this column is not small. It is a book entitled Heaven And Earth, which will be published tomorrow. It has been written by one of Australia's foremost Earth scientists, Professor Ian Plimer. He is a confronting sort of individual, polite but gruff, courteous but combative. He can write extremely well, and Heaven And Earth is a brilliantly argued book by someone not intimidated by hostile majorities or intellectual fashions.

The book's 500 pages and 230,000 words and 2311 footnotes are the product of 40 years' research and a depth and breadth of scholarship. As Plimer writes: "An understanding of climate requires an amalgamation of astronomy, solar physics, geology, geochronology, geochemistry, sedimentology, tectonics, palaeontology, palaeoecology, glaciology, climatology, meteorology, oceanography, ecology, archaeology and history."

The most important point to remember about Plimer is that he is Australia's most eminent geologist. As such, he thinks about time very differently from most of us. He takes the long, long view. He looks at climate over geological, archaeological, historical and modern time. He writes: "Past climate changes, sea-level changes and catastrophes are written in stone."

Much of what we have read about climate change, he argues, is rubbish, especially the computer modelling on which much current scientific opinion is based, which he describes as "primitive". Errors and distortions in computer modelling will be exposed in time. (As if on cue, the United Nations' peak scientific body on climate change was obliged to make an embarrassing admission last week that some of its computers models were wrong.)

Plimer does not dispute the dramatic flux of climate change - and this column is not about Australia's water debate - but he fundamentally disputes most of the assumptions and projections being made about the current causes, mostly led by atmospheric scientists, who have a different perspective on time. "It is little wonder that catastrophist views of the future of the planet fall on fertile pastures. The history of time shows us that depopulation, social disruption, extinctions, disease and catastrophic droughts take place in cold times … and life blossoms and economies boom in warm times. Planet Earth is dynamic. It always changes and evolves. It is currently in an ice age."

If we look at the last 6 million years, the Earth was warmer than it is now for 3 million years. The ice caps of the Arctic, Antarctica and Greenland are geologically unusual. Polar ice has only been present for less than 20 per cent of geological time. What follows is an intense compression of the book's 500 pages and all their provocative arguments and conclusions:

Is dangerous warming occurring? No.

Is the temperature range observed in the 20th century outside the range of normal variability? No.
The Earth's climate is driven by the receipt and redistribution of solar energy. Despite this crucial relationship, the sun tends to be brushed aside as the most important driver of climate. Calculations on supercomputers are primitive compared with the complex dynamism of the Earth's climate and ignore the crucial relationship between climate and solar energy.

"To reduce modern climate change to one variable, CO2, or a small proportion of one variable - human-induced CO2 - is not science. To try to predict the future based on just one variable (CO2) in extraordinarily complex natural systems is folly. Yet when astronomers have the temerity to show that climate is driven by solar activities rather than CO2 emissions, they are dismissed as dinosaurs undertaking the methods of old-fashioned science."
Over time, the history of CO2 content in the atmosphere has been far higher than at present for most of time. Atmospheric CO2 follows temperature rise. It does not create a temperature rise. CO2 is not a pollutant. Global warming and a high CO2 content bring prosperity and longer life.

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. "But evidence no longer matters. And any contrary work published in peer-reviewed journals is just ignored. We are told that the science on human-induced global warming is settled. Yet the claim by some scientists that the threat of human-induced global warming is 90 per cent certain (or even 99 per cent) is a figure of speech. It has no mathematical or evidential basis."
Observations in nature differ markedly from the results generated by nearly two dozen computer-generated climate models. These climate models exaggerate the effects of human CO2 emissions into the atmosphere because few of the natural variables are considered. Natural systems are far more complex than computer models.

The setting up by the UN of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988 gave an opportunity to make global warming the main theme of environmental groups. "The IPCC process is related to environmental activism, politics and opportunism. It is unrelated to science. Current zeal around human-induced climate change is comparable to the certainty professed by Creationists or religious fundamentalists."

Ian Plimer is not some isolated gadfly. He is a prize-winning scientist and professor. The back cover of Heaven And Earth carries a glowing endorsement from the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, who now holds the rotating presidency of the European Union. Numerous rigorous scientists have joined Plimer in dissenting from the prevailing orthodoxy.

Heaven And Earth is an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence