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Heaven and Earth (book)

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Heaven and Earth: Global Warming — The Missing Science
Book cover (2009)
AuthorIan Plimer
LanguageEnglish
SubjectClimate change
PublisherConnor Court Publishing
Publication dateMay 2009
Publication placeAustralia
ISBN0704371669

Heaven and Earth: Global Warming — The Missing Science is a popular science book published in 2009 and written by geologist Ian Plimer as a critique of what he sees as irrational elements within the global warming debate.

Content

Plimer says his book is for the "average punter in the street," who can sense something is wrong in the climate debate but can't put a finger on what. He likens human-induced climate change to creationism, describing it as a fundamentalist religion adopted by urban atheists looking to fill a yawning spiritual gap plaguing the West. He claims that environmental groups have filled this gap by having a romantic view of a less developed past. Plimer is critical of the IPCC, which Plimer says has allowed "little or no geological, archeological or historical input" in its analyses. If it had, he claims, it would know cold times lead to dwindling populations, social disruption, extinction, disease and catastrophic droughts, while warm times lead to life blossoming and economic booms — suggesting that global warming, were it happening, should be welcomed.

He is critical of greenhouse gas politics and argues that extreme environmental changes are inevitable and unavoidable. He suggests that meteorologists have a huge amount to gain from climate change research, and that they have narrowed the climate change debate to the atmosphere - Plimer claims that the truth is more complex. He suggests that money would be better directed to dealing with problems as they occur rather than making expensive and futile attempts to prevent climate change.

He differs markedly from the climate change consensus in contending that the Great Barrier Reef will benefit from rising seas, that there is no correlation between carbon dioxide levels and temperature, and that 96% of the greenhouse effect is due to water vapour.

Plimer claims that the current theory of human-induced global warming is not in accord with history, archaeology, geology or astronomy and must be rejected, that promotion of this theory as science is fraudulent, and that the current alarm over climate change is the result of bad science. In this book, Plimer claims that climate models focus too strongly on the effects of carbon dioxide, rather than factoring other issues such as solar variation.

Praise and political impact

  • Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel called Heaven and Earth "a damning critique of the 'evidence' underpinning man-made global warming." Strassel commented on the political impact of the book: "Australian polls have shown a sharp uptick in public skepticism ; the press is back to questioning scientific dogma; blogs are having a field day."
  • Australian columnist Paul Sheehan says Plimer's book is "an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence."
  • Australian Senator Steve Fielding, of the Family First Party, credits Plimer and his book with causing him to rethink his position on global warming. Fielding is considered a "swing" vote on this issue in the Australian Senate.

Criticisms

  • His book was criticised as unscientific and riddled with errors by Professor David Karoly, a meteorologist at Melbourne University and a member of the IPCC. Karoly reviewed the book and concluded: "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."
  • Professor Colin Woodroffe, a coastal geomorphologist at the University of Wollongong, and a lead chapter author for the IPCC AR4, writes that the book has many errors and will be "remembered for the confrontation it provokes rather than the science it stimulates." Woodroffe notes Pilmer's "unbalanced approach to the topic," and concludes by saying that the book was not written as a contribution to any scientific debate, and was evidently not aimed at a scientific audience.
  • Professor Charlie Veron, former chief scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, said every original statement Plimer makes in the book on coral and coral reefs is incorrect, and that " serve up diagrams from no acknowledged source, diagrams known to be obsolete and diagrams that combine bits of science with bits of fiction."
  • Professor Barry Brook, Director of Climate Science at the Environment Institute, University of Adelaide, said that Plimer'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". Brook also suggests that many of those scientific authors cited by Plimer actually support the consensus view and that their work is misrepresented in Plimer's book.
  • Professor Ian Enting, Professorial Fellow at MASCOS based at The University of Melbourne, claims there are numerous misrepresentations of the sources cited in the book and Plimer "fails to establish his claim that the human influence on climate can be ignored, relative to natural variation".
  • Professor Malcolm Walter, Director, Australian Centre for Astrobiology, University of New South Wales, commented on Plimer's "fallacious reasoning", noting the "blatant and fundamental contradictions" and inconsistencies in the book. Walter states that Plimer's interpretation of the literature is confused and that Plimer "bit off more than he can chew". "Reviewing this book has been an unpleasant experience for me. I have been a friendly colleague of Plimer's for 25 years or more. ... But..., in my opinion, he has done a disservice to science and to the community at large."

Responses to criticism

The Australian meteorologist, William Kininmonth, responded to Professor Lambeck's criticisms by stating that the latter had not actually addressed Plimer's arguments. He stated that he agreed with Plimer that the Earth's climate in geologic history has not been satisfactorily explained; that the logarithmic nature of the radiative forcing effect of increased CO2 ought to protect against "tipping points"; that role of evaporation may be overlooked in some models; and he also questioned the reliability of climate models to project future climate states. He said, "the science of climate change is not as settled as you have led the public to believe."

A response from Plimer

In a column written to respond to the books critics, Plimer wrote:

  • "A change of 1 per cent in cloudiness can account for all changes measured during the past 150 years, yet cloud measurements are highly inaccurate. Why is the role of clouds ignored?"
  • "I would bet the farm that by running these models backwards, El Nino events and volcanoes such as Krakatoa (1883, 535), Rabaul (536) and Tambora (1815) could not be validated."
  • "I have shown that the emperor has no clothes. This is why the attacks are so vitriolic."
  • The criticisms were "academic nit-picking" and "vitriolic ad hominem attacks by pompous academics out of contact with the community."
  • "Comments by critics suggest that few have actually read the book and every time there was a savage public personal attack, book sales rose. A political blog site could not believe that such a book was selling so well and suggested that my publisher, Connor Court, was a front for the mining or pastoral industry."
  • "here are a large number of punters who object to being treated dismissively as stupid, who do not like being told what to think, who value independence, who resile from personal attacks and have life experiences very different from the urban environmental atheists attempting to impose a new fundamentalist religion."

References

  1. ^ "The sceptic's shadow of doubt". theage.com.au. Retrieved 2009-05-22. Cite error: The named reference "age" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  2. Akerman, Piers (2007-04-12). "ABC scaremongering on the environment | Opinion". News.com.au. Retrieved 2009-04-14.
  3. "Cool heads missing in the pressure cooker - Environment". smh.com.au. Retrieved 2009-04-14.
  4. ^ "Beware the climate of conformity', Book review and column by Paul Sheehan, Sydney Morning Herald, April 13, 2009
  5. ^ "The Climate Change Climate Change", Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2009
  6. Publisher's site, recommendation by Klaus on back cover of the book
  7. "I kept an open mind on the road to Washington", by Steve Felding, The Australian, June 08, 2009
  8. "Could Australia Blow Apart the Great Global Warming Scare?", by Robert Tracinski and Tom Minchin, Real Clear Politics, June 24, 2009.
  9. "Heaven + Earth - review by David Karoly". Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 2009. Retrieved 2009-07-11.
  10. "Ian Plimer climate book". www.aussmc.org.au. Retrieved 2009-06-27.
  11. Barry Brook. "Ian Plimer – Heaven and Earth". BraveNewClimate.com. Retrieved 2009-07-05.
  12. "Ian Plimer's 'Heaven + Earth' — Checking the Claims « www.complex.org.au". ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems(MASCOS). Retrieved 2009-06-06.
  13. "Heaven + Earth - review by Malcolm Walter". The Science Show - ABC Radio National. Retrieved 2009-06-06.
  14. "Tempers flare as scientists defend the solar debate". Fairfax farmonline. Retrieved 2009-07-07.
  15. Kininmonth, W. and J. Marohasy. "In defence of "Heaven and Earth"". Retrieved 2009-07-13.
  16. "Vitriolic climate in academic hothouse". www.theaustralian.news.com.au. Retrieved 2009-05-29. {{cite web}}: Text "The Australian" ignored (help)

External links

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