Plimer
tlambert | January 1, 2012The Australian finally publishes Mike Sandiford's correction of the false claims from Plimer that The Australian published two weeks earlier:
Deliberately misrepresenting data or making it up is just not on.
Here's an example. In a section from his new book, How To Get Expelled from School, as reprinted in The Weekend Australian recently, Plimer claims: "Antarctic ice core (Siple) shows that there were 330 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air in 1900; Mauna Loa Hawaiian measurements in 1960 show that the air then had 260ppm carbon dioxide."
Plimer goes on to say: "Either the ice…
tlambert | December 21, 2011The Australian has continued its war on science by printing an extract from Ian Plimer's new book, How to Get Expelled from School. The extract is largely plagiarised from this press release on a recent paper in Science by Funder et al finding large fluctuations in Arctic sea ice over the last 10,000 years. Plimer did change this passage in the press release
In order to reach their surprising conclusions, Funder and the rest of the team organised several expeditions to Peary Land in northern Greenland.
to this:
In order to reach their unsurprising conclusions, Funder and the rest of the…
tlambert | December 15, 2011Crank magnetism is the tendency of someone attracted to one crank idea to be attracted to more. Ian Plimer, already notable for his acceptance of the iron Sun theory and the volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans theory has now been revealed as believing (like Christopher Booker) that white asbestos is harmless. But Plimer has gone beyond that to denying that white asbestos (chrysotile) is even asbestos:
MATT PEACOCK: Well can I ask you a simple question about your expertise, rocks? A few years ago you told me chrysotile was not asbestos, is that right?
IAN PLIMER: Chrysotile's a serpentine…
tlambert | March 20, 2011Ian Enting, author of Twisted: The Distorted Mathematics of Greenhouse Denial and the definitive list of errors in Plimer's Heaven and Earth has a talk on Ockham's Razor on the public debate on climate science:
the central issue is that if there was a real case against a significant human influence on climate, why is so much of what passes for public debate based on fabrication? If Ian Plimer had a real case, why does he misrepresent the contents of dozens of his cited references and fabricates so many of his graphics? More importantly, since Plimer is only one individual, if his fellow…
tlambert | February 25, 2011Graham Readfern explains how a thorough demolition of Ian Plimer is now in Hansard:
Back in October last year, the Senate's Environment and Communications Legislation Committee agreed to table a letter from Cardinal Pell which quoted heavily from Heaven and Earth to claim there were "good reasons for doubting that carbon dioxide causes warmer temperatures".
After an early battle with Senator Ian McDonald, who didn't want to give Dr Ayers time to respond, the bureau's director finally managed to get his frustrations off his chest and onto the Hansard record. Dr Ayers' explained how Cardinal…
tlambert | May 14, 2010Ian Musgrave has written an open letter to Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, correcting him on his claim that "at the time of Julius Caesar and Jesus of Nazareth the climate was considerably warmer than it is now".
But where did Abbott get the notion that it was considerably warmer in Roman times? Most likely from Ian Plimer, who on page 59 of Heaven and Earth writes:
The Roman Warming Period (250 BC - 450 AD)
Warming started about 250 BC and was enjoyed by the Greeks and Romans. The Romans had it easy. Although the Empire started in cool period, grapes were grown in Rome in 150 BC. By the 1st…
tlambert | May 4, 2010The volcanic eruption in Iceland produced a net reduction in emissions because the decrease in emissions from all the grounded flights was more than the total CO2 from the volcano. So naturally Ian Plimer has been repeating his discredited claims that volcanoes produce more emissions than humans. Media Watch busts him for it.
tlambert | December 15, 2009Ian Plimer's performance in his debate with Monbiot has to be seen to be believed. Rather than admit to making any error at all, Plimer ducks, weaves, obfuscates, recites his favourite catch phrase, tries to change the subject and fabricates some more. When confronted with the fact that the USGS says (backed with scientific papers) that human activities emit 130 times as much CO2 as volcanoes, Plimer claims that the USGS doesn't count underwater volcanoes. When told that the USGS specifically said that they do count undersea volcanoes, Plimer invented a story about how the nature of the…
tlambert | November 18, 2009This story from the Australian Associated Press contains the usual scare-mongering from Ian Plimer:
AAP November 19, 2009 01:36pm
Australia will go broke and become the laughing stock of the world if politicians ignore basic science on climate change, a leading global warming sceptic says.
But there is one intriguing detail:
Prof Plimer's comments came as he delivered the annual Essington Lewis Memorial Lecture in honour of a former chief executive and chairman of BHP.
And that lecture won't be delivered until 6pm today (Nov 19).
I think it is awesome that the AAP can report from the future…
tlambert | November 12, 2009Ian Plimer responds to criticism with by calling his critics names and failing to address their arguments. In an interview on BBC Radio 4, Plimer spouts his usual outrageous falsehoods:
"We cannot stop carbon emissions because most of them come from volcanoes."
Not true -- even Martin Durkin's Swindle retracted this one.
And when the interviewer brought up Michael Ashley's devastating review of Heaven and Earth, we got this:
Plimer: "When you look at my critics -- they are people who are rent seekers. They have everything to gain by continuing the process of frightening people witless, by…
tlambert | October 25, 2009Eli Rabett has been investigating Ian Plimer's claim that climate scientists were cooking the books on the CO2 record. Plimer wrote:
The raw data from Mauna Loa is 'edited' by an operator who deletes what is considered poor data. Some 82% of the raw data is "edited" leaving just 18% of the raw data measurements for statistical analysis [2902,2903]. With such savage editing of raw data, whatever trend one wants can be shown. [p 416 of Heaven and Earth]
The raw data is an average of 4 samples from hour to hour. In 2004 there were a possible 8784 measurements. Due to instrumental error 1102…
tlambert | October 19, 2009When Kurt Lambeck criticized Ian Plimer on Ockhams Razor, he gaves specific examples of Plimer's errros of omission and commission. I gazed into my crystal ball and wrote:
I predict that Plimer will respond to this by denying that his science has been criticised, claiming that Lambeck's criticism was merely an ad hominem attack, and by making personal attacks on Lambeck.
Yesterday on Ockham's Razor we had Professor Ian Plimer replies to his critics:
Polemical criticism of my book Heaven and Earth has been savage because there are a large number of career climate comrades who frighten us…
tlambert | September 19, 2009After Ian Plimer reneged on his agreement to answer Monbiot's questions, the folks at the Spectator have reacted just like Plimer does to criticism -- with name calling and nothing to address the criticism.
Spectator columnist Rod Liddle
Moonbat ... You pompous, monomaniacal, jackass. ... reminds me a little of the hardline creationists you find jabbering in the backwoods of the Appalachian Mountains
Novelist James Delingpole, the man that the Spectator decided was best qualified to review Plimer's book:
ineffable barkingness of George Moonbat .... if anyone ever chooses to take any of the…
tlambert | September 15, 2009Just as I thought, Ian Plimer's questions for Monbiot were a pretext to avoid answering Monbiot's questions. Monbiot writes:
Creationists and climate change deniers have this in common: they don't answer their critics. They make what they say are definitive refutations of the science. When these refutations are shown to be nonsense, they do not seek to defend them. They simply switch to another line of attack. They never retract, never apologise, never explain, just raise the volume, keep moving and hope that people won't notice the trail of broken claims in their wake. ...
Having put up…
tlambert | September 2, 2009George Monbiot has the details on Plimer's latest attempts to evade answering Monbiot's questions. Plimer wrote to him:
There are seven versions of Heaven and Earth and only my Australian publisher and I know the differences in diagrams, references and text between the seven. It has taken some time to look at your questions and determine which version was used for compilation of the questions. Can you please confirm that you have actually read Heaven and Earth and that your questions derive from that reading.
As Monbiot notes:
This was odd because, judging by the notes made from Heaven and…
tlambert | August 25, 2009I think the purpose of Plimer's strange questions was to give himself a pretext to avoid answering Monbiot's questions, but Gavin Schmidt has countered this ploy by addressing Plimer's questions at RealClimate.
tlambert | August 21, 2009Bob Ward reviews Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth in The Times:
It is easy to see why this book has attracted attention, particularly from right-wing commentators who have long believed that man-made climate change is a conspiracy theory. But this book is so full of errors that readers who believe its content could be seriously misled about the causes and consequences of climate change. ...
Possibly the funniest howler in the book also occurs in the first chapter. It is a graph that is supposed to show the global temperature record since 1880, with a marked and highly exaggerated phase of…
illconsidered | August 21, 2009I had an open thread a couple of weeks ago about Ian Plimer's recent novel supposedly exposing the lie that is Anthropogenic Global Warming.
I have not read it. A few commenter's defending the book asked how anyone can judge it if they have not read it.
Well, no one can read every book that is out there, not even every book about global warming. We all have to choose. This of course introduces the possibility of bias confirmation. If I feel it in my gut that this particular book will be crap, I won't read it and I will assume I am right about it.
But here's the thing, it is possible to…
tlambert | August 14, 2009The ABC's quality control at Unleashed appears to have failed. They have published an article by Plimer that merely repeats many of the claims from his discredited book. Plimer has enlarged his claim from his book that volcanoes emit more CO2 than human activities. Now it is:
Over the past 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.
Tamino proves him wrong even if you count supervolcanoes. And note that it is dishonest for Plimer to use supervolcanoes to argue that humn emissions don't matter, since supervolcanoes…
tlambert | August 12, 2009Instead of answering Monbiot's questions, Plimer has responded with his own set of questions. I suspect that this is a tactic so he can weasel out of answering Monbiot's questions. My favourite question from Plimer is this one (which isn't even a question):
6 From ocean current velocity, palaeotemperature and atmosphere measurements of ice cores and stable and radiogenic isotopes of seawater, atmospheric CO2 and fluid inclusions in ice and using atmospheric CO2 residence times of 4, 12, 50 and 400 years, numerically demonstrate that the modern increase in atmospheric CO2 could not derive…