Just a load of hot air
George Monbiot
This article is more than 11 years old
A book denying that climate change is man-made has been greeted with derision by experts. So why, wonders George Monbiot, has the Spectator swallowed the line so enthusiastically?
Fri 10 Jul 2009 09.01 AEST
Seldom has a book been as cleanly murdered by scientists as Ian Plimer's Heaven + Earth, which purports to show that man-made climate change is nonsense. Since its publication in Australia it has been ridiculed for a hilarious series of schoolboy errors, and its fudging and manipulation of the data. Here's a flavour of the reviews:
"Given the errors, the non-science, and the nonsense in this book, it should be classified as science fiction in any library that wastes its funds buying it. The book can then be placed on the shelves alongside Michael Crichton's State of Fear, another science fiction book about climate change with many footnotes. The only difference is that there are fewer scientific errors in State of Fear." - Professor David Karoly, University of Melbourne's School of Earth Sciences.
"Plimer has done an enormous disservice to science, and the dedicated scientists who are trying to understand climate and the influence of humans, by publishing this book. It is not 'merely' atmospheric scientists that would have to be wrong for Plimer to be right. It would require a rewriting of biology, geology, physics, oceanography, astronomy and statistics. Plimer's book deserves to languish on the shelves along with similar pseudo-science such as the writings of Immanuel Velikovsky and Erich von Daniken." - Professor Michael Ashley, astrophysicist at the University of New South Wales.
"If this had been written by an honours student, I would have failed it with the comment: you have obviously trawled through a lot of material but the critical analysis is missing. Supporting arguments and unsupported arguments in the literature are not distinguished or properly referenced, and you have left the impression that you have not developed an understanding of the processes involved. Rewrite!" - Professor Kurt Lambeck, earth scientist and President of the Australian Academy of Science.
Here are just a few of the book's elementary howlers:
Plimer uses a graph produced for the 2007 documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle on Channel 4: the programme altered the timeline, creating the false impression that most of the rise in temperature last century took place before 1940. After an outcry by scientists, subsequent editions of the film corrected the timeline. But Plimer leaves the graph - and its convenient error - intact.
He claims that only 4% of the CO² in the atmosphere is produced by humans. In fact the pre-industrial concentration was roughly 280 parts per million. Human activities have now raised this to 387ppm - you can work it out for yourself.
For a professor of geology, Plimer makes some astonishing errors about volcanoes. He claims that Mount Pinatubo released "very large quantities of chloroflourocarbons". The source he cites for this claim says the opposite. Like The Great Global Warming Swindle (from which several of the claims in his book appear to originate), he maintains that volcanoes produce more CO² than humans. In fact, humans produce 130 times more CO² than volcanoes.
Ashley noticed in Plimer's book "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% hydrogen and helium, but is instead similar in composition to a meteorite. It is hard to understate the depth of scientific ignorance that the inclusion of this information demonstrates. It is comparable to a biologist claiming that plants obtain energy from magnetism rather than photosynthesis."
You would think all this would be enough to bury the book. You would be wrong. In one of the gravest misjudgments in journalism this year, the Spectator has made the book's British publication its cover story, with the headline "Relax: global warming is all a myth". Its story consists of a hagiography of Plimer by James Delingpole, a man who knows - and cares - less about science than I do about formula one.
Plimer's book, he says, demonstrates that anthropogenic global warming "is the biggest, most dangerous and ruinously expensive con trick in history".
Delingpole takes the opportunity to cite the usual conspiracy theories about the "powerful and very extensive body of vested interests" working to suppress the truth, which presumably now includes virtually the entire scientific community and everyone from Shell to Greenpeace and the Sun to Science magazine. That took some organising.
What the article shows is that climate change denial is a matter of religious conviction. The quality of the evidence has nothing to do with it. It doesn't matter how comprehensively the sources have been discredited, or how ridiculous the claims are. People such as Plimer and Delingpole will cling on to anything that allows them to maintain their view of the world. But why did the editor of the Spectator let them use the magazine as a platform for their nutty conspiracy theories?
monbiot.com
