Who knew climate scientists and environmentalists were despots bent on taking over the world and killing hundreds of millions of people? Climate change “sceptics”, that’s who!
Vaclav Klaus, climate change denialist, president of the European Union and the Czech Republic:
“The environmentalists don’t want to change the climate. They want to change us and our behaviour,” he told the Heartland conference. “Their ambition is to control and manipulate us. Therefore, it shouldn’t be surprising they recommend preventing [climate change], not adaptive policies. Adaptation would be a voluntary behaviour.”
Environmentalism had replaced socialism as the totalitarian threat to freedom in the 21st century, he said.
“Environmentalists … do not want to reveal their true plans and ambitions: to stop economic development and return mankind centuries back.”
Threat to freedom! Wow.
Carter described the most powerful speaker [at the conference] as Arthur Robinson, a professor of chemistry and co-founder of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. In a wake-up call to Christian groups who have rushed to embrace climate alarmism, Robinson pointed out the world’s poor will bear the brunt of carbon prohibition policies.
He described as “technological genocide” efforts to deny cheap energy, in the form of coal-fired power plants, to the Third World. “Billions of people who live at the lowest level of human existence will suffer greatly from the rationing of energy, and this, in turn, will lead to the death of hundreds of millions.”
Banning the use of DDT for mosquito eradication was the first “example of genocide by the removal of technology, [resulting] in the deaths of 30 to 40 million people and [leaving] half a billion infected with malaria”.
A wake up call to Christian groups from someone who is - surprise! - not a climate scientist eh?
Just as well the poor farmers aren’t dependent on the climate for the livelihood I guess.
Too much crazy? No sir!
He also told to the conference, in excerpts posted on YouTube, “Most arguments about global warming boil down to science versus authority. For much of the public, authority will generally win, since they do not wish to deal with science … Those who are committed to warming alarm as either a vehicle for a post-modern coup d’etat or for illicit profits will obviously try to obfuscate matters.”
A “post-modern coup d’etat”! You couldn’t make this stuff up. Unless you were crazy. Which these guys apparently are.
Why were a bunch of crazies getting together to discuss conspiracy theories?
Well, it turns out that 2000 actual experts were meeting and the news is rather grim (NY Times):
At the opening of yesterday’s session, Lord Nicholas Stern, former chief economist for the World Bank, added his own dose of gloom by saying that his now-famous report on the risks of global warming, written for the British government in 2006, had underestimated them. “The reason is that emissions are growing faster than we thought, the absorption capacity of the planet is less than we thought, the probability of high temperatures is likely higher than we thought, and some of the effects are coming faster than we thought,” he explained
Yup, far from alarmism, the risks have been underestimated.
Oh good, I had almost forgotten that I was waiting to hear something funny from the Heartland conference’s latest pow-wow. Funny how half these sceptics seem to be owned by big oil, king coal, or giant car corporations.
Global warming
The institute is a member organization of the Cooler Heads Coalition, “an informal and ad-hoc group focused on dispelling the myths of global warming”.[4] The board of directors for the Heartland Institute includes Thomas Walton,[5] , Economic Policy Analysis Director for General Motors.[6]
Heartland’s publications make the following assertions about climate change:
* “Most scientists do not believe human activities threaten to disrupt the Earth’s climate.”[7]
* “The most reliable temperature data show no global warming trend.”[7]
* “A modest amount of global warming, should it occur, would be beneficial to the natural world and to human civilization.”[7]
* “The best strategy to pursue is one of ‘no regrets’.”[7]
In March 2008, the Heartland Institute sponsored a gathering of global warming skeptics in New York City, at which the participants criticized the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore.[8][9]
In April 2008, environmental journalist Richard Littlemore wrote that the Heartland Institute’s list of “500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares”[10] included at least 45 scientists who neither knew of their inclusion as “coauthors” of the article, nor agreed with its claims regarding global warming. Dozens of the scientists asked the Heartland Institute to remove their names from the list; for instance, Gregory Cutter of Old Dominion University wrote, “I have NO doubts… the recent changes in global climate ARE man-induced. I insist that you immediately remove my name from this list since I did not give you permission to put it there.” Dr. Robert Whittaker, Professor of Biogeography, University of Oxford wrote “Please remove my name. What you have done is totally unethical!” [11]
In response, the Heartland Institute refused to remove any names from the list, writing that “They [the scientists] have no right—legally or ethically—to demand that their names be removed from a bibliography.” The Institute did rename the list from its original title (chosen by its public relations department) to “500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming Scares”, to clarify that the scientists in question do not doubt global warming. Ultimately, the Heartland Institute concluded that “... the point should be obvious: There is no scientific consensus that global warming is a crisis.”[12]
They’re so corrupt they think that renaming the list that way “clarifies” the situation! Wow. Yet there are certain Christian bloggers I could name that love to quote the Heartland institute. ;-) One wonders how they forgot to at least Wiki the group first?
“New Scientist” Feb 28 has an article “Earth 2099” which shows Aussies main hope for the future is probably the Antartic. Most of Australia will only be good for solar power and wind mills. Siberia looks good in 2099 but even the Chinese are giving that a miss (probably too many Russians) . However the Chinese are setting up bigtime in the Antartic. The media say its minerals they are after, but you and I know better . One problem—they are measuring the ice thickness—could be 1to 2 K’s thick. That means there may not be much left of Antartica for anyone.
Just thought I’d cheer you up. And don’t tell the kids.
Peak oil and global warming are both very serious, but if we had the political will there are solutions that could retrofit how we live here in Australia. We don’t have to abandon the whole country. ;)
New Scientist article is here and it’s not fun reading, but having spent the last 5 years reading how we are going to live without oil I think there are many solutions that will converge to also solve global warming.
1. New Urbanism city design will be more efficient with land, and can lower local climate temperatures in effectively dealing with the “urban heat-island” effect. Apparently if Brisbane dug up its roads they could grow about a third of their food in the city… not suggesting that they’ll go and dig up their roads overnight, but just illustrating the potential to grow food where we currently have it “zoned” for something else. My point is that we don’t have to grow all our food out beyond the Blue Mountains where there is hardly any rain.
2. Worldwide rezoning for New Urbanism right NOW could basically design cities that are no longer contributing to global warming and are weaned off oil within 20 to 30 years. Fixed! Done! Then through Biochar systems we could gradually reduce the Co2 burden in our atmosphere.
3. There are many energy, water, and city design systems that can also help. EG: Sewerage recycling that pumps sewerage into massive hectares of various fast growing energy crops, cleans the sewerage, the water that comes out is **almost** good enough to drink, and the energy crops are then harvested and run through a Biochar cooker to get Biochar and biodiesel.
SOME of the energy crops could also be run through an ethanol brewer to get ethanol and then the biomass pulp left over is fertiliser to put on the Biochar.
Biochar + pulp = fertiliser for crops, especially when combined with “crop and cow” rotation. (A few years of cattle grazing on the cropland fertilises the soil, then those hectares are switched to growing crops again).
4. CETO wave energy systems also run as desal at night and could provide Sydney with all it’s water.
We can do this!
Seriously, I just spent Friday with a dad whose 19 year old boy committed suicide over peak oil. He was on one of the doomer email lists I couldn’t control, and I eventually left this one particularly doomer site because I couldn’t see eye to eye with the moderator. I warned him that his online method and message could result in disaster, and 6 months later this great kid goes and hangs himself!
Luke, I think you could give Vaclac Klaus some credit - he lived for decades under communism - so he knows whereof he speaks.
Most of what passes for current debate on stopping climate change (something even King Canute was wise enough to know he couldn’t do) is mere tokenism - 10% here, 20% there - and only in the most developed countries - not applied to the toiling masses of the third world who yearn to be as wealthy as we are.
The climate-change fundamentalists (a loaded work, I know, but so is “denialist” which I suppose you would label me for speaking some common sense) demand cuts of 80% - only the most stringent and universal world-wide controls of human behaviour, necessarily enforced with a savagery not seen since the middle decades of the last century, could possibly achieve this.
The lack of public debate (there’s plenty of private debate in the blogosphere, but heaven help us if you ever read about it in the mainstream media) - in spite of 10 years of the planet failing to get any warmer - is kinda creepy, don’t you think? kind of like you imagine scientific debate was under communism or Naziism - there are just some precepts you aren’t allowed to question. Such as - that the planet is getting warmer, that it’s our fault, that we can do anything to stop it, and that we should - each of these principles is questionable, but especially the last.
Luke, I think you could give Vaclac Klaus some credit - he lived for decades under communism - so he knows whereof he speaks.
Yeah, I guess that makes him prone to paranoia, but how’s his climate Phd doing? ;)
Alan, I’m afraid you’ve really pushed some buttons with your previous post. That particular myth the sceptics push around is REALLY starting to bug me!
Most of what passes for current debate on stopping climate change (something even King Canute was wise enough to know he couldn’t do) is mere tokenism - 10% here, 20% there - and only in the most developed countries - not applied to the toiling masses of the third world who yearn to be as wealthy as we are.
Agreed, so it’s time to get serious!
The climate-change fundamentalists (a loaded work, I know, but so is “denialist” which I suppose you would label me for speaking some common sense)
Fail — science is “advanced common sense” and you seemed determined to undermine anything the actual scientists in this say. So please don’t try and get on the high horse in “common sense”... that’s the climate scientist’s territory.
demand cuts of 80% - only the most stringent and universal world-wide controls of human behaviour, necessarily enforced with a savagery not seen since the middle decades of the last century, could possibly achieve this.
Fail — total myth being recirculated here. This is the one that REALLY bugs me.
First of all, there are greenie economic plans to lift Africa out of poverty.
Making the transition to a sustainable energy future is one of the central challenges humankind faces in this century. The concept of energy sustainability encompasses not only the imperative of securing adequate energy to meet future needs, but doing so in a way that (a) is compatible with preserving the underlying integrity of essential natural systems, including averting dangerous climate change; (b) extends basic energy services to the more than 2 billion people worldwide who currently lack access to modern forms of energy; and (c) reduces the security risks and potential for geopolitical conflict that could otherwise arise from an escalating competition for unevenly distributed energy resources.
A growing number of organizations (including the Global Commons Institute, EcoEquity, the Climate Equity Project, Feasta, Just Transition Alliance, The Sky Trust, and Third World Network) contend that the fairest solution would be to allocate annually capped emissions rights globally on an equal per-capita basis; then, if wealthy nations wished to continue using proportionally more fossil fuels, they would have to purchase emissions rights from more parsimonious consumers in poor nations. This would result over time in both a diminishing amount of total emissions (based on the declining trajectory of the annual caps) and an enormous transfer of wealth from the more-industrialized to the less-industrialized nations.
Yep, sounds like the greenies are RIGHT OUT THERE on the “persecuting the poor” front. This is where the sceptics funded by big oil are so SICK! They rape and pillage poor African nations to get their oil, promise wealth and in return use their own employees, shoot the money into their own corporate coffers, and if they employ local people it’s to recruit for gangs that stop protests against the local environment and waterways being destroyed, then eventually they leave behind an impoverished nation with a destroyed environment. Then THEY have the audacity to turn around and accuse the greenies of causing damage to the third world!? Gosh, it seems that the WORST thing to happen to many African nations is to have some natural resources. Ever heard of the term “Blood diamond”?
Secondly, you seem to want to get 3rd world countries addicted to fossil fuels just as the world is about to hit peak oil and gas, and then peak coal around 2025 to 2050 (data still unclear). Us Greenies want to see African and other poor / and or developing nations leapfrog past the fossil fuel age. With clever city design green energy means energy security for the home country, clean air, less congested cities, and immunity to the coming economic catastrophe’s about to hit the first world which is already so addicted to oil.
You sound like a heroin dealer pushing product, “Come on, just one try, you know you need it. You’ll get such a temporary rush!”
The lack of public debate (there’s plenty of private debate in the blogosphere,
I could point you to plenty of blogs about Area 51 and how immunisation is a plot to destroy capitalism. You’re talking about fools quoting fools, sometimes even supported by fossil fools, but nothing peer reviewed!
but heaven help us if you ever read about it in the mainstream media) - in spite of 10 years of the planet failing to get any warmer
Myth spread by big fossil fools companies. The climate trend for the last decade is hot hot HOT, and not at all mysteriously debunked by the super-hot year of 1998. Picking one super-spike to try and make the following very hot years look cooler is cherry-picking, unscientific, and quite frankly dishonest and dangerous given the climate risks.
- is kinda creepy, don’t you think?
Not as creepy as those who have some weird psychological need to hide from the consequences of our actions by shifting into denialist mode.
kind of like you imagine scientific debate was under communism or Naziism - there are just some precepts you aren’t allowed to question.
Well, this just makes me laugh! Of course you are allowed to honestly doubt and question and think critically, as long as you honestly then are prepared to accept the honest answers. All scientists are very critical thinkers, and the young guns entering climate science especially so. It’s not that they are all intimidated into silence by the powers that be in the climate world… where the HECK do you sceptics come up with this utter mythological persecution status RUBBISH! The reason I’m sounding cranky s that in the real world it’s exactly the other way round.
It’s the leading climatologists that have been persecuted. It’s the James Hansen’s of the world and leading climate guys that are IN FACT being persecuted by the likes of the former President of the US of A! The political persecution from within the White House down through NASA to James Hansen has been documented. I’d love to see you find some evidence that young climatologists are being pressured into climate agreement. http://eclipsenow.blogspot.com/2007/08/gw-proof-of-denial-machine.html
The young climatologist starts off sceptical, they are trained in scepticism. But unlike you, they listen to the evidence.
Try and imagine you’re a young climate scientist annoyed by all those dreadlock wearing hippies stealing your industry for their own weirdo views. (There are many hippie greenies using legitimate climate science to justify their own counter-culture lifestyle and weird philosophical positions). What’s the first thing you’d like to do? Why, make your name for being THE guy that finally debunked global warming! You don’t think that science is competitive? That there are young guns out there just busting to be the one that finally discovers THE mechanism that will save us, THE unknown as yet safety valve that will save us? I think you’re deluding yourself if you can’t acknowledge the competitive nature of young scientists out to make a name for themselves in their careers.
But till now, the evidence convinces them, it’s that simple. Yet I will add that I hope
Such as - that the planet is getting warmer, that it’s our fault, that we can do anything to stop it, and that we should - each of these principles is questionable, but especially the last.
Ummm, the evidence before your eyes is that the planet IS getting warmer, it IS our fault, we CAN do something to stop it, and we SHOULD because the consequences on the world’s poorest people will be devastating!
You’re the one peddling death and privation and starvation and war and displacement as sea levels rise by pushing the line that we DON’T have to do anything about global warming!
So, in summary:
1. Prove that the world is not getting warmer
2. Do you want the world’s poorest nations being addicted to oil, gas, and coal just as all these products are about to become scarcer?
3. Do you also want their crops to fail, agricultural lands to end up under the sea, and snow-melt water to just evaporate away?
THE Federal Government’s prohibitive nuclear power policy shows Australia isn’t serious about reducing global warming, an industry advocate says.
While acknowledging nuclear power isn’t the “silver bullet’’ to tackle global warming, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation chairman Ziggy Switkowski says the technology could considerably reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Dr Switkowski criticised the Government’s policy of prohibiting the development of a nuclear power industry, saying it is at odds with an international 2006 report - the Uranium Mining, Processing and Nuclear Power Review.
The report concluded nuclear power could be the cleanest, safest and lowest cost form of energy in the 2020s.
It suggested scenarios where Australia’s first reactor could be operational in the early 2020s and a network of 25 reactors in place by 2050, producing about one-third of Australia’s electricity needs, he said.
“This scenario would reduce national greenhouse gas emissions by 18 per cent compared to the continued use of fossil fuels,’’ Dr Switkowski said today ahead of his speech to the Paydirt Uranium conference in Adelaide.
“It may not be a silver bullet but at the very least it would lead to a considerable contribution to greenhouse gas reductions.’‘
Ummm, who produced this “report?” Sorry, but uranium mining involves enormous oil dependency and use (and therefore Co2 emissions). One has to mine hundreds of thousands of tons of ore, process it, process it again, and gradually refine it down into the rods that run the reactor.
And liar, liar, pants on fire, when ALL the costs are counted nuclear power is one of the most expensive forms of electricity ever invented. So as long as you don’t mind the taxpayer picking up the costs for storage of material, securing that for the next umpteen thousand years against terrorists, etc, then go ahead! But if you want clean, safe, and “cheapish” energy, stick with renewables.
EG: If a 9/11 strike occurs on a solar plant, oh well, we have to re-build a few thousand mirrors. But if a strike hits a nuclear reactor, the only response is King Arthur’s…. “RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!” (“But they’ll make is especially secure!” I hear you say? OK, so we’ll just add another billion to the cost.) http://eclipsenow.blogspot.com/2007/07/nuclear.html
Also, we’re not far off “peak uranium”. There’s already a world uranium crisis starting to unfold.
Also, the world is moving away from large, centralised power grids to more locally produced, more efficient, more stable and reliable and resilient localised grids! Listen to Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute on “Beyond Zero Emissions” podcast. 99% of power outages occur in the grid somewhere between the coal plant and the consumer hundreds and hundreds of km’s away. If the power source is mixed, diversified, and more local then the grid’s security and reliability is far higher. Fact.
Oh - this is so CONvincing. Las Vegas buried beneath sand, the Sydney Opera House on fire, London boiling … ( Who have they been listening to ? And what have they been smoking ? )
Here’s the trailer for “The Age of Stupid” film which has opened in London:
But Kevin it’s so true. We really are that stupid.
Remember 6th sense?
“I see stupid people. They’re walking around like regular people but they’re stupid, and they don’t even know they’re stupid!”
It doesn’t have to come to that… 2 billion people don’t have to go without crops or fresh water across Asia when the glaciers melt for good. It doesn’t have to happen. There is a plan. And my friends are going to make it happen.
We can do this in about 10 years, and solve peak oil, climate change, and many coal related cancers once and for all.
Professor Wei-Chyung Wang of New York State University at Albany is a hero to warming alarmists, having produced widely-cited papers that dismissed objections that some of the recent rise in land temperatures was caused by growing urbanisation around the measuring stations.
Mathematician Douglas Keenan checked Wang’s work and claimed fraud. He asked Wang’s university to investigate the work of a scientist who’d helped attract $US7 million in funding:
Dr Keenan alleged that in work that has come to be widely cited in climate studies, work that included the collation of data from temperature measuring stations in China, Professor Wang made statements that “cannot be true and could not be in error by accident. The statements are fabricated.”
Kafka at Albany
Last June I reported on the allegations of academic fraud levelled by a British mathematician, Doug Keenan, against Professor Wei-Chyung Wang of New York State University at Albany.
Dr Keenan alleged that in work that has come to be widely cited in climate studies, work that included the collation of data from temperature measuring stations in China, Professor Wang made statements that “cannot be true and could not be in error by accident. The statements are fabricated.”
In August 2007, Dr Keenan submitted a report (pdf) of his allegations to the Vice President for Research at Wang’s university and an inquiry was initiated. In February 2008 this was escalated into a full investigation by the Inquiry Committee.
All this was summarised in my earlier post, together with quotations from Dr Keenan’s allegation.
So far, things had run as might be expected. A fraud had been alleged, the University at Albany looked into it and decided to hold a formal investigation. Dr Keenan waited to be contacted by the investigation and asked to put his case, in line with the university’s Policy and Procedures on Misconduct in Research and Scholarship (.doc). The relevant section of this document runs as follows (emphasis added):
III. A. Rights and Responsibilities of the Complainant
Rights: The Vice President for Research will make every effort to ensure the privacy and confidentiality of complainants. The University will protect, to the maximum extent possible, the position and the reputation of those who in good faith report alleged misconduct in research.
The Vice President for Research will work to ensure that complainants will not be retaliated against in the terms and conditions of their employment or other status at the University and will review instances of alleged retaliation for appropriate action. Any alleged or apparent retaliation should be reported immediately to the Vice President for Research.
The complainant will be provided a copy of the formal allegations when and if an inquiry is opened. The complainant will have the opportunity to review portions of the inquiry and investigation reports pertinent to the complainant’s report or testimony, and will be informed in writing of the results of the inquiry and investigation, and of the final determination. After the final determination and upon request to the Vice President for Research, the complainant shall be given access to the full documentation.
Responsibilities: The complainant is responsible for making allegations in good faith, maintaining confidentiality, and cooperating fully with an inquiry and/or investigation.
Dr Keenan lived up to the responsibility as stated in the final paragraph above so far as he could. He had made the allegation in good faith and given Professor Wang an opportunity to explain how he had reached his results, an opportunity the Professor had not taken. Keenan maintained confidentiality. In order to cooperate with the investigation, though he would first have to be contacted by it. Dr Keenan waited.
Late in May 2008 a communication arrived from Albany. It said:
After careful review of the evidence and thoughtful deliberation, the Investigation Committee finds no evidence of the alleged fabrication of results and nothing that rises to the level of research misconduct having been committed by DR. Wang.
As the institutional official responsible for this case, I have accepted the Committee’s findings and the Report. You have fourteen (14) calendar days from the date of this letter to provide any comments to add to the report for the record.
Contrary to its own rules, the Committee had not given Keenan the opportunity to “review portions of the inquiry and investigation reports”.
That’s astonishing, but here’s where it becomes Kafkaesque. Keenan was being asked, in this most recent communication, to comment on the report of the Committee. But he was not sent a copy of the report. When he challenged this, he received an email from Adrienne Bonilla explaining that:
[Keenan] did not receive a copy of the Investigation report because the report did not include portions addressing your role and opinions in the investigation phase.
Per the UAlbany Misconduct policy:
VI. E. Investigation Report and Recommendations of the Vice President for Research
”...The Vice President for Research will provide the respondent with a copy of the draft investigation report for comment and rebuttal and will provide the complainant with those portions of the draft report that address the complainant’s role and opinions in the investigation. The respondent and complainant will be given 14 calendar days from the transmission of the report to provide their written comments. Any written responses to the report by either party will be made part of the report and record.
Keenan then wrote to the Vice President for Research at Albany, Lynn Videka, pointing out the various ways in which the University had breached its own policy, stating that its behaviour was consistent with a cover up, and pointing out that Professor Wang has received more than $7 million in grants from a couple of US federal agencies.
In August 2008, Lynn Videka wrote to Keenan enclosing a final copy of a “determination” of the investigation. In her covering note, she stated:
I am notifying you of the case outcome because you were the complainant in this case. The University’s misconduct policies and the Office of Research Integrity regulations preclude discussion of any information pertaining to this case with others who were not directly involved in the investigation.
To summarise, the university initiated an investigation, then broke its own rules by not involving Dr Keenan. It then produced a report that carefully avoided mentioning Dr Keenan, so it could claim he was not entitled to see a copy of this report. It then asked Keenan to comment on the report. It has completely disregarded its own policy that “After the final determination and upon request to the Vice President for Research, the complainant shall be given access to the full documentation.”
But Doug Keenan is a tenacious man. In July 2008, after being refused sight of the report, he submitted a formal complaint (pdf) to the Public Integrity Bureau at the Office of the Attorney General of New York State, alleging criminal fraud. In this complaint, he said:
Wei-Chyung Wang is a professor at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He has been doing research for over 30 years. For this research, Wang has received at least $7 million. The funds have come primarily from the Department of Energy, with additional funding from other federal agencies (DOD, FAA, NSF). I have formally alleged that Wang committed fraud in important parts of his research. My allegation was submitted to the University at Albany; a copy is enclosed.
The university conducted a preliminary inquiry; a copy of the report from the inquiry is enclosed (redacted, by the university). Briefly, Wang claimed that there were some documents that could exonerate him. The inquiry concluded that there should be a full investigation, which should be “charged with obtaining and reviewing any such additional evidence ... so that a final resolution may be made regarding the allegation against Dr. Wang”.
Wang had been claiming the existence of such exonerating documents for nearly a year, but he has not been able to produce them. Additionally, there was a report published in 1991 (with a second version in 1997) explicitly stating that no such documents exist. Moreover, the report was published as part of the Department of Energy Carbon Dioxide Research Program, and Wang was the Chief Scientist of that program.
The university conducted an investigation. The investigation concluded that Wang is innocent. I believe that the case against Wang is strong and clear, and that the university is trying to cover up the fraud so as to protect its reputation. Wang is one of the university’s star professors. The conduct of the investigation violated several of the university’s own stated policies: details are given in an attached e-mail (dated 06 June 2008). The e-mail was sent to Lynn Videka, Vice President for Research at the university: Videka was in charge of overseeing the investigation. Note, in particular, that the documents that Wang was relying on were never produced.
I have only examined a little of Wang’s research; so I do not know the full extent of the fraud. It is difficult to examine more in part because Wang has not willingly made his data available: when asked for the data from the research that I later reported as fraudulent, Wang refused. For that research, though, Wang had a co-worker in Britain. In Britain, the Freedom of Information Act requires that data from publicly-funded research be made available. I was able to get the data by requiring Wang’s co-worker to release it, under British law. It was only then that I was able to confirm that Wang had committed fraud. Details are given in my report to the university (page 4, last paragraph). I would be willing to help examine other research that Wang has done, if more data were made available.
There was another case of research fraud with a professor at the University of Vermont, in 2005. There, Prof. Eric Poehlman was convicted of making false statements on federal grant applications; he was sentenced to a year and a day in prison. Wang has done the same as Poehlman. The fraudulent work described in my report dates from 1990; Wang has been relyingon that work in some of his grant applications since then. As I understand things, each of those applications is a violation of statute. (Additionally, Wang has been using the grants to go on frequent trips to China.)
In October 2008 Dr Keenan was told there could be a wait of several months while his complaint is investigated.
I’ll let you know when there are any further developments.
UPDATE: I didn’t mention this in the main piece above, but I did mail the relevant person at Albany myself, some time ago, asking for news of the investigation against Professor Wang. I received no reply.
However, within a couple of hours of this being posted, someone at Albany came to look at it, from the host aspmini-cc326.cc.albany.edu (169.226.172.35), having apparently been sent an email about it.
So even if they are not communicative about this case, it seems someone at Albany is keeping their eyes open for reports of it.
UPDATE: On reflection, the hit from Albany is also consistent with someone using Google Alerts to monitor coverage of this issue.
UPDATE: Doug Keenan has been told on the telephone that this case is now under review by an attorney at the OAG Public Integrity Bureau.
UPDATE: Also see new findings on the effect of urban warming.
I’m sorry, but that’s a very long piece about a very inflated controversy over some very small issues.
The real climate data comes from thousands of climate measuring stations all around the globe.
The real climate theory comes from this sinister looking device.
It’s called a spectrometer. It measures how particles interact with energy. This same branch of science helped give us the internet and microwave ovens, and then tells us how Co2 interacts with sunlight bouncing off the earth, and how this could retain a certain amount of heat. (Called the Radiative Forcing Equation).
My point is: your story above only confirms that scientists really do fight it out over their own studies and their own honour. If there was anything fundamentally false in the basic Spectrometer and Radiative Forcing Equation work done in the very core of climate science, surely 97% of climatologists wouldn’t all agree with it, or be somehow intimidated into accepting it, or be lying to get next year’s funding?
Surely some of the LEGITIMATE climatologists would be writing peer reviewed papers questioning the core basics?
So I’ll keep an eye out for more information on this peripheral debate that has caught your attention, but really it only reminds me that scientists are out to make their own name in their career, and if there was a VALID way to debunk climate science, we’d have heard about it.
Anyone else see the 24 page “60 Earth hour” supplement in today’s SMH and AGE ? This bit caught my attention :
Still, environmentalists remain adamant that shunning meat is the best thing you can do for the environment - not to mention your health. (Australian Vegetarian Society director Mark) Berriman cites the Hunza people, who live in a valley in the western Himalayas and whose mainly vegetarian diet enables them to reportedly live to 100, 120, even 140 years old.
“They’re bearing children into their late 90s,’’ he says.
Someone else commented : “Something about global warming turns a journalist’s brains to complete mush, unable to distinguish fact from the most absurd fantasy….. These preposterous claims are now - unchallenged - in a ‘newspaper of record’. If it can print this, what other fibs might this paper be telling in the green cause?”
The article ( on page 19 ) also included a photo of a very thin pale young man ( looking in need of a healthy slice of beef ) who had given up eating meat “for ecological reasons”.
I then did some googling research - and I just firstly want to give thanks to our Creator for giving us such tasty and health-inducing meats - and providing us with teeth to chew it. I had to laugh at goveg.com’s front webpage claim :
Although many modern humans eat a wide variety of plant and animal foods, earning us the honorary title of “omnivore,” we are anatomically herbivorous. Biologists have established that animals who share physical characteristics also share a common diet. Comparing the anatomy of carnivores with our own clearly illustrates that we were not designed to eat meat.
These sort of views, to me, appear to come from a viewpoint that dismisses the idea that humans and animals were created by the God of the Bible. Throughout the scriptures, meat is seen as a meal that has been provided for our sustenance. I’ll stick with God’s menu - and pass on the ‘rabbit food diet’ thank you.
So true - but at least we won’t see Christian “crazies” getting exposure space in the pages of ‘Southern Cross’. Regarding the above Berriman quotes about the Hunzas, one must surely concede that having them appear in a major supplement in the SMH and the AGE gives them an air of reliable credence - and therefore ‘quotability’. ( To the unquestioning ‘true believers’ that is. )
Pity then that the SMH/AGE editors didn’t do some research and see this TOTAL REBUTTAL of the false ‘preposterous’ claims in the The New York Times Magazine :
The Optimists Are Right ( The New York Times Magazine )
By John Tierney
Published: Sunday, September 29, 1996
Lost Perspective
James Hilton created Shangri-La in ‘‘Lost Horizon,’’ his 1933 novel about a peaceful Himalayan valley of long-lived people, but there was already a real place named Hunza that fit the description. This isolated valley, in northern Pakistan near the Chinese border, is inhabited by people of uncertain origin who speak a language unrelated to any other known tongue. For more than a century, travelers who braved Himalayan cliffs to reach Hunza have been returning with reports of a ‘‘valley of eternal youth’’ where illness is virtually unknown and farmers work the fields at the age of 140. A Harvard Medical School physician investigated Hunza and declared it a ‘‘bastion of longevity’’ in a 1974 article for National Geographic titled, ‘‘Every Day Is a Gift When You Are Over 100.’’ When I went there seven years ago to write about the fabled ‘‘Hunza health secrets,’’ I understood why everyone called it Shangri-La.
It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. The valley’s lush green terraces were shielded from the outside world by a 25,000-foot pyramid of snow shaped just like the mystical mountain in Hilton’s novel, and there seemed to be a remarkable number of old people as hale as the monks of Shangri-La. But my enchantment didn’t last. The great Hunza secret to old age turned out to be its absence of birth records. The illiterate elders didn’t know how old they were, and they tended to overestimate their ages by a decade or two, as I discovered by comparing their recollections with known historical events. Hunza didn’t have an unusual number of centenarians, it turned out, and its traditional way of life was not a formula for good health.
The mountain air did seem pristine, but the people spent most of their time inside mud huts breathing horribly polluted air from open fires. They suffered from bronchitis and a host of ailments like tuberculosis, dysentery, malaria, tetanus and cancer. An iodine deficiency in their diet caused mental retardation. Children went hungry in the spring as food stores dwindled. The life expectancy for people in the isolated traditional villages, according to a 1986 medical study, was only 53 years for men and 52 for women. The healthiest people were the ones living in more modern villages near a new road to the outside world. There, trucks were bringing in food, vaccines, antibiotics, iodized salt and stoves with vented chimneys. Nearest this road, life expectancy was rising, a trend that would have delighted the designers of General Motors’s Futurama: better living through highways.
The people of Hunza were not delighted, though. Virtually everyone I interviewed believed that the intrusion of modern civilization was shortening lives. People blamed their current health problems on chemicals in imported fruit and germs in imported grain, and they insisted that the valley had once really been Shangri-La. An elderly woman named Bibi Khumari told me: ‘‘The people today are like pencils. We were like tree trunks. The babies were so healthy in the old days.’‘
’‘How many babies did you have?’’ I asked.
’‘Sixteen. But the first 13 died.’‘
’‘Thirteen died? But you said in those days the babies were so healthy.’‘
’‘I had a curse from the fairies,’’ she said. That was why my children were dying. Otherwise the babies were healthy.’’ She paused, then added absent-mindedly, ‘‘Nowadays there is not as much fairy sickness.’‘........
What chance of a correction appearing in tomorrow’s editions with the truth - declaring the real truth and nothing but the truth ?
Cool, as long as we clarify that this is about poor reporting standards and not the actual climatologists. I mean, it sounds like this reporter didn’t even WIKI these claims!
The people of Hunza are by some noted for their exceptionally long life expectancy[3], others describe this as a longevity myth and cite a life expectancy of 53 years for men and 52 for women, although with a high standard deviation. [4]
Meanwhile, how’s that spectroscopy doing?
Also, can physicists still do a little math?
Maybe there’s a reason 97% of climatologists accept global warming as a given.
According to a 2007 Newsweek poll, 42% of Americans believe that “there is a lot of disagreement among climate scientists about whether human activities are a major cause” of global warming”. I posed the same question to members of the wunderground community on Monday, and even higher 56% of them thought so. However, the results of a poll that appears in this week’s edition of the journal EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Union, reveals that the public is misinformed on this issue. Fully 97% of the climate scientists who regularly publish on climate change agreed with the statement, “human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures”.
“Earth Hour” - what a fiasco it was ( and is ) - except to those “feel good” converts who bask in the ‘sunshine’ of doing nothing - really, nothing ! No substance - just a warm fuzzy feeling. Talk about people afflicted with “the emperor’s new clothes” syndrome. And if you dare to criticise Earth Hour as a waste of space - then you get treated as an outcast. So be it !
Remember : You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time - BUT you can never fool all of the people all of the time !
Ummmm, fool them about what? No seriously, I don’t know what you are talking about. Most people I’ve spoken with know that it is just a symbol and that no real Co2 emissions were actually saved by this event. The news reports I saw focussed on the symbolic nature of this stunt. That’s all it is — symbolic. The coal fired power stations were still chugging away because it takes about 12 hours to shut one down! No, no Co2 saved here. But YES, a fairly powerful “message” sent to the G20 and other world leaders.
The current carbon trading scheme being introduced into Australia is a debacle though. It’s rubbish. We should throw it out and ask them to start again. If the goal is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, why REWARD the coal companies as you and I start to make cuts to our own Co2 emissions? Crazy.
Another simpler means might be to legislate no new coal plants, and a phasing out of coal plants over the next 15 years.
If we REALLY want to do this there’s a plan for being carbon neutral in 10 years. It involves 200km of rail each year Australia wide… I hope they mean trams and trolley buses, because look how long the Epping to Chatswood link took! http://www.beyondzeroemissions.org/zerocarbonplan
Yes indeed, those crazies get crazier .... see the latest outrageous claims that Tim Blair has discovered in The L A Times :
Tim Blair Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at 03:16am
The Los Angeles Times last week listed the terrible effects of global warming upon Australia, including:
• depression
• weeping
• broken families
• drought
• floods
• mosquito-borne illnesses
• economic collapse
• killer heat waves
• koala deaths
• destruction of entire towns
• Ferris wheel ruination
• rail warpage
• flying fox annihilation
• field desiccation
• tree shriveling
• orchard abandonment
• business closures
• collapse of agriculture “and the nation’s ability to feed itself”
• Victorian farmers killing themselves at rate of one per week (“hanging is the preferred method”)
• pear stunting
• burned apples
• water restrictions in ”every capital in Australia’s eight states and territories”
• urban bucketing
• toilet drinking
• surviving on rainwater or “what they can scrounge or buy”
• delayed burials
• crocodile attacks
• hemorrhagic dengue fever
• bleached coral
• reef extinction
• retreating forests
• white lemuroid ringtail possum endangerment
• abandoned settlements, and
• unliveable coastlines
The Times now revisits this subject in an editorial:
In the 1959 Gregory Peck classic “On the Beach,” humanity’s last holdouts in the aftermath of a global nuclear war huddle in Australia and wait for the inevitable atomic wind to carry the rest of the species away. When it comes to today’s real-world climate crisis, though, Australia is going first, not last …
Climate skeptics believe that Australia is simply in the midst of a cyclical change in weather patterns, or that the steel-warping temperatures turning the interior into a Martian landscape are the result of a natural warming period rather than a phenomenon with human causes. Most of these skeptics live outside Australia.
Only someone who lives outside Australia would refer to the interior being turned into a Martian landscape; it’s been that way for as long as humans have known it. Does anyone at this paper care for a wager? I’ll put a lazy billion on Australia (and Australians) outlasting the LA Times. Hell, let’s make it $100 billion. They need the money, after all.
Ummm, yeah, so there are some weirdo extremists making bizarre claims. I’m glad we don’t have any of those in Christendom or that might disprove Christianity! ;-)
In the meantime, climate change gets more obvious. Have you heard of “early spring”, and the possibly horrible implications? Tim Flannery was writing about some of this stuff back in 2005. Now it’s here.
Breaking the silence about Spring
Did you know that in 1965 the U.S. Department of Agriculture planted a particular variety of lilac in more than seventy locations around the U.S. Northeast, to detect the onset of spring — in turn to be used to determine the appropriate timing of corn planting and the like? The records the USDA have kept show that those same lilacs are blooming as much as two weeks earlier than they did in 1965. April has, in a very real sense, become May. This is one of the interesting facts that you’ll read about in Amy Seidl’s book, Early Spring, a hot-off-the-press essay about the impacts of climate change on the world immediately around us – the forest, the birds, the butterflies in our backyards.
The brilliant title of Seidl’s book was one of the reasons that it caught my attention. The other was that I have realized I need to better educate myself about the impact of climate change on everyday life. I’ve been dismissive of the idea that the average person can really detect the impacts of recent warming on, for example, the timing of the apple-blossom season, but I’ve been taken to task by several of RealClimate’s readers for this. If you are paying attention, they have argued, the changes are actually rather obvious.
Of course, Amy Seidl is not the average person. Rather, she’s a trained ecologist with a Ph.D. (as well as an avid gardener) and she’s clearly paying extremely close attention. Her book is the first one I have read that effectively brings home the tangible impacts that global warming will have – is having – on our everyday lives. “We are increasingly familiar,” she writes, of images of melting glaciers, “but how do we give them relevance in our lives? From my window I see no glaciers.” She answers her own question with a series of vignettes, some from her own experiences, many more from her extensive research (well referenced throughout the book).
Cardinals, robins and cowbirds are all arriving earlier in Vermont than they did a century ago. Kingfishes, fox sparrows and towhees are not. Why the difference? The answer, as Seidl explains, is that the former group has the ability to respond ecologically to the changes, because these birds cue their arrival to temperature. The latter, it appears, respond more directly to temporal cues, that won’t change even as climate does. It’s obvious from this example that the make up of bird life in Vermont – the species distribution – will change over time. This may not necessarily be a bad thing of course. On the other hand, it turns out that the robins are the most important host for West Nile virus; the early bird gets the worm, so to speak, and passes it along to humans.
Maple seedlings need about 100 days of below-freezing weather. As this becomes rarer, fewer maples will populate the forests. This, Seidl explains, is why species-range models predict the decline and eventual loss of sugar maple (at least in New England) in the future. But, she notes, the models don’t take into account the full complexity of the system, such as the impact of competition among different species. So we don’t really know what will happen, or how fast. What we do know is that maple-sugar farmers have noticed – and documented – an earlier maple sugaring season over the last few decades.
There are many other examples in Early Spring both of clear climate-related changes (such as the early arrival of robins), and of less clear-cut changes (the maple sugaring season). Seidl doesn’t make the common mistake of assuming that the more ambiguous examples are necessarily due to climate change. For example, she quotes a maple-sugarer who points out that technological changes have allowed them to tap maples earlier, and hence that the timing of sugaring is a weak measure of climate change. The point though, is that even rather minor changes are, after all, being noticed. And if much larger changes do occur, as predicted, they will most certainly have impacts we can’t ignore, even if we don’t live in the Arctic or in Bangladesh. In other words, Seidl tells us, listen to the farmers and gardeners, and the observations of regular people: they are meaningful.
The soberness of Seidl’s approach to the subject of climate change impacts contrasts starkly with that of many books before it. It couldn’t be further, for example, from Mark Lynas’s book, Six Degrees, which is a truly alarming read. In my comments on Six Degrees, I said that it wasn’t an alarmist book. I stand by that characterization, because – and this is what I liked about it – it doesn’t go beyond what is in the scientific literature. However, while Lynas’s book is a straightforward reading of the scientific literature, it is a somewhat uncritical one, and hence tends to emphasize what might happen in the future over what will happen; this is a point that many readers of my review seem to have missed. Seidl’s book, on the other hand, is focused on the more certain – and often less dramatic — things, and on the impacts we are likely to see in our own lifetimes.
The calm demeanor of Seidl’s book, and the very personal nature of it, could lead one to think that it is primarily just a philosophical reflection on the climate change story. Indeed, Bill McKibben, in his introduction to Early Spring, says that in the face of changes we may not be able to prevent, “one of our tasks is simply to bear witness”. Certainly, the book is partly that. But Seidl’s voice, like Rachel Carson’s before her, has the authentic and authoritative voice of a scientist, made all the more compelling for being very much rooted in the author’s own story and experiences. And she doesn’t pull punches when she has something definitive to say: “One thing is clear:” she writes, “we will not be able to manage the climate”.
Early Spring has the potential to be immensely influential, a real turning point in the popular appreciation of climate change impacts among laypersons and scientists alike. Read it. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=670
The misinformation has to be the most annoying in this whole deal.
One such piece I can’t stand is that “solar panels can’t ever be considered to be a primary source of energy
......due to no storage facility for the energy at night time.
Crap I say!!
Not many are aware that the coal powered generator sells power to the snowy to pump water up at off peak times at cheap rates ........then the snowy drops the water again at peak times and ‘makes money’.
they keep this a big secret ....but makes sense to when idling the boilers ......heat shock etc. I understand why they do it ...BUT it should be pointed out that this system of pumping could be applied to solar.
No one can tell me that if you go nuts with solar assisted or any type of solar panel to pump this water up the snowy it would not create masses of employment aside of any CO2 argument…..as long as we kept it on-shore .....we just we to bring back the expertise that was shunned by our past govt ....I’m sure they are keen.
I see the australian designed solar assisted boiler system has taken off like crazy in the states…...the very different but interesting reflector unit here at Bridgewater seems to have slowed .....but I still reckon a focus on solar with a view to pumping water up anywhere in our hydro has to be a good thing.
Maybe off topic but am sick of hearing this argument that solar can’t be considered a primary source of energy.
Absolutely Michael… but solar PV is best to give domestic users some power during the day. It’s the ferrari of renewables, and is a bit expensive.
However, there are STACKS of solar + wind + geothermal + wave + biomass solutions for energy. These together can offer power spread throughout the day and eventually be “baseload” over a large enough grid area just from the fact that at some place, wind is always blowing and the sun is always shining. (There are many organisations now looking at the viability of a worldwide power grid sending clean green electrons down HVDC lines at only 3% loss per 1000 km). You end up with African solar thermal powering Europe, etc.
However, new storage techniques are developing all the time.
Solar thermal is going baseload with various means of storing heat energy quite economically. If one counted the WHOLE cost of coal, including the public health cost, then I’m sure it would be economic.
This system is fairly unique because the graphite block can be mounted on a small traditional windmill tower and have solar mirrors pointing DIRECTLY onto the graphite block to heat that… it is heating the MEANS of storage immediately, and the power is drawn down from that in a steady 24 hour basis supply of heat => turbine => electricity system.
This can also be used to make the higher ERoEI wind energy systems baseload and is being implemented on King Island where there is great wind but not great solar.
“Ummm, yeah, so there are some weirdo extremists making bizarre claims. I’m glad we don’t have any of those in Christendom or that might disprove Christianity! “
Right, I agree with you on this one - the Los Angeles Times ( no small newspaper ) has been taken over by weirdo extremists. You have brought up the comparison with disproving Christianity several times. But there is a great difference between the two. Christianity is a fact - whereas AGW is not.
Now here’s a NEW book worthy of consideration :
“University of Adelaide Professor of Mining Geology Ian Plimer this week launches his seventh book, Heaven and Earth, Global Warming: The Missing Science, which aims to refute every scientific argument that humans are responsible for global warming.
Professor Plimer embarked on the project after being incensed by increasing public acceptance of the idea that humans have caused global warming.”
From his reading of the book, even Paul Sheehan has been moved to question his earlier unquestioning trust in the claims of AGW. He wrote in yesterday’s SMH :
Beware the climate of conformity
Paul Sheehan
April 13, 2009
What I am about to write questions much of what I have written in this space, in numerous columns, over the past five years. Perhaps what I have written can withstand this questioning. Perhaps not. The greater question is, am I - and you - capable of questioning our own orthodoxies and intellectual habits? Let’s see.
The subject of this column is not small. It is a book entitled Heaven And Earth, which will be published tomorrow. It has been written by one of Australia’s foremost Earth scientists, Professor Ian Plimer. He is a confronting sort of individual, polite but gruff, courteous but combative. He can write extremely well, and Heaven And Earth is a brilliantly argued book by someone not intimidated by hostile majorities or intellectual fashions.
The book’s 500 pages and 230,000 words and 2311 footnotes are the product of 40 years’ research and a depth and breadth of scholarship. As Plimer writes: “An understanding of climate requires an amalgamation of astronomy, solar physics, geology, geochronology, geochemistry, sedimentology, tectonics, palaeontology, palaeoecology, glaciology, climatology, meteorology, oceanography, ecology, archaeology and history.”
The most important point to remember about Plimer is that he is Australia’s most eminent geologist. As such, he thinks about time very differently from most of us. He takes the long, long view. He looks at climate over geological, archaeological, historical and modern time. He writes: “Past climate changes, sea-level changes and catastrophes are written in stone.”
Much of what we have read about climate change, he argues, is rubbish, especially the computer modelling on which much current scientific opinion is based, which he describes as “primitive”. Errors and distortions in computer modelling will be exposed in time. (As if on cue, the United Nations’ peak scientific body on climate change was obliged to make an embarrassing admission last week that some of its computers models were wrong.)
Plimer does not dispute the dramatic flux of climate change - and this column is not about Australia’s water debate - but he fundamentally disputes most of the assumptions and projections being made about the current causes, mostly led by atmospheric scientists, who have a different perspective on time. “It is little wonder that catastrophist views of the future of the planet fall on fertile pastures. The history of time shows us that depopulation, social disruption, extinctions, disease and catastrophic droughts take place in cold times … and life blossoms and economies boom in warm times. Planet Earth is dynamic. It always changes and evolves. It is currently in an ice age.”
If we look at the last 6 million years, the Earth was warmer than it is now for 3 million years. The ice caps of the Arctic, Antarctica and Greenland are geologically unusual. Polar ice has only been present for less than 20 per cent of geological time. What follows is an intense compression of the book’s 500 pages and all their provocative arguments and conclusions:
Is dangerous warming occurring? No.
Is the temperature range observed in the 20th century outside the range of normal variability? No.
The Earth’s climate is driven by the receipt and redistribution of solar energy. Despite this crucial relationship, the sun tends to be brushed aside as the most important driver of climate. Calculations on supercomputers are primitive compared with the complex dynamism of the Earth’s climate and ignore the crucial relationship between climate and solar energy.
“To reduce modern climate change to one variable, CO2, or a small proportion of one variable - human-induced CO2 - is not science. To try to predict the future based on just one variable (CO2) in extraordinarily complex natural systems is folly. Yet when astronomers have the temerity to show that climate is driven by solar activities rather than CO2 emissions, they are dismissed as dinosaurs undertaking the methods of old-fashioned science.”
Over time, the history of CO2 content in the atmosphere has been far higher than at present for most of time. Atmospheric CO2 follows temperature rise. It does not create a temperature rise. CO2 is not a pollutant. Global warming and a high CO2 content bring prosperity and longer life.
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. “But evidence no longer matters. And any contrary work published in peer-reviewed journals is just ignored. We are told that the science on human-induced global warming is settled. Yet the claim by some scientists that the threat of human-induced global warming is 90 per cent certain (or even 99 per cent) is a figure of speech. It has no mathematical or evidential basis.”
Observations in nature differ markedly from the results generated by nearly two dozen computer-generated climate models. These climate models exaggerate the effects of human CO2 emissions into the atmosphere because few of the natural variables are considered. Natural systems are far more complex than computer models.
The setting up by the UN of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988 gave an opportunity to make global warming the main theme of environmental groups. “The IPCC process is related to environmental activism, politics and opportunism. It is unrelated to science. Current zeal around human-induced climate change is comparable to the certainty professed by Creationists or religious fundamentalists.”
Ian Plimer is not some isolated gadfly. He is a prize-winning scientist and professor. The back cover of Heaven And Earth carries a glowing endorsement from the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, who now holds the rotating presidency of the European Union. Numerous rigorous scientists have joined Plimer in dissenting from the prevailing orthodoxy.
Heaven And Earth 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.
HEAVEN AND EARTH
Global Warming: The Missing Science
- IAN PLIMER
Recommended by Václav Klaus, President of the EU, 2009.
“This is a very powerful, clear, understandable and extremely useful book. Ian Plimer fully exploits his unique scientific background in geology, his life-long academic experience, and his broad, truly interdisciplinary knowledge to dismantle the currently popular, politically correct but rationally untenable and indefensible position that the Earth is approaching catastrophic climate change and that we have to react – at all costs – to prevent it.
Professor Plimer argues that the undergoing climate change is not unprecedented in history and that the temperatures in the 20th Century are not outside the range of natural variability. He rejects the unscientific idea that the explanation of climate change can be reduced to one variable (CO2), the proposition that there is a strong relationship between measured temperature and CO2 emissions, and the almost religious belief that we will stop climate change by reducing CO2 emissions. He rightly assumes that humans will be able to adapt to any future coolings or warmings.
He also convincingly criticizes the UN, the IPCC, UK and US politicians as well as “Hollywood show business celebrities”. He strictly distinguishes science and environmental activism, politics and opportunism. The book I wrote two years ago “Blue Planet in Green Shackles” comes to very similar conclusions but I have to say that if I’d had a chance to read Professor Plimer’s book, my book would have been better.”
The Earth is an evolving dynamic system. Current changes in climate, sea level and ice are within variability. Atmospheric CO2 is the lowest for 500 million years. Climate has always been driven by the Sun, the Earth’s orbit and plate tectonics and the oceans, atmosphere and life respond. Humans have made their mark on the planet, thrived in warm times and struggled in cool times.
The hypothesis that humans can actually change climate is unsupported by evidence from geology, archaeology, history and astronomy. The hypothesis is rejected.
A new ignorance fills the yawning spiritual gap in Western society. Climate change politics is religious fundamentalism masquerading as science. Its triumph is computer models unrelated to observations in nature. There has been no critical due diligence of the science of climate change, dogma dominates, sceptics are pilloried and 17th Century thinking promotes prophets of doom, guilt and penance.
When plate tectonics ceases and the world runs out of new rocks, there will be a tipping point and irreversible climate change.
Don’t wait up.
Ian Plimer is Professor of Mining Geology at The University of Adelaide and Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences at The University of Melbourne where he was Professor and Head (1991-2005). He was previously Professor and Head of Geology at The University of Newcastle (1985-1991). His previous book, A Short History of Planet Earth, won the Eureka Prize.
“University of Adelaide Professor of Mining Geology Ian Plimer this week launches his seventh book, Heaven and Earth, Global Warming: The Missing Science, which aims to refute every scientific argument that humans are responsible for global warming.
Note, he’s a geologist.
The book’s 500 pages and 230,000 words and 2311 footnotes are the product of 40 years’ research and a depth and breadth of scholarship. As Plimer writes: “An understanding of climate requires an amalgamation of astronomy, solar physics, geology, geochronology, geochemistry, sedimentology, tectonics, palaeontology, palaeoecology, glaciology, climatology, meteorology, oceanography, ecology, archaeology and history.”
Yes, but which field is he professionally trained in and writing peer-reviewed scientific papers in? Which assertions of his have been lambasted by the scientific community as utter rubbish? If even I can see where he’s stuffed up from this brief review, how laughable are his conclusions to the REAL climatologists?
The most important point to remember about Plimer is that he is Australia’s most eminent geologist.
Exactly, so we’ll all look to him for guidance on…. climate? LOL!
As such, he thinks about time very differently from most of us. He takes the long, long view. He looks at climate over geological, archaeological, historical and modern time. He writes: “Past climate changes, sea-level changes and catastrophes are written in stone.”
And climatologists can read the rocks as well… or hasn’t this reviewer read any actual climate history or papers?
Much of what we have read about climate change, he argues, is rubbish, especially the computer modelling on which much current scientific opinion is based, which he describes as “primitive”. Errors and distortions in computer modelling will be exposed in time. (As if on cue, the United Nations’ peak scientific body on climate change was obliged to make an embarrassing admission last week that some of its computers models were wrong.)
Well it’s a good thing climate science is not based on computer models then isn’t it, but actual measurable energy exchanges in a SPECTROMETER and in the PHYSICS of atmospheric equations. But he’ll no doubt ignore the Radiative Forcing Equation and the good old disciplines of spectrometry and atmospheric physics, no doubt. Too inconvenient when you’re trying to sell a book. ;-)
Plimer does not dispute the dramatic flux of climate change - and this column is not about Australia’s water debate - but he fundamentally disputes most of the assumptions and projections being made about the current causes, mostly led by atmospheric scientists, who have a different perspective on time.
Rubbish… did he even read James Hansen’s papers on the Milankovitch cycles and how Co2 accelerated the temperature trends on these 100 thousand year cycles over the last few million years? Where does this guy get the audacity? Oh, that’s right, he’s selling a book.
“It is little wonder that catastrophist views of the future of the planet fall on fertile pastures. The history of time shows us that depopulation, social disruption, extinctions, disease and catastrophic droughts take place in cold times … and life blossoms and economies boom in warm times. Planet Earth is dynamic. It always changes and evolves. It is currently in an ice age.”
Yep, I actually agree. Cold is bad, warm is good. Seems true. But he ignores that hot is bad as well!
If we look at the last 6 million years, the Earth was warmer than it is now for 3 million years. The ice caps of the Arctic, Antarctica and Greenland are geologically unusual. Polar ice has only been present for less than 20 per cent of geological time. What follows is an intense compression of the book’s 500 pages and all their provocative arguments and conclusions:
Yes, but us human beings did not have a technological civilisation finely tuned to the current temperature gradings 6 million years ago. Also, he ignores how in DEEP deep history various mass extinction events are now being examined in the light of catastrophic global warming. 6 million years is nothing! If he wants to get pedantic about deep time, he should account for the Paleocene dieoff.
Sustained and significant global warming
This would have the opposite effects: expand the area available for tropical species; kill temperate species or force them to migrate towards the poles (or perish); possibly cause severe extinctions of polar species; often make the Earth’s climate wetter on average, mainly by melting ice and snow and thus increasing the volume of the water cycle. It might also cause anoxic events in the oceans (see below).
Global warming as a cause of mass extinction is supported by several recent studies.[32]
The most dramatic example of sustained warming is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which was associated with one of the smaller mass extinctions. It has also been suggested to have caused the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event, during which 20% of all marine families went extinct. Furthermore, the Permian–Triassic extinction event has been suggested to have been caused by warming. [33][34][35]
He says no, but the ACTUAL CLIMATOLOGISTS say yes.
Is the temperature range observed in the 20th century outside the range of normal variability? No.
Not over millions of years of “normal” variability of Milankovitch cycles etc…. but Milankovitch cycles are not the CAUSE this time, we are! There’s that pesky Radiative Forcing Equation again…
The Earth’s climate is driven by the receipt and redistribution of solar energy. Despite this crucial relationship, the sun tends to be brushed aside as the most important driver of climate. Calculations on supercomputers are primitive compared with the complex dynamism of the Earth’s climate and ignore the crucial relationship between climate and solar energy.
This has been studied to death, and the sun’s actual input measured countless, countless times by countless organisations continuously studying the solar variability and it’s impacts on climate. Does he refer to these studies, or some old, unpeer reviewed work that has been disproved repeatedly? The guy is just plain stubborn.
“To reduce modern climate change to one variable, CO2, or a small proportion of one variable - human-induced CO2 - is not science. To try to predict the future based on just one variable (CO2) in extraordinarily complex natural systems is folly. Yet when astronomers have the temerity to show that climate is driven by solar activities rather than CO2 emissions, they are dismissed as dinosaurs undertaking the methods of old-fashioned science.”
Sorry, but where have the IPCC or other climatologists reduced climate to JUST Co2? Now he’s being plain dishonest! Kevin, have you bothered to read Tim Flannery’s “Weather makers”? You’d know just how comprehensive and enormously broad climate studies have become, measuring solar forcings, the earth’s wobble, changing albedo’s of “black carbon” (soot on ice), the role of Co2, methane, and other gases, the solar cycle, shifts in the magnetic field, even the impact of dead oceans, plankton, and the hundred-million year drift of continents across the world! If you had read about climate more broadly you’d know that the above paragraph is utterly dishonest, and you might even be ashamed to quote such dangerous tripe.
Over time, the history of CO2 content in the atmosphere has been far higher than at present for most of time. Atmospheric CO2 follows temperature rise.
True!!! Atmopsheric Co2 DOES follow normally follow temperature rise, when we are measuring the Milankovitch cycles. Der! But climatologists know all this already.
It does not create a temperature rise.
No, the earth’s 100 thousand year wobble acts as the trigger, but the Co2 in these ancient stories acted as a magnifier of the Milankovitch event. Got it? And climate change is NOT dependent on Al Gore’s poor presentation of the Milankovitch phenomena. Just because climate change is a bit too complex for the average Aussie to understand does not mean that it is “wrong”.
CO2 is not a pollutant.
No, it’s not. We breathe it out. Or as “Exxon Mobile” would have us believe, “Carbon is life”. Sure. But we are not discussing POISON’s but the Radiative Forcing Equation.
Global warming and a high CO2 content bring prosperity and longer life.
Except when Co2 kills off 20% of the ecosphere in deep history, and
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.
In other words, when you tell a lie, tell it big and repeat it… with lots of outrage and gasps of shock and exasperation.
“But evidence no longer matters. And any contrary work published in peer-reviewed journals is just ignored. We are told that the science on human-induced global warming is settled. Yet the claim by some scientists that the threat of human-induced global warming is 90 per cent certain (or even 99 per cent) is a figure of speech. It has no mathematical or evidential basis.”
SHOW ME ONE CONTRARY WORK PUBLISHED IN THE PEER REVIEW!
Observations in nature differ markedly from the results generated by nearly two dozen computer-generated climate models. These climate models exaggerate the effects of human CO2 emissions into the atmosphere because few of the natural variables are considered. Natural systems are far more complex than computer models.
Citation? Some of the models have been pretty good actually, even old ones! (Climate science is still evolving, but the models are only becoming MORE precise).
The setting up by the UN of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988 gave an opportunity to make global warming the main theme of environmental groups. “The IPCC process is related to environmental activism, politics and opportunism. It is unrelated to science. Current zeal around human-induced climate change is comparable to the certainty professed by Creationists or religious fundamentalists.”
And Plimer has also positioned himself in with the conspiracy theorists, right up there with Aliens at Area 51! It’s trite to call names, much harder to actually argue against the REAL climate science (like the basis of global warming being on the Radiative Forcing Equation, not computer models).
Ian Plimer is not some isolated gadfly. He is a prize-winning scientist and professor. The back cover of Heaven And Earth carries a glowing endorsement from the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, who now holds the rotating presidency of the European Union. Numerous rigorous scientists have joined Plimer in dissenting from the prevailing orthodoxy.
A brilliant mechanic should not be quoted on brain surgery, nor a great accountant sought to develop a cure for cancer.
Heaven And Earth 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.
It uses evidence that all the climatologists are already aware of, contains no surprises anywhere, and recycles the same tired old excuses for inaction that I’ve seen dozens of nutty right wing bloggers quote all over the net. But hey, don’t let reality ruin a good story right? The best lies involve half the truth. Evidence, yes. Correct conclusions, no. The guy’s selling a book.
Lastly:
* I hope he’s right and global warming goes away, then we’ve only got the fact that we are running out of the best grades of oil, gas, and coal to deal with.
* Did I mention we’re running out of the stuff and need to move on?
From the ABC Online ..... Marc Hendrickx has created a video presentation on the Emissions Trading Scheme for our federal politicians :
Dear Member of Parliament,
Please take 5 minutes out of your busy schedule to view this video. It provides an important lesson in the application of the precautionary principal to environmental policy.
Will you listen to Prince Tim and introduce an ETS along with other regressive taxes and leave Australia in the dark and or will you apply prudence and ask for more evidence? An ETS will do nothing for the environment and nothing to reduce carbon emissions. It is up to you!
[null]Catholics File Suits on Contraceptive CoverageNew York Times[{}]At least 11 other Catholic and evangelical organizations had already filed lawsuits challenging the birth control mandate, but those cases are still pending. The White House declined to comment on Monday, instead providing President Obama's comments ...
[null]Catholic Groups File Suits on Contraceptive CoverageNew York Times[{}]At least 11 other Catholic and evangelical organizations had already filed lawsuits challenging the birth control mandate, but those cases are still pending. The White House declined to comment on Monday, instead providing President Obama's comments ...
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