heaven and earth

The Australian has a printed a response by Plimer to some of the criticism he has received. Plimer opens with: In Heaven and Earth - Global Warming: The Missing Science, I predicted that the critics would play the man and not discuss the science. Then he proceeds to play the man and not the ball, calling his critics "arrogant pompous scientists", saying that they lack "common sense" and the scientists who criticised him on Lateline were merely "an expert on gravity, a biologist and one who produces computer models". And how does he respond to the numerous specific criticisms of all the…

Adam Morton asked Ian Plimer where his dodgy Figure 3 came from (my emphasis): Some of his critics say they are surprised that a former head of the University of Melbourne geology department, with more than 120 published papers to his name, would include unsourced graphs in his book. Asked where he found one graph showing temperatures across the 20th century differing markedly to the data used by the IPCC or the world's leading climate centres, Plimer says he can not recall. Gee, imagine what Plimer would have said if some climate scientist had been caught out unable to provide a source for…

Looks like it was Pilmer night on the ABC. First, he was on Counterpoint, ABC's anti-Science show, as you would expect from his previous appearance, everything he said, no matter how outrageous was uncritically accepted. This time he blamed the Antarctic ozone hole on CFCs coming from Erebus. (Not so) But his performance on Lateline was astonishing. Rather than let himself get pinned down into to defending the claims in his book, he continually shifted ground. When Tony Jones, questioned about his claim that temperatures had been cooling since 1998, Plimer said that this was not an…

On page 19 of Heaven and Earth we find Plimer making this remarkable claim about one of the authors of the IPCC's 2nd Assessment Report's chapter on the impacts of global warming on health: 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. Yes, that's just crazy. Let's see what Plimer's source, Paul Reiter's submission to a House of Lords committee says: One of these activists has published "professional" articles…

I agree with Barry Brook that Ian Plimer's approach to climate science in Heaven Earth is unscientific. He starts with his conclusion that there is no "evidential basis" that humans have caused recent warming and that the theory that humans can create global warming is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archeology and geology. He accepts any factoid that supports his conclusion and rejects any evidence that contradicts his conclusion. For example, he blindly accepts EG Beck's CO2 graph. And remember Khilyuk and Chilingar? The guys who compared human…