Plimer
tlambert | August 3, 2009After George Monbiot panned Plimer's book for his grotesque scientific errors, Plimer challenged Monbiot to a face-to-face debate. Of course, Plimer would do his usual Gish gallop with such a format, so Monbiot agreed with just one condition:
Last week I wrote to Professor Plimer accepting his challenge, on the condition that he accepts mine. I would take part in a face-to-face debate with him as long as he agreed to write precise and specific responses to his critics' points -- in the form of numbered questions that I would send him -- for publication on the Guardian's website. I also…
tlambert | July 15, 2009Some people have wondered what happened to Ian Plimer. Before his current anti-science book, didn't he take it to the creationists in Telling Lies for God? Trouble is, Plimer's methods have not changed -- Telling Lies for God has the same cavalier approach to evidence as Heaven and Earth. Jeffrey Shallit reviewed it and concluded:
Unfortunately, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, what is good about Plimer's book is not original, and what is original is not good. ... We cannot successfully fight the pseudoscience of creationism by adopting gutter tactics. After all, the creationists have much of…
tlambert | July 9, 2009Ian Plimer is well aware that numerous serious errors of fact and interpretation have been exposed in his book but has yet to mount any kind of substantive response -- all he has done is call his critics names. As a result James Delingpole leaves himself wide open when he writes an excessively credulous review of Heaven and Earth:
My tribe doesn't believe in global warming! ... Plimer has a sciency-looking book saying it's all a big hoax! ... the Australian government will collapse ... Al Gore is fat!
OK, that was a paraphrase. Except for the bit about the Australian government collapsing.…
tlambert | June 14, 2009Professor David Karoly of the University of Melbourne's School of Earth Sciences is an expert on climate change, so like every other scientist who has read Ian Plimer's error-filled book, he was appalled at how bad it was. His review:
Now let me address some of the major scientific flaws in Plimer's arguments. He claims 'it is not possible to ascribe a carbon dioxide increase to human activity' and 'volcanoes produce more CO2 than the world's cars and industries combined'. Both are wrong. Burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide enriched with carbon isotope C12and reduced C13 and…
tlambert | June 10, 2009One of the claims that Ian Plimer likes to make is that as a geologist he takes time into account in a way that the IPCC does not, so it is worthwhile looking at what another geologist thinks of Plimer's error-filled book. Professor Malcolm Walter, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, concludes:
There is fallacious reasoning. Take this statement on page 87: 'If it is acknowledged that there have been rapid large climate changes before industrialisation, then human production of carbon dioxide cannot be the major driver for climate change.' This would only be true if carbon dioxide…
tlambert | June 5, 2009On Ockham's Razor, Kurt Lambeck, president of the Australian Academy of Science, reviews Ian Plimer's error-filled book.
If this had been written by an honours student, I would have failed it with the comment: You have obviously trawled through a lot of material but the critical analysis is missing. Supporting arguments and unsupported arguments in the literature are not distinguished or properly referenced, and you have left the impression that you have not developed an understanding of the processes involved. Rewrite!
I would then identify a number of specific issues which, while in…
tlambert | May 21, 2009On page 287 of his error-filled book Ian Plimer claims:
The Arctic was warmer than now between 1920 and 1940. This is
reflected in the sea ice and the local climate.[1473]"
[1473] Benestad, R.E. (2002) I. Hanssen-Bauer, T.E. Skaugen and E.J. Førland:
Associations between the sea-ice and the local climate on Svalbard,
met.no, Klima, 07/02.
I emailed R.E. Benestad to see if he felt that Plimer had accurately described his work. He replied:
The analysis we did was for the Svalbard islands, and for these, it is not true. Year 2006 was a record warm one by a significant margin. My report also…
tlambert | May 14, 2009Remember how Ian Plimer claimed that he could not recall where his dodgy figure 3? Well now he has resorting to lying about the source. In a talkback radio debate (about 4 minutes from the end) with Steven Sherwood, Plimer claimed that the graph came from page 21 of Klimafakten, a book published by the German government in 2001. That's a straight-up lie.
The graph came from Durkin's Great Global Warming Swindle. I've overlaid the graphs below so that you can see that they are identical. Just put your mouse on the graph to change it to the Swindle one. Notice that he copied the labels on…
tlambert | May 13, 2009Ian Enting has been checking the claims Ian Plimer makes in his error-filled book. His list of errors and other problematic claims is here. [Link updated to version 1.7]. He's found plenty that I missed. For example:
p 409: New Orleans sunk rapidly by about 1 metre in the three years before Katrina struck. This time (unlike p 303, item18) a reference is cited: by Dixon and others Nature, 441, 587-588 (2006) from radar satellite altimetry. They report a three-year average of -5.6±2.5 mm/year, with a maximum of -29mm/year (negative values indicating subsidence). They note that if the motion…
tlambert | May 10, 2009Ben McNeil investigates Andrew Bolts claim that Ian Plimer's error-filled Heaven and Earth has 25,000 copies sold or ordered:
Indeed, if a non-fiction book has 25 000 copies sold in Australia it is a massive blockbuster. I was suspicious when reading through the SMH book section the last couple of weeks and 'Heaven and Earth' not being listed in their top-seller list for non-fiction. Being a little more rigorous, Bookscan, which track book sales in Australia doesn't list it in the top 10 for non-fiction for the month as of the time of this blog entry . Seem a little odd to you?
Further…
tlambert | May 9, 2009Harry Clarke
It is not wrong to challenge orthodoxy anywhere but the work of Plimer is unscientific and both irresponsible and dangerous - he has provided a social diservice. The extensive publicity he has received has had an entirely undeserved impact.
Forget Plimer, read the science.
John Quiggin
In the Oz of all places, a demolition of Ian Plimer so scathing, and so convincing, that it's hard to imagine how he can salvage any kind of academic reputation, other than by a full retraction (which would be a pretty impressive move, admittedly). ...
If there are any genuine sceptics left…
tlambert | May 8, 2009One of Ian Plimer's claims is that the IPCC ignores astronomy, so it's interesting to see what an astronomer thinks of his book. In today's Australian, the blue moon continues with a review of Heaven and Earth by Michael Ashley:
Plimer probably didn't expect an astronomer to review his book. I couldn't help noticing on page120 an almost word-for-word reproduction of the abstract from a well-known loony paper entitled "The Sun is a plasma diffuser that sorts atoms by mass". This paper argues that the sun isn't composed of 98 per cent hydrogen and helium, as astronomers have confirmed through…
tlambert | May 7, 2009Wednesday was an unusual day at the Australian, with two pro-science pieces published. First, Leigh Dayton, their science writer, raises some scientific objections to Ian Plimer's book. Plimer will, no doubt, continued to deny the existence of these problems:
Plimer also repeats the inaccurate "fact" that the global warming peaked in 1998. Yes, it was a global scorcher, thanks to a heat-inducing El Nino. But after a dip in 1999, data collected by US and British climate centres shows an upward trend, despite year-to-year variations.
She also corrects Greg Roberts' misleading stories:…
tlambert | May 4, 2009The 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…
tlambert | May 1, 2009Adam 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…
tlambert | April 27, 2009Looks 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…
tlambert | April 24, 2009On 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…
tlambert | April 23, 2009I 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…
tlambert | April 17, 2009Today was the day of the Big Push in the Australian's war on science. They published two news stories that distorted scientists' views on Antarctic ice, a long piece promoting "silenced" Ian Plimer's denialist book, an absurdly over the top piece from Christopher Pearson about how Plimer's book is the turning point that leads to global warming being recognized as a mass delusion as well as an editorial touting Plimer's views.
The debunking of this rubbish is outsourced to Harry Clarke.
tlambert | November 27, 2008Miranda Devine, in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald brings us the sad story of how Ian Plimer is being shouted down and silenced:
Human-caused climate change is being "promoted with religious zeal ... there are fundamentalist organisations which will do anything to silence critics." ...
It is difficult for non-scientists to engage in the debate over what causes climate change and whether or not it can be stopped by new taxes and slower growth, because dissenting voices are shouted down by true believers in the scientific community who claim they alone have the authority to speak.
The same…