heaven and earth
tlambert | December 15, 2009Ian Plimer's performance in his debate with Monbiot has to be seen to be believed. Rather than admit to making any error at all, Plimer ducks, weaves, obfuscates, recites his favourite catch phrase, tries to change the subject and fabricates some more. When confronted with the fact that the USGS says (backed with scientific papers) that human activities emit 130 times as much CO2 as volcanoes, Plimer claims that the USGS doesn't count underwater volcanoes. When told that the USGS specifically said that they do count undersea volcanoes, Plimer invented a story about how the nature of the…
tlambert | November 12, 2009Ian Plimer responds to criticism with by calling his critics names and failing to address their arguments. In an interview on BBC Radio 4, Plimer spouts his usual outrageous falsehoods:
"We cannot stop carbon emissions because most of them come from volcanoes."
Not true -- even Martin Durkin's Swindle retracted this one.
And when the interviewer brought up Michael Ashley's devastating review of Heaven and Earth, we got this:
Plimer: "When you look at my critics -- they are people who are rent seekers. They have everything to gain by continuing the process of frightening people witless, by…
tlambert | October 25, 2009Eli Rabett has been investigating Ian Plimer's claim that climate scientists were cooking the books on the CO2 record. Plimer wrote:
The raw data from Mauna Loa is 'edited' by an operator who deletes what is considered poor data. Some 82% of the raw data is "edited" leaving just 18% of the raw data measurements for statistical analysis [2902,2903]. With such savage editing of raw data, whatever trend one wants can be shown. [p 416 of Heaven and Earth]
The raw data is an average of 4 samples from hour to hour. In 2004 there were a possible 8784 measurements. Due to instrumental error 1102…
tlambert | October 19, 2009When Kurt Lambeck criticized Ian Plimer on Ockhams Razor, he gaves specific examples of Plimer's errros of omission and commission. I gazed into my crystal ball and wrote:
I predict that Plimer will respond to this by denying that his science has been criticised, claiming that Lambeck's criticism was merely an ad hominem attack, and by making personal attacks on Lambeck.
Yesterday on Ockham's Razor we had Professor Ian Plimer replies to his critics:
Polemical criticism of my book Heaven and Earth has been savage because there are a large number of career climate comrades who frighten us…
tlambert | September 19, 2009After Ian Plimer reneged on his agreement to answer Monbiot's questions, the folks at the Spectator have reacted just like Plimer does to criticism -- with name calling and nothing to address the criticism.
Spectator columnist Rod Liddle
Moonbat ... You pompous, monomaniacal, jackass. ... reminds me a little of the hardline creationists you find jabbering in the backwoods of the Appalachian Mountains
Novelist James Delingpole, the man that the Spectator decided was best qualified to review Plimer's book:
ineffable barkingness of George Moonbat .... if anyone ever chooses to take any of the…
tlambert | September 15, 2009Just as I thought, Ian Plimer's questions for Monbiot were a pretext to avoid answering Monbiot's questions. Monbiot writes:
Creationists and climate change deniers have this in common: they don't answer their critics. They make what they say are definitive refutations of the science. When these refutations are shown to be nonsense, they do not seek to defend them. They simply switch to another line of attack. They never retract, never apologise, never explain, just raise the volume, keep moving and hope that people won't notice the trail of broken claims in their wake. ...
Having put up…
tlambert | September 2, 2009George Monbiot has the details on Plimer's latest attempts to evade answering Monbiot's questions. Plimer wrote to him:
There are seven versions of Heaven and Earth and only my Australian publisher and I know the differences in diagrams, references and text between the seven. It has taken some time to look at your questions and determine which version was used for compilation of the questions. Can you please confirm that you have actually read Heaven and Earth and that your questions derive from that reading.
As Monbiot notes:
This was odd because, judging by the notes made from Heaven and…
tlambert | August 25, 2009I think the purpose of Plimer's strange questions was to give himself a pretext to avoid answering Monbiot's questions, but Gavin Schmidt has countered this ploy by addressing Plimer's questions at RealClimate.
tlambert | August 21, 2009Bob Ward reviews Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth in The Times:
It is easy to see why this book has attracted attention, particularly from right-wing commentators who have long believed that man-made climate change is a conspiracy theory. But this book is so full of errors that readers who believe its content could be seriously misled about the causes and consequences of climate change. ...
Possibly the funniest howler in the book also occurs in the first chapter. It is a graph that is supposed to show the global temperature record since 1880, with a marked and highly exaggerated phase of…
illconsidered | August 21, 2009I had an open thread a couple of weeks ago about Ian Plimer's recent novel supposedly exposing the lie that is Anthropogenic Global Warming.
I have not read it. A few commenter's defending the book asked how anyone can judge it if they have not read it.
Well, no one can read every book that is out there, not even every book about global warming. We all have to choose. This of course introduces the possibility of bias confirmation. If I feel it in my gut that this particular book will be crap, I won't read it and I will assume I am right about it.
But here's the thing, it is possible to…
tlambert | August 3, 2009After George Monbiot panned Plimer's book for his grotesque scientific errors, Plimer challenged Monbiot to a face-to-face debate. Of course, Plimer would do his usual Gish gallop with such a format, so Monbiot agreed with just one condition:
Last week I wrote to Professor Plimer accepting his challenge, on the condition that he accepts mine. I would take part in a face-to-face debate with him as long as he agreed to write precise and specific responses to his critics' points -- in the form of numbered questions that I would send him -- for publication on the Guardian's website. I also…
tlambert | June 14, 2009Professor David Karoly of the University of Melbourne's School of Earth Sciences is an expert on climate change, so like every other scientist who has read Ian Plimer's error-filled book, he was appalled at how bad it was. His review:
Now let me address some of the major scientific flaws in Plimer's arguments. He claims 'it is not possible to ascribe a carbon dioxide increase to human activity' and 'volcanoes produce more CO2 than the world's cars and industries combined'. Both are wrong. Burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide enriched with carbon isotope C12and reduced C13 and…
tlambert | June 10, 2009One of the claims that Ian Plimer likes to make is that as a geologist he takes time into account in a way that the IPCC does not, so it is worthwhile looking at what another geologist thinks of Plimer's error-filled book. Professor Malcolm Walter, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, concludes:
There is fallacious reasoning. Take this statement on page 87: 'If it is acknowledged that there have been rapid large climate changes before industrialisation, then human production of carbon dioxide cannot be the major driver for climate change.' This would only be true if carbon dioxide…
tlambert | May 21, 2009On page 287 of his error-filled book Ian Plimer claims:
The Arctic was warmer than now between 1920 and 1940. This is
reflected in the sea ice and the local climate.[1473]"
[1473] Benestad, R.E. (2002) I. Hanssen-Bauer, T.E. Skaugen and E.J. Førland:
Associations between the sea-ice and the local climate on Svalbard,
met.no, Klima, 07/02.
I emailed R.E. Benestad to see if he felt that Plimer had accurately described his work. He replied:
The analysis we did was for the Svalbard islands, and for these, it is not true. Year 2006 was a record warm one by a significant margin. My report also…
tlambert | May 14, 2009Remember how Ian Plimer claimed that he could not recall where his dodgy figure 3? Well now he has resorting to lying about the source. In a talkback radio debate (about 4 minutes from the end) with Steven Sherwood, Plimer claimed that the graph came from page 21 of Klimafakten, a book published by the German government in 2001. That's a straight-up lie.
The graph came from Durkin's Great Global Warming Swindle. I've overlaid the graphs below so that you can see that they are identical. Just put your mouse on the graph to change it to the Swindle one. Notice that he copied the labels on…
tlambert | May 13, 2009Ian Enting has been checking the claims Ian Plimer makes in his error-filled book. His list of errors and other problematic claims is here. [Link updated to version 1.7]. He's found plenty that I missed. For example:
p 409: New Orleans sunk rapidly by about 1 metre in the three years before Katrina struck. This time (unlike p 303, item18) a reference is cited: by Dixon and others Nature, 441, 587-588 (2006) from radar satellite altimetry. They report a three-year average of -5.6±2.5 mm/year, with a maximum of -29mm/year (negative values indicating subsidence). They note that if the motion…
tlambert | May 10, 2009Ben McNeil investigates Andrew Bolts claim that Ian Plimer's error-filled Heaven and Earth has 25,000 copies sold or ordered:
Indeed, if a non-fiction book has 25 000 copies sold in Australia it is a massive blockbuster. I was suspicious when reading through the SMH book section the last couple of weeks and 'Heaven and Earth' not being listed in their top-seller list for non-fiction. Being a little more rigorous, Bookscan, which track book sales in Australia doesn't list it in the top 10 for non-fiction for the month as of the time of this blog entry . Seem a little odd to you?
Further…
tlambert | May 9, 2009Harry Clarke
It is not wrong to challenge orthodoxy anywhere but the work of Plimer is unscientific and both irresponsible and dangerous - he has provided a social diservice. The extensive publicity he has received has had an entirely undeserved impact.
Forget Plimer, read the science.
John Quiggin
In the Oz of all places, a demolition of Ian Plimer so scathing, and so convincing, that it's hard to imagine how he can salvage any kind of academic reputation, other than by a full retraction (which would be a pretty impressive move, admittedly). ...
If there are any genuine sceptics left…
tlambert | May 8, 2009One of Ian Plimer's claims is that the IPCC ignores astronomy, so it's interesting to see what an astronomer thinks of his book. In today's Australian, the blue moon continues with a review of Heaven and Earth by Michael Ashley:
Plimer probably didn't expect an astronomer to review his book. I couldn't help noticing on page120 an almost word-for-word reproduction of the abstract from a well-known loony paper entitled "The Sun is a plasma diffuser that sorts atoms by mass". This paper argues that the sun isn't composed of 98 per cent hydrogen and helium, as astronomers have confirmed through…
tlambert | May 7, 2009Wednesday was an unusual day at the Australian, with two pro-science pieces published. First, Leigh Dayton, their science writer, raises some scientific objections to Ian Plimer's book. Plimer will, no doubt, continued to deny the existence of these problems:
Plimer also repeats the inaccurate "fact" that the global warming peaked in 1998. Yes, it was a global scorcher, thanks to a heat-inducing El Nino. But after a dip in 1999, data collected by US and British climate centres shows an upward trend, despite year-to-year variations.
She also corrects Greg Roberts' misleading stories:…