A review of Heaven and Earth in Farm Online:
But he’s unequivocal on whether that atmospheric CO2 is pushing humanity into a climate disaster.
In his estimation, CO2 contributes about 0.1 per cent to any warming effect: the rest is up to nature.
“The hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology and geology,” he writes.
The article repeats the meme, first started by Michael Ashley in The Australian, that Plimer is trying to refute most of modern physical science.
But do these facts add up to a refutation of the prevailing climate change theory?
To believe Professor Plimer, the reader has to disbelieve thousands of intelligent scientists, many of them leaders in their respective fields.
That requires either a very poor view of human nature and the science community in particular, or a belief in a giant conspiracy involving most of the world’s major science agencies.
This echoes Ashley:
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.
This claim is simply false. as noted by commenter Dover Beach at catallaxy,
What nonsense. Most of the scientific papers Ashely is referring to here are not at all concerned with the cause(s) of climate change; this is certainly true of oceanographers, biologists, geologist, and snow and ice researchers, so to dispute the cause(s) of climate change, if that is what Plimer is doing, would have no effect on these other papers at all.
The fact that climate science draws on data from many fields does not mean that the data from all those fields is incorrect. It simply means that climate scientists – in fact those climate scientists studying the link between human activity and temperature – would be wrong. Not “literally thousands” of oceanographers and so on.
Like other critics, Ashley does not address the substance of Plimer’s arguments (except to gasp at the audacity of proving so many people wrong) . Instead – again presaging a trend – he nitpicks a single point of fact,
I couldn’t help noticing on page 120 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 may indeed be shocking, but this kind of one-off gotcha game is not sufficient. Ashley, like other reviewers, does not outline Plimer’s arguments or why they are wrong.
Plimer’s key question is, “what is the evidence that human-produced C02 is warming the planet?”
His main point is that there is no evidence for that claim. What is shocking – more than dubious references – is that the defenders of climate change theory can go round and round arguing flaws in the arguments of skeptics, but never spell out the evidence for their core scientific claim in response.
Perhaps one of those “thousands of oceanographers, solar physicists, biologists, atmospheric scientists, geologists, and snow and ice researchers during the past 100 years” can step up and explain the evidence that human-induced C02 is warming the planet.
Let’s see a review that tackles Plimer’s thesis – that the evidence doesn’t exist - head-on.