Here's a piece from ABC Science.

Ancient Arctic beasts ate rotting matter. Friday, 12 June 2009. Michael Reilly Discovery News

Canada's Ellesmere Island is a frigid tundra. But 53 million years ago it resembled a swamp, teeming with plants and crowded with alligators, turtles and tapirs. Even lemur-like creatures swung from the trees. The early Eocone climate of Ellesmere was drastically warmer than present day, averaging temperatures 25 to 17C or more back then.

So I take it Global warming is a normal phenomenon. The Hoo Haa is all money making scaremongering.

Fear is the best motivator for us, the ignorante sheep. Greenzis will lead civilization into the next Dark Age. Fear the unknown and call it science -circa 2009

If Plimer had real contributions to make to understanding climate and the human induced portion of climate change he would have published in a real science journal. He hasn't. He hasn't changed our current best understanding of climate any more than the opinions expressed in this forum. What he can do is write a book that keeps alive the notion that there is still significant cause to doubt AGW. There's not. The considered views of full time and dedicated professionals who study climate at the CSIRO or at our leading Universities are not agenda driven; as best it's understood there is rational cause to be alarmed because climate is quite sensitive to some widespread human activities. Plimer's wrong and can't prove anything as a scientist.

“So, Protagoras, the wicked skeptics are fools, because they use just one decade to claim a cooling trend….

Um.... not quite Clownfish. The skeptic fools have used just one hot year (1998) to claim a cooling trend while the climate scientists have used 130 years to claim a warming trend. You really should get out and about more.

“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?”

Um……not quite again. Clownfish. It’s the rapid rise in greenhouse gases over the past century which is unprecedented in at least 800,000 years, according to a study of the oldest Antarctic ice core by scientists (from the British Antarctic Survey) who advise that existing levels of carbon dioxide and methane are far higher than anything seen during the earlier warm periods.

Younger Dryas? You’re not suggesting that there is some obscure reason to suppose that all climate change events have the same cause or even similar causes, are you?

Why not consider the unprecedented actions of man’s fossil fuels emissions into every ecosystem on the planet where once these gases were released only in catastrophic events of significance like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, extraterrestial impacts etc.

But man has continued to dig everything up and dump carcinogenic hydrocarbons, mercury, lead, aerosols, man-made dioxins etc into rivers, soils, oceans, atmosphere - the earth’s lungs, while the plants and animals we eat uptake these hazards thus contaminating the entire food chain. And let’s not forget the massive and ongoing oil spills which are killing marine life and subsequently other animals which depend on fish for survival. I’d say Planet Earth is p**ed off.

And this debate should not be about whether all the evidence is “real,” Clownfish but about which evidence is most important and should be emphasized.

This is in contrast to your pseudo-debate about climate change where the presence of all the evidence on one side of the debate leaves the denialist side with no strategy but to…, well, deny the evidence.

Cheerio

It's interesting that some, such as Ozandy, liken climate "denialists" to creationists, while Protag uses Plimer's legal action AGAINST creation scientists as an example of his shakey credibility.

Now, I'm not expecting all those of the alarmist persuasion to be of exactly the same mind set, and to have their stories straight, but I do believe when someone is pilloried from diametrically opposite directions, it's a strong hint that both are baseless ad hominem, and makes me more likely to conclude there is some substance to the work.

As for Tony Jones, if Al Gore had turned up to the studio in a sack cloth, Jones would ask Plimer why he had a hair out of place.

Kalin1 and I have both sought information on what drove previously high CO2 concentrations down in the past. Anyone? Perhaps I'll find the answer in Plimer's book. I'm off to the shop.

TO all the sceptics!

Yes there are natural forcings at work and climate "has always changed".

Yes climate is a BIG, bold, complex story with lots of geological history involving the rise and fall of ice ages, changes in solar intensity, "global dimming" and all sorts of other climate forcings.

However, the problem is that Plimer acts like HE is the only one who really understands all these factors, when the reality is that ALL of Plimer’s silly objections have been addressed by literally thousands of peer-reviewed papers.

Reading him you’d get the impression that only he understood the 100 thousand year ice-age sequence. To break it down quickly, Al Gore got it wrong when "An Inconvenient Truth" suggested that Co2 caused the ice-ages to retreat. Co2 was not the "trigger", but the "gunpowder" igniting off the trigger. The initial trigger was the Milankovitch cycles (100 thousand year wobbles in earth's orbit) which affects how much sunlight hits the earth at what angle. This triggers temperature changes, which triggers Co2 release in warming phase, which INCREASES warming phase, or Co2 cover in cooling phase (trapped under ice), which INCREASES cooling phase. Co2 is still doing its thing, refracting longwave length energy back into the atmosphere instead of letting it leak off into space. (This is testable and repeatable in a spectrometer! Does Plimer disprove that?)

Even James Hansen made that clear... Earth's "wobble" triggers temperature => Co2 changes => feedback. But just because climate science is complex and surprising does not mean that it is WRONG! Despite Al Gore's clumsiness in "Inconvenient Truth" climate change WAS NEVER BASED on the ice ages. Sorry Plimer, that's a straw-man. It always was based on physics as demonstrated by spectrometer readings, and the "Radiative Forcing Equation".

But we are to believe that ONLY PLIMER understands Milankovitch cycles? And make sure you buy his next dozen books on the subject! ;-)

The Newsflash about Plimer should actually read… "Geologist who made money debunking Noah’s ark turns to debunking climate change for a few quid".