Ian Plimer’s expertise is in mining geology not climate science.

GHGs are associated with the consumption of energy at every step in the mining production chain, from exploration through mining to milling and smelting; the use of explosives, the transport of ores and intermediate products which also contribute to GHG emissions, plus the massive use of water.

Given the vast quantities of mine wastes now produced annually in Australia with declining ore grades, there would be a very substantive quantity of listed National Pollutant Inventory pollutants contained within tailings and waste rock yet I believe they are excluded from, or at least poorly addressed by such accounting and reporting systems.

It strikes me that the good Professor has a large conflict of interest but in typically "humbled" tones, constantly witnessed in the representatives from the mining industry, he was quoted as declaring:

“I have a finely tuned bull**t detector and I don't see the point in wasting time with frauds, egos and those who talk a lot but deliver little,"

Touche Ian Plimer!

The stupid question at the end.

I notice you completely dodged my point, Protagoras: The poster boys of climate change alarmism have as much vested interest as the skeptics.

Mind you, it was a clever ploy by sarnian, I think it was, managed to successfully steer comment away from the ludicrous assertions of the actual article, and instead mire everyone in yet another endless standoff between the "faithful" and the "deniers".

We expect our politicians to lie to us and to conspire against us to serve corporate interests, as in the matter of junk food advertising to children. Individual scientists can be dishonest too, but science is a very different sort of enterprise from politics. It is a poor avenue for people who are motivated by greed or a lust for power. It is also self-correcting and international. Trofim Lysenko managed to get the ear of Stalin and impose his ridiculous ideas on the Soviet scientific community, setting back genetics there by 20 years, but Lysenkoism was a joke in the rest of the world. Even if nearly all the climatologists in the US and Australia were involved in some gigantic conspiracy, it is hard to see why the Indians, Russians, Chinese, etc. would also be taken in by it.

Since no one can know everything about everything, it makes sense to rely on the people who are in the best position to understand an issue. As the Nobel Prize winning physicist Lawrence Krauss wrote in New Scientist, the physics of AGW makes sense, and some very smart people are working on it. When scientists write papers, one of the things they do is to try to think of every possible argument against what they are saying, so you need to consider why an overwhelming majority of climatologists are not convinced by the sceptics. It is easy to point to some cases where the maverick was right, but there are far more where the maverick was wrong. I am not going to start worrying about alien abductions any time soon.

Since no one can know everything about everything, it makes sense to rely on the people who are in the best position to understand an issue. As the Catholic Church, Prize winning physicist Pope wrote as he sentenced Galileo to death:

The physics of A Flat Earth (AFE) makes sense, and some very smart people are working on it.

When eclesiastic scientists write papers, one of the things they do is to try to think of every possible argument against what they are saying. So you need to consider why an overwhelming majority of geographers are not convinced by the sceptics. It is easy to point to some cases where the maverick was right, but there are far more where the maverick was wrong. Galileo being the current case in point.

BTW Our theory on heavenly epiphanies (spiritual abductions) will be available to all our flock any time soon now.

Not at all Clownfish. I do not begrudge any company/individual conducting a profitable business providing it is environmentally friendly and ethical. While Tim Flannery has flip-flopped on occasion, such as nuclear energy, his association with the institutes you mention potentially lead to cleaner results for our environment.

Carbonscape is trying to develop a patented industrial microwave charcoal technology that sucks CO2 from the atmosphere, helping mitigate the impact of global warming and the same principle applies to Geodynamics.

Flannery has made contributions of international significance to the fields of palaeontology, mammalogy and conservation and to the importance of protecting endangered species.

A number of his major discoveries have received international acclaim from both peers and professionals. He also taught at Harvard in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and he has contributed greatly to the scientific studies of mammal populations which have led to a significant understanding of how ecological communities are organized and function – particularly with global warming.

You would need to explain how placing Dracula in charge of the blood bank is ecologically sustainable when you support a rock doctor who has astonishingly (and only recently) proclaimed himself an expert on the environment and is sufficiently avaricious to profit from publishing books, denying man’s contribution to climate change.

To Plimer, it would be a mere peccadillo that Australia’s mining industry, from which he profits, has slaughtered thousands of native species just this decade (officially 16,000 in WA alone) and the industry from which he profits, continues to contaminate and threaten the health of the environment and communities across the planet while the displacement of indigenous groups, human rights' atrocities and the accidental deaths of employees continue unabated.

And included in the top 10 companies to have greedy directors' packages overwhelmingly rejected by shareholders last year was CBH Resources where the "no" votes were huge and on a scale not seen before.

Seemingly you prefer the culpable mining Draculas to suck the life blood from this nation whilst they deny A/climate change and refute any urgent requirement for environmentally sustainable industry practices?