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 - Click to enlarge cartoon by Noz
Professor Ian Plimer, a geologist at Adelaide University, has released a book “Heaven and Earth”, which claims to rip apart the accepted science of climate change. It was launched with uncritical aclaim by The Australian newspaper. This was a book I had to read.
Heaven and Earth is well worth a read. and is packed with an enormous amount of information. Professor Plimar gives a very detailed and thought provoking account of how the earth’s climate has changed since the planet was born. He talks about the natural influences that have shaped earth’s climate. The sun is clearly the single most important determinant of global temperature. Sun spots, variance in solar radiation, electromagnetic fields and changes in the earths orbit around the sun all have a significant impact on the earths climate. In addition, other heavenly causes of climate change include variations in cosmic radiation and cosmic dust, which can have a significant impact. On earth, volcanic activity and movement of techtonic plates and shifting of continents can influence global temperature in ways that we are only begining to understand.
None of those points are at all controversial, and are recognized by climate change science. Professor Plimer suggests that climate change has always occurred, and has always been driven by natural process. He implies that current climate change is also natural. This is where things start to get controversial.
Professor Plimer argues that CO2 is an insignificant greenhouse gas. Surely it must be, he says, otherwise the steady increase in atmospheric CO2 we are currently experiencing would cause the planet to warm. Instead, he argues, the planet has been cooling since 1998, which demonstrates that CO2 has no effect on global temperature. This is one of his central arguments, and he refers to it frequently in his book. Why does Plimer think the planet is cooling?
According to the Hadley Met Office in Britain, 1998 was the hottest year ever recorded, and the years since have been less hot. Plimer states that this represents a definite cooling trend. It is worth looking at the Hadley web site, because their interpretation of their results differs markedly. According to the Hadley Met Office, 1998 was indeed the hottest year ever recorded, due to an unusually strong El Nino. What Plimer doesn’t mention is that according to the same Met Office, the 11 hottest years ever recorded have been in the last 13 years. What Plimer doesn’t mention is that the 10 years since 1998 were on average significantly hotter than the 10 years prior to 1998. 2008 was a cooler year, going against the trend, due to a strong La Nina. What Plimer doesn't mention is that 2008 was still the tenth hottest year ever recorded. "The planet is continuing to warm", the Met Office says.In fact the Met Office goes on to say that “A worst-case scenario, where no action is taken to check the rise in Greenhouse gas emissions, temperatures would most likely rise by more than 5 °C by the end of the century. This would lead to significant risks of severe and irreversible impacts’.
Plimer is looking at the Hadley Met Office numbers and saying there is a definite cooling trend.The Met Office are emphatically stating the opposite. So, who do we believe? Are we warming or cooling?
Sea level is a complex issue, but the single most important determinant of sea level rise and fall is global temperature. If the earth warms, sea levels rise, and vise-versa. Sea level is currently rising at a rate of about 3 mm a year. Plimer doesn’t explain how global cooling can be occurring despite rising sea level. His global cooling theory is controversial.
Clearly, as part of Clean Energy For Eternity, I may have a biased view of Plimer’s comments. Read it for yourself. In fact read page 165 for yourself. On page 165, Plimer attempts to reinforce his argument that CO2 is an insignificant greenhouse gas. Here he has “proof” that CO2 does not drive climate. During the Phanerozoic time, the earth was cold despite a staggeringly high CO2 of 4000 parts per million., or so he claims. Plimer says that “Clearly a high atmospheric CO2 does not drive global warming and there is no correlation between global temperature and atmospheric CO2”. That statement is a strong one, and central to the case he presents. It is well worth looking up his reference for that information. The information comes from Berner, a Professor of Geology and Geophysics at Yale University. What Berner says (as distinct from what Plimer says he says), is “..we find that CO2 was low during periods of long lived and widespread continental glaciations and high during other warmer periods”. This is completely at odds with Plimers interpretation of the paper.
Once again Plimer has come up with an interpretation of a scientists work that differs wildly from the paper he references. This happens repeatedly throughout the book. There is a long list of climate scientists who say that their work has been misrepresented in “Heaven and Earth”.
Plimer states that an understanding of geological climate change is essential to our understanding of future climate change. I think most scientists would agree. Plimer argues that atmospheric CO2 is inconsequential, and the planet is cooling. His case is weak, and unconvincing. His book demonstrates to me that we need more than a study of ancient rocks to tell us about future climate.
Matthew Nott
MAKE A COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLE AT "CONTACT US" ----"GUEST BOOK"
Professor Ian Plimer makes a number of controversial claims in his book 'Heaven And Earth'. He sets out to show that CO2 is an inconsequential greenhouse gas. He makes a number of statements to support that claim. One such statement is global cooling. Plimer states repeatedly that the globe is cooling, and has been doing so since 1998. He sources this information from the Hadley Met Office, which demonstrates that 1998 was the hottest year ever recorded, and subsequent years have been less hot. What Plimer fails to tell his readers about the Met Office figures is that the 10 years since 1998 were hotter than the 10 years prior to 1998. The 11 hottest years ever recorded have all been i9n the last 13 years. Below is a press release from the Hadley Met Office which is headed by the statement "Anyone who thinks global warming has stopped has their head in the sand".
Hadley Met Office
Met Office Press Office +44 (0)1392 886655
E-mail: pressoffice(at)metoffice.gov.uk
Met Office Customer Centre 0870 900 0100
If you're outside the UK +44 (0)1392 885680
Anyone who thinks global warming has stopped has their head in the sand.
Average global temperatures are now some 0.75 °C warmer than they were 100 years ago. Since the mid-1970s, the increase in temperature has averaged more than 0.15 °C per decade. This rate of change is very unusual in the context of past changes and much more rapid than the warming at the end of the last ice age. Sea-surface temperatures have warmed slightly less than the global average whilst temperatures over land have warmed at a faster rate of almost 0.3 °C per decade.
Over the last ten years, global temperatures have warmed more slowly than the long-term trend. But this does not mean that global warming has slowed down or even stopped. It is entirely consistent with our understanding of natural fluctuations of the climate within a trend of continued long-term warming.
* Global warming has not stopped
* Natural climate variations temporarily enhance or reduce observed warming
These natural fluctuations include the El Niño Southern Oscillations (ENSO) in the Pacific Ocean. In El Niño years - those when cold surface water is not apparent in the tropical eastern Pacific - global temperature is considerably warmer than normal. A particularly strong El Niño occurred in 1998 resulting in the warmest year on record across the globe. In La Niña years - when cold water rises to the surface of the Pacific Ocean - temperatures can be considerably colder than normal. Volcanic eruptions can also cause temporary drops in global temperatures because of huge amounts of dust thrown high into the atmosphere that reduce the amount of sunlight that reaches the surface. A La Nina was present throughout 2007 and much of 2008; despite this temporary cooling, 2008 is currently the tenth warmest in the global record.
As a result of such fluctuations, global average temperature trends calculated over ten-year periods have varied since the mid-1970s, from a modest cooling to a warming rate of more than 0.3 °C per decade. Similar behaviour is also seen in individual model predictions of future climate change where the long-term warming trend is forecast to exceed 2 °C per century. Even then, due to the natural variations in climate, we expect to see ten-year periods both globally and regionally with little or no warming and other ten-year periods with very rapid warming. This complex behaviour of the climate system shows why we need to examine much longer periods than ten years if we are to fully understand and quantify how the climate is changing.
These longer-term analyses have shown that current warming is being caused mainly by human emissions of greenhouse gases which have accumulated in the atmosphere and intensified the greenhouse effect by absorbing more of the thermal radiation emitted by the land and ocean. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in its most recent assessment in 2007 that increases in man-made greenhouse gas concentrations have 'very likely' caused most of the overall increase in global average temperatures since the mid 20th century.
This long-term warming trend is set to continue as the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues to increase. Inevitably this will lead to further impacts on our lives and the world's natural ecosystems. Heatwaves and droughts are likely to become more prevalent; snow cover is projected to continue to diminish; and sea ice to continue to shrink. On shorter timescales natural climate variations and other factors, like volcanoes, will continue to temporarily enhance or reduce the magnitude and impacts of these longer-term changes.
Predictions of future conditions, such as the seasonal, decadal and centennial forecasts provided by the Met Office, can help considerably in dealing with the challenges of our changing climate. For example, the emerging science of decadal forecasting has exciting potential to provide water companies, emergency responders and local authorities with information that can help them in planning for future droughts and floods.
Plimer goes on to provide further information to demonstrate that CO2 is an inconsequential greenhouse gas. During Panerozoic times, global temperatures were low whilst atmospheric CO2 was extremely high. Support for this statment is provided by Berner, a Professor of Geology and Geophysics at Yale, or so Plimer claims, on page 165 of 'Heaven and Earth'.. Professor Berner says nothing of the sort. Below are two articles by Berner, talking about atmospheric CO2 during Phanerozoic times. Plimer must have been hoping that no one would look up the references he provides.
Robert A. Berner 1
1 Department of Geology and Geophysics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511
A new model has been constructed for calculating the level of atmospheric CO2 during the past 570 million years. A series of successive steady states for CO2 is used in order to calculate CO2 level from a feedback function for the weathering of silicate minerals. Processes considered are: sedimentary burial of organic matter and carbonates; continental weathering of silicates, carbonates, and organic matter; and volcanic and metamorphic degassing of CO2. Sediment burial rates are calculated with the use of an isotope mass-balance model and carbon isotopic data on ancient seawater. Weathering rates are calculated from estimates of past changes in continental land area, mean elevation, and river runoff combined with estimates of the effects of the evolution of vascular land plants. Past degassing rates are estimated from changes in the rate of generation of sea floor and the shift of carbonate deposition from platforms to the deep sea. The model results indicate that CO2 levels were high during the Mesozoic and early Paleozoic and low during the Permo-Carboniferous and late Cenozoic. These results correspond to independently deduced Phanerozoic paleoclimates and support the notion that the atmospheric CO2 greenhouse mechanism is a major control on climate over very long time scales.
CO2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate
Dana L. Royer1, Robert A. Berner2, Isabel P. Montañez3, Neil J. Tabor4, and David J. Beerling5
1. Department of Geosciences and Institutes of the Environment, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, USA, E-mail: droyer(at)psu.edu, 2. Department of Geology and Geophysics, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520, USA, 3. Department of Geology, University of California, Davis, California 95616, USA, 4. Department of Geological Sciences, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas 75275, USA, 5. Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK Recent studies have purported to show a closer correspondence between reconstructed Phanerozoic records of cosmic ray flux and temperature than between CO2 and temperature. The role of the greenhouse gas CO2 in controlling global temperatures has therefore been questioned. Here we review the geologic records of CO2 and glaciations and find that CO2 was low (<500 ppm) during periods of long-lived and widespread continental glaciations and high (>1000 ppm) during other, warmer periods. The CO2 record is likely robust because independent proxy records are highly correlated with CO2 predictions from geochemical models. The Phanerozoic sea surface temperature record as inferred from shallow marine carbonate δ18O values has been used to quantitatively test the importance of potential climate forcings, but it fails several first-order tests relative to more well-established paleoclimatic indicators: both the early Paleozoic and Mesozoic are calculated to have been too cold for too long. We explore the possible influence of seawater pH on the δ18O record and find that a pH-corrected record matches the glacial record much better. Periodic fluctuations in the cosmic ray flux may be of some climatic significance, but are likely of second-order importance on a multimillion-year timescale. Received: September 2, 2003; Accepted: December 2, 2003
DOI: 10.1130/1052-5173(2004)014<4:CAAPDO>2.0.CO;2 
Plimer's argument for global cooling is weak, so he has to misinterpret Hadley Met Office figures to support his theory. Global cooling is a central theme for Plimer. It "proves" that rising atmospheric CO2 is inconsequential. He mentions global cooling and the Hadley Met Office figure repeatedly. He is forced to misrepresent his scientific references to make his case. He then goes on to grossly misrepresent satellite data.
On page 382 of 'Heaven and Earth', Plimer says "In fact, satellites and radiosonodes show that there is no global warming". He references the article I've copied below, by Keller in 'Science World Journal'. Keller actually says the opposite. Keller says "both satellite and in-situ radiosonde observations have been shown to corroborate both the surface observations of warming and the model predictions". Plimer has again failed to be convincing about global cooling. His page 382 statement is deceptive.
Sorry for the highlighting below, but this is amazing. The article by Keller argues against many of Plimer's theories. It defends the Hockey Stick, it rejects solar warming, and supports computer modeling. What was Plimer thinking? It's almost as if the article Plimer references is a direct attack on Heaven and Earth.The highlights below shows that Plimer misquoted his page 382 statement, to convey its opposite meaning. Surely, Plimer must have known he was wrong. Keller's article supports warming, and Plimer uses it to demonstrate global cooling. Plimer can't come up with any genuine evidence for global cooling.
Here is the article he referenced to "prove" that satellites show no global warming.
Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA. alfanso@mail.cybermesa.
In the four years since my original review (Keller[25]; hereafter referred to as CFK03), research has clarified and strengthened our understanding of how humans are warming the planet. So many of the details highlighted in the IPCC's Third Assessment Report[21] and in CFK03 have been resolved that I expect many to be a bit overwhelmed, and I hope that, by treating just the most significant aspects of the research, this update may provide a road map through the expected maze of new information. In particular, while most of CFK03 remains current, there are important items that have changed: Most notable is the resolution of the conundrum that mid-tropospheric warming did not seem to match surface warming. Both satellite and radiosonde (balloon-borne sensors) data reduction showed little warming in the middle troposphere (4-8 km altitude). In the CFK03 I discussed potential solutions to this problem, but at that time there was no clear resolution. This problem has now been solved, and the middle troposphere is seen to be warming apace with the surface. There have also been advances in determinations of temperatures over the past 1,000 years showing a cooler Little Ice Age (LIA) but essentially the same warming during medieval times (not as large as recent warming). The recent uproar over the so-called "hockey stick" temperature determination is much overblown since at least seven other groups have made relatively independent determinations of northern hemisphere temperatures over the same time period and derived essentially the same results. They differ on how cold the LIA was but essentially agree with the Mann's hockey stick result that the Medieval Warm Period was not as warm as the last 25 years. The question of the sun's influence on climate continues to generate controversy. It appears there is a growing consensus that, while the sun was a major factor in earlier temperature variations, it is incapable of having caused observed warming in the past quarter century or so. However, this conclusion is being challenged by differing interpretations of satellite observations of Total Solar Insolation (TSI). Different satellites give different estimates of TSI during the 1996-7 solar activity minimum. A recent study using the larger TSI satellite interpretation indicates a stronger role for the sun, and until there is agreement on TSI at solar minimum, we caution completely disregarding the sun as a significant factor in recent warming. Computer models continue to improve and, while they still do not do a satisfactory job of predicting regional changes, their simulations of global aspects of climate change and of individual forcings are increasingly reliable. In addition to these four areas, the past five years have seen advances in our understanding of many other aspects of climate change--from albedo changes due to land use to the dynamics of glacier movement. However, these more are of second order importance and will only be treated very briefly. The big news since CFK03 is the first of these, the collapse of the climate critics' last real bastion, namely that satellites and radiosondes show no significant warming in the past quarter century. Figuratively speaking, this was the center pole that held up the critics' entire "tent." Their argument was that, if there had been little warming in the past 25 years or so, then what warming was observed would have been within the range of natural variations with solar forcing as the major player. Further, the models would have been shown to be unreliable since they were predicting warming that was not happening. But now both satellite and in-situ radiosonde observations have been shown to corroborate both the surface observations of warming and the model predictions. Thus, while uncertainties still remain, we are now seeing a coherent picture in which past climate variations, solar and other forcings, model predictions and other indicators such as glacier recession all point to a human-induced warming that needs to be considered carefully. A final topic touched on briefly here is the new understanding of the phenomenon called "global dimming." Several sets of observations of the sun's total radiation at the surface have shown that there has been a reduction in sunlight reaching it. This has been related to the scattering of sunlight by aerosols and has led to a better quantification of the possibility that cleaning up our atmospheric pollution will lead to greater global warming. Adding all these advances together, there is a growing consensus that the 21st century will indeed see some 2 degrees C (3.5 degrees F) or more in additional warming. This is corroborated in the new IPCC Assessment, an early release of which is touched on very briefly here.
For years the debate about climate change has had a contentious sticking point -- satellite measurements of temperatures in the troposphere, the layer of atmosphere where most weather occurs, were inconsistent with fast-warming surface temperatures.
But a team led by a University of Washington atmospheric scientist has used satellite data in a new and more accurate way to show that, for more than two decades, the troposphere has actually been warming faster than the surface. The new approach relies on information that better separates readings of the troposphere from those of another atmospheric layer above, which have disguised the true troposphere temperature trend.
"This tells us very clearly what the lower atmosphere temperature trend is, and the trend is very similar to what is happening at the surface," said Qiang Fu, a UW associate professor of atmospheric sciences.
He is lead author of a paper documenting the work published in the May 6 edition of the journal Nature. Co-authors are Celeste Johanson, a UW research assistant and graduate student in atmospheric sciences; Stephen Warren, a UW professor of atmospheric sciences and Earth and space sciences; and Dian Seidel, a research meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Air Resources Laboratory in Silver Spring, Md.
The team examined measurements from devices called microwave-sounding units on NOAA satellites from January 1979 through December 2001. The satellites all used similar equipment and techniques to measure microwave radiation emitted by oxygen in the atmosphere and determine its temperature.
Different channels of the microwave-sounding units measured radiation emitted at different frequencies, thus providing data for different layers of the atmosphere. In the case of the troposphere -- which extends from the surface to an altitude of about 7.5 miles -- it was believed there was less warming than what had been recorded at the surface.
The troposphere temperature was measured by channel 2 on the microwave sounding units, but those readings were imprecise because about one-fifth of the signal actually came from a higher atmospheric layer called the stratosphere.
"Because of ozone depletion and the increase of greenhouse gases, the stratosphere is cooling about five times faster than the troposphere is warming, so the channel 2 measurement by itself provided us with little information on the temperature trend in the lower atmosphere," Fu said.
Stratosphere temperatures are measured by channel 4 on the microwave units. Fu's team used data from weather balloons at various altitudes to develop a method in which the two satellite channels could be employed to deduce the average temperature in the troposphere. The scientists correlated the troposphere temperature data from balloons with the simulated radiation in the two satellite channels to determine which part of the channel 2 measurement had come from the cooling stratosphere and should be removed.
What remained indicated that the troposphere has been warming at about two-tenths of a degree Celsius per decade, or nearly one-third of a degree Fahrenheit per decade. That closely resembles measurements of warming at the surface, something climate models have suggested would result if the warmer surface temperatures are the result of greenhouse gases. The previous lack of demonstrable warming in the troposphere has prompted some to argue that climate models are missing unrecognized but important physical processes, or even that human-caused climate change is not happening.
One reason previous data have not shown enough warming in the troposphere, Fu said, is because the stratosphere influence on the channel 2 temperature trend has never been properly quantified, even though there have been attempts to account for its influence. Those attempts had large uncertainties, so many researchers had simply used the unadjusted channel 2 temperature trends to represent the temperature trends in the middle of the troposphere.
Fu's work is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
The findings, he said, could offer a new context for climate change discussion.
"I think everyone can understand our approach," he said. "I think this could convince not just scientists but the public as well."
No science in Plimer's primerArticle from: The Australian Heaven and Earth
By Ian Plimer
Connor Court, 503pp, $39.95
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. What makes this case unusual is that Plimer is a professor -- of mining geology -- at the University of Adelaide. If the subject were anything less serious than the future habitability of the planet Earth, I wouldn't go to the trouble of writing this review.
Plimer sets out to refute the scientific consensus that human emissions of CO2 have changed the climate. He states in his acknowledgments that the book evolved from a dinner in London with three young lawyers who believed the consensus. As Plimer writes: "Although these three had more than adequate intellectual material to destroy the popular paradigm, they had neither the scientific knowledge nor the scientific training to pull it apart stitch by stitch. This was done at dinner."
This is a remarkable claim. If Plimer is right and he is able to show that the work of literally thousands of oceanographers, solar physicists, biologists, atmospheric scientists, geologists, and snow and ice researchers during the past 100 years is fundamentally flawed, then it would rank as one of the greatest discoveries of the century and would almost certainly earn him a Nobel prize. This is the scale of Plimer's claim.
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.
Now, before I am accused of attacking the man and not the argument, let me point out that scientists regard peer-reviewed journal publications as fundamental for advancing science. They allow ideas to be exchanged, tested, improved on and, quite frequently, discarded. If Plimer can do what he claims, and can prove that human emissions of CO2 have no effect on the climate, then he owes it to the scientific community and, in fact, humanity, to publish his arguments in a refereed journal.
Perhaps we will find a stitch-by-stitch demolition of climate science in his book, as promised? No such luck. The arguments that Plimer advances in the 503 pages and 2311 footnotes in Heaven and Earth are nonsense. The book is largely a collection of contrarian ideas and conspiracy theories that are rife in the blogosphere. The writing is rambling and repetitive; the arguments flawed and illogical.
He recycles a graph, without attribution, from Martin Durkin's Great Global Warming Swindle documentary, neglecting even to make the changes that Durkin made following an outcry over the fact that the past two decades of temperature measurements had been mysteriously deleted.
Plimer claims that scientists such as himself, who do not agree with the consensus, are labelled deniers, "yet their scientific doubts are not addressed". Nothing could be further from the truth. All of Plimer's arguments have been addressed ad nauseam by patient climate scientists on websites or in the literature.
To appreciate the errors in Plimer's book you don't have to be a climate scientist. 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.
While it is undoubtedly true that if you measure CO2 in your home it could vary by large amounts from day to day -- depending, for example, on whether you have the windows open or closed, or how many people are in the house at the time -- this is not the right way to measure a global average. That's why scientists go to mountain-tops or Antarctica or to the isolated Cape Grimm on the Tasmanian coast rather than measuring CO2 in their living rooms.
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. Plimer repeatedly veers off to the climate sceptic's journal of choice, the bottom-tier Energy and Environment, to advance all manner of absurd theories: for example, that CO2 concentrations actually have fallen since 1942.
Plimer believes "global warming" occurring on Mars, Triton, Jupiter and Pluto proves human emissions of CO2 don't affect Earth's climate. He believes that once CO2 levels reached 200ppmv (about half of today's value) the CO2 had absorbed almost all the infrared energy it could, and further increases will not have much effect. He believes global warming does not lead to biological stress. He believes volcanoes emit significant quantities of chlorofluorocarbons. He believes the sun formed on the collapsed core of a supernova. All these ideas are so wrong as to be laughable: they do not offer an "alternative scientific perspective".
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 a century of observation and theory, but is instead similar in composition to a meteorite.
It is hard to understate the depth of scientific ignorance that the inclusion of this information demonstrates. It is comparable to a biologist claiming that plants obtain energy from magnetism rather than photosynthesis.
Plimer has done an enormous disservice to science, and the dedicated scientists who are trying to understand climate and the influence of humans, by publishing this book. It is not "merely" atmospheric scientists that would have to be wrong for Plimer to be right. It would require a rewriting of biology, geology, physics, oceanography, astronomy and statistics. 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.
Michael Ashley is professor of astrophysics at the University of NSW.
Review: Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth
I attended the formal launch of Professor Ian Plimer’s new book Heaven and Earth (held in the historic balcony room of South Australia’s Parliament House). Ian had kindly sent me an invitation and I thought it a good opportunity to get a summary of his recent opinion, straight from the horse’s mouth. The book went on sale a few days before and having been lent a copy, I’d read through it on-and-off over the last few days. Here is what the blurb suggests the book achieves:
The Earth is an evolving dynamic system. Current changes in climate, sea level and ice are within variability. Atmospheric CO is the lowest for 500 million years. Climate has always been driven by the Sun, the Earth’s orbit and plate tectonics and the oceans, atmosphere and life respond.
Humans have made their mark on the planet, thrived in warm times and struggled in cool times. The hypothesis that humans can actually change climate is unsupported by evidence from geology, archaeology, history and astronomy. The hypothesis is rejected. A new ignorance fills the yawning spiritual gap in Western society.
Climate change politics is religious fundamentalism masquerading as science. Its triumph is computer models unrelated to observations in nature. There has been no critical due diligence of the science of climate change, dogma dominates, sceptics are pilloried and 17th Century thinking promotes prophets of doom, guilt and penance.
When plate tectonics ceases and the world runs out of new rocks, there will be a tipping point and irreversible climate change. Don’t wait up.
I’ve been critical of Ian’s views before (see here and here). In short, my view was that Ian’s assertions about man’s role in climate change were naive, reflected a poor understanding of climate science, and relied on recycled and distorted arguments that had been repeatedly refuted. Ian and I have regularly “debated” on this issue, so I’m probably more familiar than most with his lines of argument. (I actually think it’s rather silly to debate the science, because this the role of the scientific community as a whole, and in doing so they’ve reached a view that this is a serious problem — but that is what the media demands.) Anyway, after reading the 500+ page tome that is H+E, I find that nothing has fundamentally changed.
Plimer tackles literally hundreds of lines of argument in his book. He claims that mainstream science — including the “experts” in each area (those that focus on particular focused questions within narrow discipline areas) are ALL wrong — every argument, every one of those scientists. I quote (from a recent Adelaide Advertiser article on the book):
Professor Plimer said his book would “knock out every single argument we hear about climate change”, to prove that global warming is a cycle of the Earth.
“It’s got nothing to do with the atmosphere, it’s about what happens in the galaxy. You’ve got to look at the whole solar system and, most importantly, we look back in time”.
There are a lot of uncertainties in science, and it is indeed likely that the current consensus on some points of climate science is wrong, or at least sufficiently uncertain that we don’t know anything much useful about processes or drivers. But EVERYTHING? Or even most things? Take 100 lines of evidence, discard 5 of them, and you’re still left with 95 and large risk management problem. It’s an unscientific and disingenuous claim. As is his oft repeated assertion that a single apparently contradictory piece of information axiomatically overturns all other lines of evidence. Plimer apparently thinks Popperian falsification is the dominant deductive modus operandi in the natural sciences. I’ve got other news for him (I’m happy to email people my full article from BioScience if they email me a request).
Ian Plimer’s book is a case study in how not to be objective. Decide on your position from the outset, and then seek out all the facts that apparently support your case, and discard or ignore all of those that contravene it. He quotes a couple of thousand peer-reviewed scientific papers when mounting specific arguments. What Ian doesn’t say is that the vast majority of these authors have considered the totality of evidence on the topic of human-induced global warming and conclude that it is real and a problem.
Some researchers have show that the Earth has been hotter before, and that more CO2 has been present in the atmosphere in past ages. Yes, quite — this is an entirely uncontroversial viewpoint. What is relevant now is the rate of climate change, the specific causes, and its impact on modern civilisation that is dependent, for agricultural and societal security, a relatively stable climate. Ian pushes mainstream science far out of context, again and again.
Ian also claims that a huge body of scientific evidence — indeed, whole disciplines such as geology and astronomy — have been ignored. This is an extraordinary proposition and quite at odds with the published literature, as reviewed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I wonder if Ian has ever read their reports to find out what they actually do say. Terms like “solar” and “volcano” get frequent mentions, and there is a whole chapter on “paleoclimate”. Ian’s stated view of climate science is that a vast number of extremely well respected scientists and a whole range of specialist disciplines have fallen prey to delusional self interest and become nothing more than unthinking ideologues. Plausible to conspiracy theorists, perhaps, but hardly a sane world view — and insulting to all those genuinely committed to real science.
There is another important general point about the book. In the final chapter (pg 473), Ian quotes Charles Babbage; this quote is relevant to the thrust of his book, and underscores to me why it is so distorted. Babbage outlined three criteria for detecting non-science: trimming, cooking and forgery. Here is a useful description of what Babbage said:
Trimming “consists of clipping off little bits here and there from those observations which differ most in excess from the mean, and in sticking them on to those which are too small.” Babbage believed trimming was not a serious threat to the search for truth because it merely reinforced the average results and eliminated some odd outlying data. In contemporary clinical research, however, rare adverse effects can be literally a matter of life and death. Thus, clinical investigators today are not so complacent on this point.
Cooking is the selective reporting of a group of results, picking out the data from among several measurements that most supports the desired conclusion. Babbage had in mind the actions of a single investigator, but selective reporting might also draw concern as a cause of publication bias. Is an investigator who does not report the results of a study with a negative finding committing fraud? This is a question that has not yet been answered by the research community.
Blatant forgery, as in reporting measurements on imaginary patients, was for Babbage the most nefarious type of fraud. Yet as medical research and its relationship to the pharmaceutical industry and to consumers has grown more complex, it has become more difficult to clearly define investigator fraud. Medical professor and ethicist Robert Levine defines “fraud” as “the deliberate reporting in the scientific literature or at scientific meetings of ‘facts’ that the reporter knows are unsubstantiated.” But the scientific community, Levine says, has not yet agreed on how to distinguish between “felonies and misdemeanours” in the context of research misconduct.
Trimming might include surreptitiously deleting outliers that do not fit with models or theory. Cooking is good old cherry-picking, a la the “1998 was the hottest year on record and so the Earth has cooled since” meme. Forgery is typified by Fig 3 in the Introduction of Plimer’s book. Guess where that came from?
Here (first edition of the Great Global Warming Swindle). This is the original version of his Fig 3:
The above figure contains fabricated data, as can be seen in this comparison (Ian used the purple version):
I wonder what happened to the last 20-odd years of warming in Ian’s plot, and where did all that smoothing and flattening come from? There are numerous other examples of Babbage’s misdemeanours in the book. (A bunch more are listed below).
Ian says that creationists use all three tricks — I’d agree. But he then says that the IPCC uses at least two of them, and rants on for a few pages as to why. But of course herein is the great irony of Plimer’s position: a rogue accuses others of what he is most guilty. The pseudo-sceptics of climate science, like the tobacco lobby, liberally undertake all three malpractices to convince their audience of their position. Their twisted logic goes something like this: We know we do it, so surely the ‘other side’ (climate scientists, IPCC etc.) must do it too! Of course, the other side deny that they do it, so we must deny as well. And so it goes on.
The irony of the distortion of Babbage seems to be lost on Ian. Or perhaps it’s all part of the illusionist’s box of magic.
Ian’s book contains over 2,000 references to the scientific literature, although the most cited journal by far is Energy and Environment. What the unsuspecting reader might not realise, however, is that a large number of the scientists he cites in footnotes would agree with the mainstream consensus — just a casual look turns up names like Broeker, Alley, Barnosky, Rampino, Lambeck, Royer, Berner, etc. (even Brook, heh, heh). It’s all about the context, and Ian is not averse to implicit extrapolation…
David Karoly: Ian Plimer's new book Heaven + Earth claims to shed new light on the science of climate change. It states that 'human-induced global warming has evolved into a religious belief system', that 'atmospheric carbon dioxided does not create a temperature rise' and that 'global warming and a high CO2 content bring prosperity and lengthen your life'. Are these claims justified and based on science? They are in marked contrast to the scientific understanding of the causes of recent climate change reported in the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (often referred to as the IPCC), as well as by other scientific bodies including the US National Academies, the British Royal Society and the Australian Academy of Science. They have all reached the same conclusion; that the observed increase in global-average surface temperature since the mid-20th century is mainly due to the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, caused by human activity. Heaven + Earth claims that this conclusion and almost all the conclusions of the IPCC are wrong. It suggests that there is a conspiracy amongst climate scientists to hide the 'truth' and that the learned scientific societies of many countries have been hoodwinked. He implies that this conspiracy involves all the hundred-plus national governments that unanimously approved the conclusions of the IPCC assessments. Not surprisingly, the book has attracted attention from the media, politicians and some scientists, as well as the public. Nothing sells like a good conspiracy story. But is this book the story of a conspiracy, or even a good read? Is it about science or is it science fiction? The book is impressive and possibly interesting, but very disappointing. Impressive because of the time and effort that must have been spent writing the 500 pages with 2,000-plus footnotes. Interesting because it seeks to link many aspects of geology, astronomy, biology, glaciology, oceanography and meteorology to explain climate change over the Earth's multi-billion-year history, including the last hundred years. It's disappointing because a senior professor should not have produced such a book with so many errors, so many internal inconsistencies, and with no sources for its graphs. The average reader will find it difficult to sort the fact from the fiction, to disentangle the inconsistencies, and separate the personal opinions and interpretations of the author from the well-established science. The book is built around six sections that consider history, the Sun, earth, ice, water, and air. In these, 18 questions are considered, and many scientists would agree with some aspects of the answers presented. However, there are major errors in many of the answers, making the conclusions invalid. The best description of the problems with the book is provided by Plimer himself. He writes, 'Trying to deal with these misrepresentations is somewhat like trying to argue with creationists, who misquote, concoct evidence, quote out of context, ignore contrary evidence, and create evidence ex nihilo.' There are some sensible things in Heaven + Earth. Yes, it is important to 'look at climate over geological, archaeological, historical and modern time'. Throughout Earth's history there have been natural climate variations driven by many factors, including variations in the Earth's orbit around the Sun, volcanic eruptions, tectonics, and changes in greenhouse gas concentrations. For most of Earth's history, global temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have been higher than present. Plimer is wrong to claim that 'the IPCC has essentially ignored the role of natural climate variability', as natural climate variability is carefully considered in all four of the IPCC's comprehensive assessments since 1990. In its 2007 report, a whole chapter on palaeoclimate focuses on natural climate variations over Earth's history. Yes, water vapour is the most important greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. However, as Plimer states, 'Water vapour tends to follow temperature change rather than cause it,' so water vapour changes cannot initiate climate change. 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 12C and reduced 13C and essentially no 14C, and it decreases atmospheric oxygen, exactly as observed and as Plimer states on pages 414 and 415. Scientists have estimated emissions from volcanoes on land for the last 50 years and they are small compared with total global emissions from human sources. Plimer even argues that the recent sources must be underwater volcanoes. This is not the case, because the net movement of carbon dioxide is from the atmosphere to the ocean, based on measurements that the concentration of dissolved carbon dioxide in the ocean is less than in the atmosphere. In addition, measurements show that the concentrations of two other long-lived greenhouse gases with human-related sources, methane and nitrous oxide, have increased markedly over the last 200 years, at the same time as the increases in carbon dioxide. This is not possible due to sources from underwater volcanoes. Next, he states that CO2 does not drive climate. He then contradicts himself by writing 'CO2 keeps our planet warm so that it is not covered in ice'. There is ample geological evidence of increased CO2 causing climate change, such as the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum about 55 million years ago. He writes 'land and sea temperatures increased by five to ten degrees with associated extinctions of life' when methane was released into the atmosphere due to geological processes and rapidly converted to CO2. Plimer writes repeatedly that global warming ended in 1998, that the warmth of the last few decades is not unusual, and that satellite measurements show there has been no global warming since 1979. He is correct that on time scales of the last 100 million years, the recent global-scale warmth is not unusual. However, it is unusual over at least the last 1,000 years, including the Medieval warming. Plimer makes the mistake of using local temperatures from proxy evidence rather than considering data from the whole globe at the same time. The report of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2006, cited by Plimer, states 'Presently available proxy evidence indicates that temperatures at many, but not all individual locations, were higher during the past 25 years than during any period of comparable length since AD 900.' We do not expect significant warming to always occur for short periods, such as since 1998. Natural climate variations are more important over short periods, with El Nino causing hotter global-average temperatures in 1998 and La Nina cooler global temperatures in 2007 and 2008. Global-average temperature for the current decade from surface observations and from satellite data is warmer than any other decade with reasonable data coverage. Plimer is wrong to write 'Not one of the IPCC models predicted that there would be cooling after 1998'. Actually, more than one-fifth of climate models show cooling in global average temperatures for the period from 1998 to 2008. Plimer writes that solar activity accounts for some 80% of the global temperature trend over the last 150 years. This doesn't fit the observational evidence. Increases in solar irradiance would cause more warming in the daytime, in the tropics and in summer, as well as warming in the upper atmosphere, and these are not observed. Changes in solar irradiance and cosmic rays show a large 11-year sunspot cycle and negligible trend, but observed global temperatures show a large warming trend and small 11-year cycle. Plimer is wrong again when he writes 'An enrichment in atmospheric CO2 is not even a little bit bad for life on Earth. It is wholly beneficial.' This is contradicted when he writes that the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum was associated with mass extinctions. There are many other errors, both large and small, including volcanoes emitting CFCs and that the Sun consists mainly of the same elements as the rocky planets. Many of the figures have mistakes, either in the caption or in the data, and have no sources provided. Given the errors, the non-science, and the nonsense in this book, it should be classified as science fiction in any library that wastes its funds buying it. The book can then be placed on the shelves alongside Michael Crichton's State of Fear, another science fiction book about climate change with many footnotes. The only difference is that there are fewer scientific errors in State of Fear. Robyn Williams: David Karoly is a Federation Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He was reviewing Ian Plimer's book Heaven + Earth, now in the bestseller lists.
Category: Plimer
Posted on: April 23, 2009 2:26 PM, by Tim Lambert
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 CO2 emissions with natural C02 emissions over the entire history of the planet and concluded that human emissions didn't matter. As I wrote earlier:
their mistake is so large and so obvious that anyone who cites them either has no clue about climate science or doesn't care whether what they write is true or not.
Plimer doesn't cite them once he cites them three times.
And what of evidence that contradicts his conclusion? For example, the fact that the stratosphere is cooling contradicts his theory that the sun is the cause of recent warming. What does Plimer say about this in a 500 page book with a 70 page chapter on the atmosphere? Nothing. It's not mentioned at all.
And look at Plimer's figure 3 that he presents to prove that CO2 doesn't cause warming because of all the cooling in the "post-war economic boom":
Ian Plimer figure 3
Plimer doesn't tell you the source of this graph, but it comes from Durkin's Great Global Warming Swindle and omits the last 20 years of warming. Even Durkin admitted it was wrong and changed it, but it lives on in Plimer's book.
Compare Plimer's Swindle graph with the one from the IPCC AR4 Summary for Policymakers below. Plimer doesn't print this but tells his readers that it "showed cooling for 100 of the last 160 years".
ar4wg1spmfig3a.png
The problems with the Swindle graph were given wide publicity. It was one of seven major misrepresentations that 37 scientists asked Durkin to correct. On page 467 Plimer addresses their request claiming they did so because that deemed Swindle to present an "incorrect moral outlook", so he was well aware of what was wrong with the Swindle graph but used it anyway.
Here are the notes I made on some of the other problems with Plimer's book. These are nowhere near exhaustive -- this is just what leapt off the page and assaulted me.
Update: See also Ian Enting's extensive list
p11 No source given for figure 1 but is based on a graph in AR4WG1 Technical Summary. The massive drop in temperatures comes from using the temps for the first half of 2008 to represent all of 2008. It looks very different if you graph the actual 2008 temp, added in red below:
plimerfig1.png
p14 Claims IPCC has no evidence to support its conclusion of 90% certainty that at least half of recent warming is anthropogenic. Nowhere does he even admit the existence of the evidence in Chapter 9 of AR4 WG1
p19 repeats Paul Reiter's false claims about the IPCC authors on the health effects of global warming
p21 Repeats SEPP smear of Santer
p22 Claims hockey stick is a fraud
p25 Figure 3 is infamous graph from the Great Global Warming Swindle. Graphs ends in 1987 but horizontal scale makes it look like it goes to 2000. Even Swindlers had to fix this one.
p26 Figure 4: Start point of graph is cherry picked to mislead
p87-99 claims hockey stick is a fraud and the NRC panel that vindicated it was a cover up.
p99 False claims that GISS was forced to withdraw claims about global temperature. Plimer confuses USA temperatures with the global ones.
p131 Figure 15 Dodgy sunspot temperature graph from GGWS. Ends in 1980, if continued sunspot-temp correlation goes away.
p198 claims Arctic sea ice is expanding
p198 claims drowned polar bears were actually killed by "high winds"
p198 claims polar bear numbers are increasing
p199 claims malaria is common in cold climates. No cite!
p209 Claims undersea volcanoes can have a profound effect on surface temps
p217 Claims Pinatubo eruption released "very large quantities of chloroflourocarbons, the gases that destroy the ozone layer." Cites Brasseur and Granier who actually say the opposite:
after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, the input of chlorine to the stratosphere was probably small.
p281 Claims alpine glaciers are not retreating. Cited source actually says that glacial retreat is not accelerating.
p286 Claims the IPCC has "no evidence" to support its statement that glaciers are retreating.
p322 Cites Morner on Maldives.
p325 Says that even if we burn all fossil fuels we won't be able to double atmospheric CO2.
p349 the hockey stick is "infamous"
p366 Claims climate sensitivity is 0.5C. No footnote!
p367 Confused about by the fact that the Earth warms the atmosphere and asks how this means GHGs can cause warming. How does he think a blanket works?
p370 Claims 98% of GH effect is H2O. No footnote!
p371 Claims climate sensitivity is 0.5C. No footnote!
p376 Claims that if temperature measurements are rounded to the nearest degree, the average of many measurements is only accurate to the nearest degree.
p377 Claims that surfacestations.org proves that temp measurements have a warming bias
p378 Implies that surface record does not include measurements in the oceans
p381 claims molten rocks significantly warm ocean. No cite!
p382 "In fact, satellites and radiosondes show that there is no global warming.[1918]" Woohoo! at last a cite. Trouble is, it says exactly the opposite of what Plimer claims
p382 claims hockey stick is a fabrication
p388 claims no such thing as an average temp, citing Essex and McKitrick nonsense
p391 claims Hadley Centre has shown that warming stopped in 1998. Hadley says:
Anyone who thinks global warming has stopped has their head in the sand.
p391 claims IPCC ignores 2/3 of the cooling effect of evaporation citing Wentz et al, but Wentz says no such thing
p413 claims volcanoes produce more CO2 than humans. No cite! This one was in GGWS. Plimer's a geologist. You'd think he would at least know something about volcanoes.
p420 figure 52 is Beck's bogus CO2 graph
p421 claims only 4% of CO2 in atmosphere is from humans. No cite!
p425 claims anthropogenic CO2 produces only 0.1% of global warming. No cite!
p425 claims IPCC have exaggerated CO2 forcing 20 fold.
p437 "Chapter 5 of IPCC AR4 (Humans Responsible for Climate Change) .. is based on the opinions of just five independent scientists". Wrong chapter number, chapter title, and it has over 50 authors.
p442 claims Lysenko parallels the global warming movement
p443 repeats Monckton's claims about An Inconvenient Truth without mentioning that most were rejected by the court
p444 claims IPCC reports are written by just 35 scientists who are controlled by an even smaller number
p452 cites Oregon petition
p452 cites Peiser's false claims about Oreskes
p467 claims that the 38 scientists who asked Durkin to correct the errors in GGWS did so because that deemed it to present an "incorrect moral outlook". One of the error that they wanted Durkin to correct was the bogus graph that Plimer puts on page 25.
p474 claims hockey stick is dishonest
p477 quotes Khilyuk & Chilingar whose thesis is that humans aren't responsible because our CO2 emissions, measured over the history of the planet, are less than that of volcanoes. Also cited on p479 and p492.
p484 claims IPCC AR4 WG1 SPM "showed cooling for 100 of the last 160 years"
p485 claims Montreal Protocol used precautionary principle to ban CFCs but we didn't ban chlorination even though chlorine destroys ozone!!! [Not in the stratosphere it doesn't]
p486 misrepresents Revelle
p486 cites false WorldNetDaily claim that Gore buys offsets from himself
p487 cites Melanie Philips as an authority on the hockey stick, asserting it is the "most discredited study in the history of science"
p472 claims Pinatubo emitted as much CO2 as humans in a year. No cite! And obviously wrong if you glance at Mauna Loa data.
p472 termite methane emissions are 20 times potent than human CO2 emissions. No cite!
p492 false claim that DDT ban killed 40 million
Vested interest is irrelevant unless you can disprove an argument. The local village idiot is correct until proven wrong. Therefore the following summary of Plimer's vested interests is entirely irrelevant, and is included for interest only.
Plimer is a director of three Australian mining companies: Ivanhoe Australia, a subsidiary of Bob Friedland's Ivanhoe Mines, CBH Resources, and Kefi Minerals. As part of his employment agreement with Ivanhoe, Plimer can forgo annual directors fees of $65,000 in return for a total of 100,000 share options "for nil consideration." The options are available in four installments on September 1 each year from 2008 through to 2011, subject to Plimer continuing in employment with the company. (Ivanhoe Australia, which has an interest in uranium exploration, stated in its 2008 prospectus that "one of the arguments for nuclear energy is its substantially reduced level of carbon emissions".) Plimer is also non-executive Director and Deputy Chairman of Kefi. He has 250,000 shares in Kefi which, at the early November 2009 value of 2.25 British pence, would be worth over $A10,106. Plimer also has options on 2,000,000 more shares which can be exercised at 3 pence prior to December 12, 2012. CBH Resources paid him $A125,000 in 2009 and $A181,003 in 2008. As of June 2009, Plimer had options on 3,569,633 CBH Resources shares. At the early November 2009 share price of .10, Plimer's options would be worth approximately $A356,963.. However, CBH's annual report does not list details of what price, if any, the options would be available at or when they would have to be exercised by.
Plimer claims that his mining company directorships have no impact on his beliefs.
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