USA Today: Could we be wrong about global warming?

Indeed, an economist should be able to analyze data. However, science isn't just data analysis. If it were, then we wouldn't need scientists and we could just rely on economists. As I said, I respect economists. But they aren't climate scientists, and they shouldn't pretend to be.

barfo

 

I've skimmed his document now, it is quite a bit more extensive than that. It wouldn't take 98 pages to report on whether two variables were correlated. He's clearly playing scientist.

Which is fine, of course. It's a free country. But the government shouldn't be obliged to fund him or publish him in his hobby.

barfo

 

One doesn't?

I to be saying nothing of the sort.

Are you arguing that two wrongs make a right? That since Al Gore got some things wrong, the EPA should publish some other wrong stuff to balance it out?

I guess he knows a bit about science. I'm more inclined to believe the findings of those who know more than a bit.

barfo

 

Nails it:

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Global warming religion First World urban elites/1835847/story.html

Global warming is the new religion of First World urban elites

Geologist Ian Plimer takes a contrary view, arguing that man-made climate change is a con trick perpetuated by environmentalists

By Jonathan Manthorpe, Vancouver SunJuly 28, 2009

Ian Plimer has outraged the ayatollahs of purist environmentalism, the Torquemadas of the doctrine of global warming, and he seems to relish the damnation they heap on him.

Plimer is a geologist, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University, and he may well be Australia's best-known and most notorious academic.

Plimer, you see, is an unremitting critic of "anthropogenic global warming" -- man-made climate change to you and me -- and the current environmental orthodoxy that if we change our polluting ways, global warming can be reversed.

It is, of course, not new to have a highly qualified scientist saying that global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon with many precedents in history. Many have made the argument, too, that it is rubbish to contend human behaviour is causing the current climate change. And it has often been well argued that it is totally ridiculous to suppose that changes in human behaviour -- cleaning up our act through expensive slight-of-hand taxation tricks -- can reverse the trend.

But most of these scientific and academic voices have fallen silent in the face of environmental Jacobinism. Purging humankind of its supposed sins of environmental degradation has become a religion with a fanatical and often intolerant priesthood, especially among the First World urban elites.

But Plimer shows no sign of giving way to this orthodoxy and has just published the latest of his six books and 60 academic papers on the subject of global warming. This book, Heaven and Earth -- Global Warming: The Missing Science, draws together much of his previous work. It springs especially from A Short History of Plant Earth, which was based on a decade of radio broadcasts in Australia.

That book, published in 2001, was a best-seller and won several prizes. But Plimer found it hard to find anyone willing to publish this latest book, so intimidating has the environmental lobby become.

But he did eventually find a small publishing house willing to take the gamble and the book has already sold about 30,000 copies in Australia. It seems also to be doing well in Britain and the United States in the first days of publication.

Plimer presents the proposition that anthropogenic global warming is little more than a con trick on the public perpetrated by fundamentalist environmentalists and callously adopted by politicians and government officials who love nothing more than an issue that causes public anxiety.

While environmentalists for the most part draw their conclusions based on climate information gathered in the last few hundred years, geologists, Plimer says, have a time frame stretching back many thousands of millions of years.

The dynamic and changing character of the Earth's climate has always been known by geologists. These changes are cyclical and random, he says. They are not caused or significantly affected by human behaviour.

Polar ice, for example, has been present on the Earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time, Plimer writes. Plus, animal extinctions are an entirely normal part of the Earth's evolution.

(Plimer, by the way, is also a vehement anti-creationist and has been hauled into court for disrupting meetings by religious leaders and evangelists who claim the Bible is literal truth.)

Plimer gets especially upset about carbon dioxide, its role in Earth's daily life and the supposed effects on climate of human manufacture of the gas. He says atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at the lowest levels it has been for 500 million years, and that atmospheric carbon dioxide is only 0.001 per cent of the total amount of the chemical held in the oceans, surface rocks, soils and various life forms. Indeed, Plimer says carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but a plant food. Plants eat carbon dioxide and excrete oxygen. Human activity, he says, contributes only the tiniest fraction to even the atmospheric presence of carbon dioxide.

There is no problem with global warming, Plimer says repeatedly. He points out that for humans periods of global warming have been times of abundance when civilization made leaps forward. Ice ages, in contrast, have been times when human development slowed or even declined.

So global warming, says Plimer, is something humans should welcome and embrace as a harbinger of good times to come.

jmanthorpe@vancouversun.com

 

Oooh, a professor of mining geology. Why, he must understand... how to extract rocks from the earth. Kind of a different subject, isn't it?.

Isn't it odd that the climate change deniers keep trotting out these people who don't have relevant scientific backgrounds?

Highly qualified scientist, ha ha ha.

If he were an actual scientist, he'd realize that the CO2 held in the oceans, surface rocks, soils, and various life forms is not relevant to the question of whether there is too much CO2 in the atmosphere.

barfo

 

Sorry Barfo, but you apparently have no clue about who's qualified and who's not. if the guy wasn't an astrologer ragging on astrology, you'd be arguing he's not qualified. Your argument is meaningless and without merit.

Geology is strongly related, if not the origin, of a number of sciences. They find fossils in old rocks. Digging up ice cores is a geologist's kind of thing to do. The guy not only studies the chemical makeup of the rocks he digs up (Earth is 3rd rock from the sun, you know, it is a rock), he studies their temperatures, too.

And geology is one of few sciences that studies these things and relates them to geologic time periods, unlike Rev. Gore and his kool-aid drinking flock who are fixated on a couple hundred years.

But yeah, if the guy wasn't an astrologer ragging on astrology, how could he possibly be qualified?

 

As opposed to, say, carbon monoxide which isn't plant food and is a pollutant.

 

I don't pretend to be a climatologist, but isn't water vapor by far the biggest "greenhouse gas"? Why is one worried about CO2 vice methane or water vapor? Is it because a bunch of CFCs were banned in the 80's, so there's not as much "bad stuff" poking holes in the ozone layer?

But let's not kid ourselves, the policy aspects are the reasons this is being fought.

And just from a couple articles I've read, we (as Americans) have had a decreasing rate of CO2 addition over the last 5 years, while China's has increased by around 10% each year. Why, if what we're doing's working for us, do we have to have mandated that our car liberty taken away for something that's probably not that much better, when we already have a trend downward, and the rest of the trying-to-be-industrialized world isn't really caring about this?

 

Is ragging on climate science the goal here? Because if so, anyone on the internets is perfectly qualified to do so. You don't need a mining geologist for that. Rag on!

Qualifications only matter if you are relying on expert opinion (as opposed to carefully studying the matter in question yourself, or just making uninformed assumptions). If you are going to rely on expert opinion, it makes sense to pay more attention to those with the most expertise, and less attention to those who aren't expert.

You reject the actual experts in climate science, yet trot out this mining geologist as an expert. That would be bad decision-making if you were relying upon his opinion. But of course you aren't - you've selected this "expert" because he agrees with the opinion you already had. The fact that you have to select experts that aren't really expert to buttress your case is pretty good evidence that you are, technically speaking, wrong about all of this.

Or, of course, it is a giant conspiracy involving thousands of scientists, in which case you'd be right to reject them all as experts. I'd be concerned about that possibility, but I'm too busy worrying about the ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF GOLD that was under WTC7 and how Obama was born in Kenya and how the Rockefellers are secretly creating a one-world government.

barfo