All quotes that follow
are from my 2009
'paperback' version
of:
“Heaven and Earth:
Global Warming,
the Missing Science"
... an excellent 2009 book
by Professor Ian Plimer,
Australian geologist,
and two time winner
of the Eureka Prize --
Australia's highest
scientific honor !
(from the back cover of the book):
“Climate, sea level, and ice sheets have always changed, and the changes observed today are less than in the past. Climate changes are cyclical and driven by Earth’s position in the galaxy, the Sun, wobbles in Earth’s orbit, ocean currents, and plate tectonics. In previous times, atmospheric carbon dioxide was far higher than at present but did not drive climate change.” …
This book’s 504 pages and over 2,300 references to peer-reviewed scientific literature and other authoritative sources engagingly synthesize what we know about the Sun, Earth, ice, water and air.
Importantly, in a parallel to his 1994 book challenging “creation science”, “Telling Lies for God”, Ian Plimer describes Al Gore’s book and movie “An Inconvenient Truth” as long on scientific “misrepresentations”. Trying to deal with these misrepresentations is somewhat like trying to argue with creationists”, he writes, “who misquote, concoct evidence, quote out of context, ignore contrary evidence and create evidence ex nihilo.”
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(from page 165)
“The proof that CO2 does not drive climate is shown by previous glaciations. The Ordovician-Silurian (450 to 420 million years ago) and Jurassic-Cretaceous (151 to 132 million years ago) glaciations occurred when the atmospheric CO2 content was more than 4,000 ppmv and about 2,000 parts per million by volume (ppmv) respectively. The Carboniferous-Permian glaciation (360 to 260 million years ago) had a CO2 content of about 400ppmv, at least 15 ppmv higher than the present figure. If the popular catastrophist view is accepted, then there should have been a runaway greenhouse when CO2 was more than 4,000 ppmv. Instead there was glaciation. Clearly a high atmospheric CO2 does not drive global warming and there is no correlation between global temperature and atmospheric CO2. This has never been explained by those who argue that human additions of CO2 to the atmosphere will produce global warming.”
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(from page 175)
“Planet Earth has enjoyed five major mass extinctions of complex life and numerous minor mass extinctions. A sobering thought is that 99.99% of all species that have ever existed in planet Earth are now extinct.”
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(from page 193)
“The emotion about human-induced global warming is underpinned by the assumption that a future climate change will be so rapid that plants and animals would not be able to adapt to the rate of temperature change. This view ignores the past, where there have been large climate changes on the scale of decades which have not led to plant or animal extinction.”
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(from page 228)
“Since the last glaciation ended 14,000 years ago, sea level has risen some 130 metres. … Some two-thirds of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has already melted over the last 14,000 years since the last Ice Age and the remaining ice will melt, detach and cause a 7-meter sea level rise. Not only will this cause inundation of low-lying coastal areas but also there will be increased earthquake activity and an increased number of tsunamis. The process is not the result of the Late 20th Century Warming, it is the end result of the 130-meter increase in sea level since the last Ice Age.”
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(from pages 251 and 252)
“To try to use calving of glaciers to show there is global warming is naïve and misleading. Ice sheets just do not simply grow or melt in response to global temperature. The Northern Hemisphere has had ice sheets for 2.5 million years, whereas Antarctica has had ice sheets for 37 million years. The simple melting or growing of ice sheets in response to temperature cannot explain this. Glaciers grow, flow and melt continuously. … However, a calving iceberg makes good television for a catastrophic message.”
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(from page 276)
“The initial analysis of the Vostok ice core used samples spaced at intervals of hundreds of years. The initial conclusions were that high CO2 in the atmosphere led to high air temperatures. However, with far more detailed measurements on the scale of decades over a 250,000-year ice core record and a correlation of a 35,000-year ice core record from Taylor Dome, it was shown that high air temperatures are followed some 400 to 1,000 years later by a high atmospheric CO2 content. More recent work, using argon isotopes in Antarctic ice cores of just one temperature rise, shows that CO2 increased 200 to 800 years after that particular temperature rise. During the last 420,000 years there have been massive temperature changes, and a rise in CO2 concentration follows an air temperature increase by about 800 years and it is only after a cooling event that CO2 decreases. This is no surprise, as CO2 is more soluble in cold (ocean) water than in warm (ocean) water.”
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(from page 315):
“The International Union for Quaternary Research is almost 80 years old and deals with the last 2 million years of environmental and climate change. The former president of their Sea Level Commission states that no regular trend in sea level is evident over the last 300 years and satellite telemetry shows virtually no change over the last decade.”
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(from page 344)
“Sea surface temperature used to be measured in the major sea lanes of the world by passing ships. This was voluntary and only covered maritime ship routes. Almost all the surface of the oceans went unmeasured, especially in the Southern Hemisphere where about 80% is ocean and these oceans have far less shipping than the Northern Hemisphere. Until recently, the sea surface temperature was measured with a thermometer in a bucketful of seawater. These measurements had an accuracy of no better than +/- 0.5 degrees C., which is highly inaccurate. The change from wooden to canvas buckets led to a “discontinuity” of temperature measurements and significant errors. Currents were also measured by similarly crude methods. A large proportion of historical sea surface temperature measurements were by unknown methods.”
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(from page 366):
“All the CO2 does is slow down heat loss. Atmospheric CO2 does not trap heat, as insulation does. If the current atmospheric CO2 content of 380 ppmv were doubled to 760 ppmv, there would be a miniscule impact on the radiation balance and the temperature. An increase in air temperature of 0.5 degrees C. is likely. This is hardly catastrophic. Furthermore, the effects of the additional CO2 would be completely masked by other climate drivers such as the Sun and the Earth’s orbit and there would be great benefits derived from accelerated plant growth. “
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(from page 377):
“One can argue that it is human vanity to imagine that our relatively small inhabited percentage of global surface has the ability to alter the climate of the whole planet, as some 98.6% of the surface of the planet is essentially uninhabited. … Most climate stations in eastern Colorado did not meet the requirements of the World Meteorological Association’s requirements for correct siting and this was found to be common in the U.S.A. It has now been shown that about half of the U.S. weather measuring stations are incorrectly positioned, do not fulfill the siting requirements of the U.S. government and introduce a warming bias.”
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(from page 393):
“On a scale of 500 years, the planet is warming. But warming compared to what? We were in the grip of the Little Ice Age 500 years ago, so thankfully it is now warmer. On a scale of 5,000 years, there have been many periods of warming and cooling. On a scale of 5 million years, there were numerous periods of intense cold and many short periods of warmth.”
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(from page 440):
“Climate computer models amount to a religious statement by the modeler stating his belief to how his small part of the world should operate. Global climate models deal with atmosphere-ocean-land interactions, while variables such as the Sun, the cosmos, bacteria, history and the geological processes that take place beneath our feet are ignored.”
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(from page 446):
“Human-induced global warming is a popular belief because it offers the satisfaction of righteousness without actually having to do anything.
Subscribing costs nothing, it provides the immediate reward of moral superiority, and there is the bonus of seeing “polluters” having to pay for their sins.”
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(from page 448):
“Almost every time a global warming story is featured on television, there is a background image of a cooling tower on a coal-fired power station.
The visible plume is not CO2, it is H2O.”
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(from page 462):
“There is no use for an honest scientist who says “I don’t know”. Yet uncertainty is the crux of science whereas certainty underpins religious beliefs. The politicians and the public prefer to hear scientists give confident black-and-white answers and make confident predictions. Uncertainty and predictions that all is well are far less likely to attract attention than those that say we’re doomed.”
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(from pages 463 and 464):
“Environmentalism is an urban religion disconnected from Nature, or rural life, or the realities of food and mineral production. This environmental religion is terrified of doubt, skepticism and uncertainty yet claims to be underpinned by science. … Like many fundamentalist religions, it attracts believers by announcing apocalyptic calamities unless we change our ways. … Logic, questioning or contrary data are not permitted.”
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(from page 482):
“It took nearly eight years and direct action from the U.S. House of Representatives before the data and computer programs for the 1998 Mann et al. “hockey stick” were released. These showed a lack of robustness, statistical flaws and fraud. The IPCC used the “hockey stick” with great fanfare in the IPCC’s 2001 report and highlighted it in the “Summary for Policymakers”. It did not appear in the IPCC’s next report, save for an obtuse reference buried in the scientific part of the report. There was no explanation. … The “hockey stick” is still used by environmental extremists and some scientists promoting human-induced global warming”
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(from page 486):
“The late Dr. Roger Revelle, Al Gore’s scientific adviser, must be turning in his grave. Before he died, he co-authored a popular paper stating: “We know too little to take any action based on global warming. If we take any action, it should be an action that we can justify completely without global warming.” Gore’s staffers tried to have his name posthumously removed from the paper by claiming Revelle was senile. One of Revelle’s co-author’s took the matter to court and won. Revelle’s name stayed on the paper. Did this attempted suppression of science get widespread publicity?”
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(from page 490):
“Even if today’s warming was unprecedented, the Sun is the probable cause. It was more active in the past 70 years than in the previous 11,400 years. … CO2 occupies only one-ten-thousandth more of the atmosphere today than it did in 1750 AD. Even if CO2 were to blame, no runaway greenhouse catastrophe occurred in the Cambrian Period 500 million years ago when there was more than 20 times today’s atmospheric CO2.”
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(from page 492):
“How many examples of failed predictions, discredited assumptions, evidence of incorrect data and evidence of malpractice are required before the idea of human-induced climate change loses credibility?"