Comments on: Debunking Ian Plimer’s “Heaven and Earth”

By: Graeme Bird

Graeme Bird — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 03:05:54 +0000

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.

By: Sin Fong Chan

Sin Fong Chan — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 23:48:41 +0000

What’s the point to write in if “Your e-mail (required, will not be published)”?

To be precise, it should read “Your e-mail address (required, will not be published)”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!

By: Killthealarmists

Killthealarmists — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 01:18:17 +0000

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.

By: Ian MacDougall

Ian MacDougall — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 09:38:08 +0000

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.

By: Philip Machanick

Philip Machanick — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:35:30 +0000

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.