"Admitting" the context of his data is commendable, Protoadoras, the kind of honesty you appear quite incapable of.

Protagoras, Tony Jones, in that interview, came across as the small minded, smug dummy he is. How is it that the ABC are able to get so many dumb people, who think they are smart, together in the same place?

Someone had tried to coach his small mind in one area, where they thought they could put Plimer down. His refusal to discuss anything else showed him, & the "B" grade ABC up as the now worthless corpus of a once worthwile organisation.

It's the worst 8 cents a day I have to spend, & that's saying something, when I live in Queensland, & pay a small fortune to the totally incompetent lot in George St.

Hasbeen

It is not important to anyone what you think of Tony Jones. The point being that Plimer manipulated the science and tried to dupe the interviewer.

And the usual suspects continue to make fools of themselves by using one year only (El Nino 1998) the hottest year on record, to "prove" that the globe is cooling when the majority of the hottest years on record have occurred in the 21st century.

1. Global anomalies 1880 - 2008:

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/annual.land_and_ocean.90S.90N.df_1901-2000mean.dat

2. “Combined land and sea global temperatures for April 2009 was the fifth warmest since records began in 1880.

3. “Combined land and sea global temperatures for January – April 2009 (year to date) tied with 2003 as the sixth warmest since records began in 1880.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2009/apr/global.html#temp

4. “The ten warmest years all occur within the 12-year period 1997-2008. The two-standard-deviation (95% confidence) uncertainty in comparing recent years is estimated as 0.05°C [ref. 2], so we can only conclude with confidence that 2008 was somewhere within the range from 7th to 10th warmest year in the record.”

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/

"NASA climate scientist James E. Hansen has been chosen by his peers to receive the 2009 Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the American Meteorological Society (AMS).

"Founded in 1919, AMS is the nation's leading professional society for more than 12,000 research scientists, professors, students, and weather enthusiasts interested in the atmospheric and related sciences.

"In a separate announcement on Dec. 30, Hansen was also named by EarthSky Communications and a panel of 600 scientist-advisors as the Scientist Communicator of the Year. Peers cited Hansen as an "outspoken authority on climate change" who had "best communicated with the public about vital science issues or concepts during 2008."

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20090114/

I can’t do this anymore. I can’t maintain this panic and fear that has made environmentalism irresponsibly go down the wrong road. I can’t tell my kids that the planet is going to be dead from CO2 in their day. All of you, wake up like I did and stop the “denier” dogma used instead of honestly looking at what the other side of this issue says. This theory calls for the end of our civilization so why on earth would you not look into it. My God this is insane now. Climate Change and Global Warming are just wrong. The failed theory is 23 years old and it’s about time we started protecting instead of saving our planet.
It’s getting embarrassing and I don’t see history being kind to the environmentalists of today.
Call it a quarter of a century of scaring our kids if you like because that is exactly what we have done. I’m ashamed of myself and the entire movement.
Count me out. Stop this needless fear.

So, Protagoras, the wicked skeptics are fools, because they use just one decade to claim a cooling trend, while wiser heads like yours have used two or three decades to claim the opposite: My trend's bigger than your trend, nyer.

It's a pity that if you look back over, say hundred of thousands or even, golly gosh, millions of years, neither appear to be particularly exceptional (as best as can be made out).

Oh and don't come at me with that palaver about climate change never having occurred in such a short time frame before: ever heard of, say, the Younger Dryas?

Oh, and while you're eagerly canonising James Hansen, you might like to list that evil scientist Plimer's medals and prizes. Oh, wait, I already did that, and you ignored it then, too, as you do anything that conflicts with your childish "good guys/bad guys" worldview.

Articles like this make me wonder how Universities work. I naively think of them as academic meritocracies, but obviously this isn't always true.

First we have Clive Hamilton, and a professor in ethics whose primary mission in life seems to be ensuring all Australian's live his version of an ethical life. Maybe the irony of this escapes him?

Now we have Ian Plimer, a Professor of Mining Geology, who apparently places more weight on popular conspiracy theories than he does on peer reviewed data. The Australian article was damming.

Maybe they are stellar teachers. Certainly clear thinking isn't their strong point.