This is a collection of scientific assessments and commentaries on Heaven and Earth: Global Warming: The Missing Science, a book by Ian Plimer which attempts to deny that human activities are responsible for potentially dangerous climate change.
Kurt Lambeck, earth scientist and president of the Australian Academy of Science, comments on ABC Radio National’s “Ockham’s Razor” about Heaven and Earth. Audio with transcript. (Short link: bit.ly/klambeckplimer )
To give his arguments a semblance of respectability the book is replete with references. But the choice is very selective. Plimer will quote, for example, a paper that appears to support his argument, but then he does not mention that the conclusions therein have been completely refuted in subsequent papers. Elsewhere, he refers to a specific question raised in published work but does not mention that this issue has subsequently been resolved, has been incorporated in subsequent analyses, and is no longer relevant. Or he simply misquotes the work or takes it out of context. An example of this is a reference to my own in the Mediterranean where he gives quite a misleading twist to what we actually concluded.
Other examples can be identified in this section, and throughout the book. Together they point to either carelessness, to a lack of understanding of the underlying science, or to an attempt to see the world through tinted spectacles.
Climate scientist Barry Brook has a page of notes on Heaven and Earth, including links to other commentaries. (Short link: tinyurl.com/plimer )
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.
[I]t may well be held up as an example for the future. An example of just how deluded and misrepresentative the psuedo-sceptical war against science really was in the first decade of the 21st century.
Mathematician Ian Enting has produced Ian Plimer’s ‘Heaven + Earth’—Checking the Claims, a 31-page document listing the errors and problems in Heaven and Earth. (Short link: bit.ly/entingplimer )
Overall:
• it has numerous internal inconsistencies;
• it often misrepresents the operation of the IPCC and the content of IPCC reports;
• in spite of the extensive referencing, key data are unattributed and the content of references is often mis-quoted.
Most importantly, Ian Plimer fails to establish his claim that the human influence on climate can be ignored, relative to natural variations.
Earth scientist Andrew Glikson responds with Plimer wants to talk science? OK, here goes… in Crikey (Short link: bit.ly/gliksonplimer )
Plimer’s book claims current global warming is a natural event consistent with climate variability through time and attributed primarily to the sun.
The book negates the well documented consistent relations between climate and carbon gases, which through the Earth’s history resulted in temperature changes in the range of several degrees C , including abrupt climate changes and related mass extinction of species .
Climate scientist David Karoly reviews Heaven and Earth (audio with transcript):
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.
No science in Plimer’s primer by astronomer Michael Ashley in The Australian. (Short link: bit.ly/ashleyplimer )
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.
The science is missing from Ian Plimer’s “Heaven and Earth” by computer scientist and climate change commentator Tim Lambert. (Short link: bit.ly/tlambertplimer )
He accepts any factoid that supports his conclusion and rejects any evidence that contradicts his conclusion.
A review by geologist and planetary scientist Malcolm Walter on The Science Show, ABC Radio National. Audio. (Short link: bit.ly/walterplimer )
He has done a disservice to science and the community at large.
Mike Pope does a nice job at Online Opinion of debunking Plimer’s central claims in Heaven, Earth and science fiction, concluding:
To avoid following the polar bear to extinction, homo sapiens would do well to reject the science fiction espoused by Plimer. That may be a bit harsh on science fiction writers whose work is often prescient, even plausible. No such claims can be made for Ian Plimer’s book.
Short link for this post: bit.ly/plimer
#1 by Philip Machanick on July 23, 2009 - 7:35 pm
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I debunked some claims that evidently were based on Plimer’s book at Kevin Rudd’s blog (http://www.pm.gov.au/PM_Connect/PMs_Blog/Climate_Change_Blog), and repeated the main ones at my personal blog http://opinion-nation.blogspot.com/2009/07/monty-python-climate-change-phrasebook.html — since I haven’t read the book, I’m ready to be corrected but since no one has so far, I assume the person I was correcting was quoting correctly from the book.
#2 by Ian MacDougall on September 11, 2009 - 7:38 pm
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I have read the book and have reviewed it in some detail on my site NOAH’S RAINBOW SERPENT.
Interestingly, Plimer’s Publisher Conor Court http://www.connorcourt.com/catalog1/index.php?main_page=page&id=14&chapter=0
lists only three favouable reviews, all of which are by right-wing journalists of the denialist persuasion (Christopher Pearon, Miranda Devine and Paul Sheehan). By way of contrast, Matt on this site has listed about ten highly critical reviews, mainly by practising scientists.
The most logical explanation of this discrepancy is that Conor Court has not had its attention drawn to them, as the fact that Plimer himself is a professional scientist (holding two chairs in geology, each at a major Australian university) has not exactly gone unemphasised in the PR campaign organised by that publisher.
I cannot think of any other possible reason.
#3 by Killthealarmists on October 14, 2009 - 11:18 am
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I am an engineer and a scientist at heart. Just looking at the occupations associated with each of the “debunkers” above I would not trust them for a second, most have a vested interest in climate change. Plimers arguments are common sense backed up by research findings. You don’t have to agree with the outcomes of research to use them with other data to produce other findings. Combining data to get a bigger picture should be the aim of all scientific endeavours. Climate science isn’t based on the whole picture, which is the point of Ian Plimers argument.
Don’t make it about carbon, climate will change regardless, as proven over millions of years, focus on creating a societal structure that can adapt to it. Concentrate on limiting our effects on microclimates. For instance, land clearing for farms and urban sprawl should be stopped (go up not out, height restrictions are a cause of climate change!). some farm regions would get more rain if there was a mixture of managed production forests and farms, which would increase their average production and reduce man-made impacts. Simple things, but it will require government mandates and a part reversal of thousands of years of land use evolution.
#4 by Sin Fong Chan on October 18, 2009 - 9:48 am
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What’s the point to write in if “Your e-mail (required, will not be published)”?
To be precise, it should read “Your e-mail address (required, will not be published)”
Many climate change / global warming theories claimed to be so, but they are nothing more than hypotheses. Many scientific facts can easily be viewed as fictions.
If a rise in a couple of degrees can cause such detrimental effect to lives on earth, then how can anyone or anything survive the fluctuation of temperatures between summer and winter in many countries, or city like Melbourne having four seasons in one day?
Commonsense tells us that millions of joules of energy have been pouring in from the sun each day. The ocean water can only be warmed up, and so does the earth’s atmosphere. Unless the heat is dissipated beyond our atmosphere, our climate will only change in one direction – rise in temperature.
Unfortunately many people pray to false gods of climate change. Have those so-called eminent speakers on climate change the proper data to back them up? They also speak on borrowed statistics. The view of Edward De Bona who wrote the book “I’m right, you are wrong” seems to apply to opposing parties of climate change / global warming. May I suggest that instead of having all the current talk fests on global warming, it’s about time all the do-gooders invest in research on global cooling, if this is the goal to reverse the trend?
Rise in sea level should not be viewed as catastrophic, for rising water will only help to fill the many dried-up lakes and rivers, rejuvenating inland aquatic lives, fauna and flora. Larger land mass covering with water will result in more water evaporation, and hence higher rainfall, thus producing cooler temperature for many parts of the world. Isn’t this the outcome we are looking for?
Has anyone ever asked why we need the icy poles, besides keeping the current polar animals alive? If scientists really believe that they can learn so much from studying the ice layers, and there is a fear of all the ice being melt away within the next two to three decades, scientist of future generations will have no way to tell of our current climate fluctuation.
ETS will not solve the current “problems”. Money and time spent on climate cooling will!
#5 by Graeme Bird on January 1, 2010 - 1:05 pm
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My goodness Monbiot made an idiot of himself. He would not answer any science questions. And he put about this idiocy that emissions from underwater volcanoes is about the same as emissions from those above the ground.
This is self-evidently a lie. It amounts to claiming that the magma wants to flow through a tall mountain, above sea level, where the crust is thicker, in preference to magma wanting to go through rift-zones, in the deep ocean, where the crust is more thin.
When I heard this fraudulent claim I immediately tried to find out where it came from. The liars involved in this new scandal had to go back to 1991 to find anyone stupid enough to make such a claim. And the claim itself is not based on any direct evidence. Its not as if there was any survey involved with the Gerlach 1991 study.
Nevertheless this has not stopped the usual fraudsters locking this claim in as the revealed truth. Though it is self-evidently wrong and they can find no evidence for it.