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The Forum > Article Comments > Global warming zealots are stifling scientific debate > Comments

Global warming zealots are stifling scientific debate : Comments

By Ian Plimer, published 26/7/2007

Science is apolitical, and when it has submitted to political pressure in the past, it has been at great human cost.

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That's all great about starbursts, volcanoes and continental drift. But in those time scales the Earth didn't have 6.5 billion people living on a knife edge. I would have thought that the example of the dinosaurs shows how it can all go wrong quickly.

Side note: what's with OLO and all the anti GW stories?
Posted by Taswegian, Thursday, 26 July 2007 11:06:27 AM
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Ian Plimer’s temper tantrum resorts to schoolboy debating tactics with irrelevant data and Strawman accusations. If he does not like the zealots in the Global Warming movement, don’t read them. Instead, he should try reading the thousands of scientific papers from hundreds of different fields of science that all come to the same conclusion. One Strawman he creates is a picture of thousands of scientists sitting around in a big convention, feeding in all their data into the one computer model which spits out a result — and the scientists all said “Amen”. Plimer, this schoolboy tactic needs a schoolboy reply. “As if”.

The opposite is true. The very skepticism and rational debate he laments are actually alive and well in the scientific community. Every independent scientist or university is out to make a name for themselves. They are a fiercely independent mob who want nothing more than to disprove a current paradigm and go down in the history books, or at least win a grant.

The media are the only ones that keep quoting the sheer number of GW scientists. The "Average Aussie” does not have time to sift through all the complex arguments, so this is merely to demonstrate to them that GW is now mainstream science.

The scientists themselves are sceptically studying their own data, not "counting colleagues".

http://tinyurl.com/2fo2ju

The next Strawman he creates is the “forgotten data” argument. He quotes mountain building as if that is going to affect climate change over the last few hundred years! ;-) We’re not fooled Plimer — you are quoting something that occurs over millions of years, not the last few centuries. Climatologists such as Tim Flannery go into continental drift, Milancovitch cycles (the earth’s wobble), cosmic rays, volcanoes, all of these causes and climate effects over millions of years. But we are talking about when the climate story narrows into the last few thousand years. Implying these items are forgotten is an outright lie. Maybe Plimer should start at the beginning and read “The Weather Makers” before spewing out such nonsense.

Plimer’s creativity: 8/10
Accuracy 1/10
Posted by Eclipse Now, Thursday, 26 July 2007 11:22:36 AM
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Xoddam, Monbiot is just a petite fart who believes he is a hurricane. To put it another way as some bloke has said, ... when it comes to changing climate, human CO2 emissions represent but a fart in a hurricane.

It is also such a ridiculous notion when you consider that carbon creates a greening and healthy environment. If there is any one thing that is known about carbon dioxide and global change with any certainty it is that more CO2 in the air substantially enhances the growth of plants as well as the efficiency with which they utilize water. i.e. When we think of all the extra and free fertiliser we should be out there working with the goods.

As I have said previously, one of the glaring oversights with these new high priests of humans causing global warming is an assumption that our largest plasma discharge formation the sun doesn't do anything. One may remark, just how terribly wrong can one really be?

Just as we should be out there planting the greening so should we be out there harvesting sunnyboy's ions and electrons which we call plasma. However, whilst we persist with this old nuclear fusion model of sunnyboy there will also persist a bunch of problems associated with it. (Very difficult because the high priests of astro-science CONTROL all their invented fictional ideas of a big bang expanding universe. Similarly, climate CONTROL is our new religion and just as fictional.)
Posted by Keiran, Thursday, 26 July 2007 11:48:10 AM
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And people talk about the theology of religion being divided! Seems to me that the heart of man is just as deceitful in religion, science, athieism, medical and every other human endeavour. Thank God for sending the One who could be relied upon and trusted. Global warming is becoming more hilarous as the days go by.
Posted by runner, Thursday, 26 July 2007 11:56:29 AM
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re:
"Science has no consensus, science is anarchistic as it submits to no authority, and the latest scientific view is only transitory. Science is apolitical, and when it has submitted to political pressure in the past, it has been at great human cost."

Ignoring the epic attributes of Big-S Science, I wonder about the idea that the latest scientific view is only transitory. True, no doubt, from a geological perspective, but on a shorter timeframe, we have Newton's Laws:

A brief and pertinent historical summary from Wikipedia:

"Newton first gave his laws in the first volume of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687 and, using the mathematical tools of his newly developed calculus, proved many results concerning the motion of idealised particles. In the third volume, he showed how, combined with his law of universal gravitation, his laws of motion explained the motion of the planets and the Laws of Kepler. Not until 1916 and Albert Einstein's theory of relativity did anyone improve upon Newton's model of the motions of the planets."

http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newtons_Laws_of_Motion

To the best of my knowledge, Newton's Laws hold up pretty well, 320 years later, in our classrooms and our day to day driving experiences. So what, exactly, does the learned gentleman mean by "the latest scientific view is only transitory"? Newton's views were once "the latest", were they not?

I would hope for a bit more rigor and a lot less rant from a recognised expert and educator. I hope The Age published a good selection of letters on Professor Plimer's twaddle.
Posted by Sir Vivor, Thursday, 26 July 2007 11:58:29 AM
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Runner, I'm a Christian and yet maintain that modern science is quite clear on human caused Global Warming. Try to stay on topic, some would call your post "trolling".

I'm surprised Kieran didn't quote the other 26 myths of Climate change skeptics while he was at it. Just quoting Durkin's "The sun did it" hypothesis again does not validate his argument. Here are those myths, as documented by New Scientist.

• Human CO2 emissions are too tiny to matter

• We can't do anything about climate change

• The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong

• Chaotic systems are not predictable

• We can't trust computer models of climate

• They predicted global cooling in the 1970s

• It's been far warmer in the past, what's the big deal?

• It's too cold where I live - warming will be great

• Global warming is down to the Sun, not humans

• It’s all down to cosmic rays

• CO2 isn't the most important greenhouse gas

• The lower atmosphere is cooling, not warming

• Antarctica is getting cooler, not warmer, disproving global warming

• The oceans are cooling

• The cooling after 1940 shows CO2 does not cause warming

• It was warmer during the Medieval period, with vineyards in England

• We are simply recovering from the Little Ice Age

• Warming will cause an ice age in Europe

• Ice cores show CO2 increases lag behind temperature rises, disproving the link to global warming

• Ice cores show CO2 rising as temperatures fell

• Mars and Pluto are warming too

• Many leading scientists question climate change

• It's all a conspiracy

• Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming

• Higher CO2 levels will boost plant growth and food production

• Polar bear numbers are increasing

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn11462
Posted by Eclipse Now, Thursday, 26 July 2007 12:00:37 PM
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