The Outsider

Failure is my success

The Courier Mail - Lord Monckton & Ian Plimer won the Brisbane debate "in straight sets"

This shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody who has been paying attention these last few years.

It's the real reason why alarmists tend to run for cover when challenged to open debate. As the Intelligence Squared debate in New York a couple of years ago and the more recent one at the University of St Andrew's have shown, once people are exposed to the counter arguments they begin to question how strong the case for anthropogenic climate change is, or at least begin to question whether it is as pressing an issue as it has been made out to be.

From the Bolter:

Bruce McMahon of the Courier Mail shows no mercy to green colleague Graham Readfearn, who foolishly agreed to join a debate in Brisbane with climate sceptics:

Aided by Adelaide’s Professor Ian Plimer, Lord Monckton cruised to victory before a partisan crowd of suits and ties, movers and shakers.

Hundreds of them were there for the sell-out, $130-a-head Brisbane Institute lunch – and scepticism was applauded.

Climate change scientist Professor Barry Brook and teammate Graham Readfearn, The Courier-Mail’s environment blogger, were stoic in argument (even if Mr Readfearn may have foot-faulted once or twice and had to be pulled into line by moderator Ray Weeks).
Readfearn has not commented on his ordeal, merely posting this audio extract and this.

Our alarmist friend Professor Barry Brook also took part in the debate, but he seems to have lost some of his old certainty.

In 2007 Brook claimed that while, yes, nature had been holding climate change at bay, ”all hell is about to break loose” from 2009, and he last month claimed ”2010 (is) looking likely to be the hottest ever”.

But in debate with Monckton and Plimer he conceded “we don’t know how much it (global temperature) is going to change in the future” (first audio clip), and urged instead that we cut our gases just in case.

Monckton’s retort to this citing of the “precautionary principle” is magisterial - that it is nonsense to consider only the risk of not Doing Something, without also considering the risks that Doing that Something involves.

In Defence of 'Heaven and Earth' Part 2

DON Aitkin, a former member of the Australian Science and Technology Council and Foundation Chairman of the Australian Research Council, wrote to Kurt Lambeck, President of the Australian Academy of Sciences, concerning his public criticism of Ian Plimer’s new book Heaven and Earth.  Professor Aitkin waited ten days for a response, and, in its absence, has decided to release his letter more widely.

The rest here.

In Defence of ‘Heaven and Earth’ Part 1

IN the following open letter to the President of the Australian Academy of Science, William Kininmonth explains that the science of climate change is ‘not settled’ and if the scientific community is to get to a position where it can confidently prediction future climate it will be necessary to both understand why and how the climate system has varied in the past, and to have a robust computer construct of the climate system.  Given so far we have neither, the recent very public criticisms of Ian Plimer’s new book ’Heaven and Earth’ are not logical or consistent.

The rest of the post is here

ABN Newswire interviews Ian Plimer

via CCNet

It's a friendly interview, but interesting nonetheless. Professor Plimer makes most of the major points of his book Heaven and Earth: Climate Change: The Missing Science.

It's also on YouTube:

Plimer also has an opinion piece in this morning's The Australian:

He points to a wonderfully pompous, self-important and arrogant letter that seven academics have written to Australia's coal based power generators.

"The unfortunate reality is that genuine action on climate change will require the existing coal-fired power stations to cease operating in the near future.

"We feel it is vital that you understand this and we are happy to work with you and with governments to begin planning for this transition immediately."

My, that's big of them. They are also overflowing with empathy for all the people who are going to lose their jobs and their livelihoods because of this idiocy.

Plimer responds "electricity generating companies should reply by cutting off the power to academics' homes and host institutions, forcing our ideologues to lead by example."

It's one of those funny things about the loudest climate change boosters - they nearly always are pretty well-heeled themselves, but it's always other people who need to make the necessary sacrifices. Not them.

Like Tim Flannery and Al Gore, they will continue to fly around the world from one conference to the next, and then onto the latest celebrity media event or book launch, while looking down their noses at ordinary people having a cheap holiday in Bali.

Plimer’s biter bit + smell the Zeitgeist

The denunciations by global warming believers of Professor Ian Plimer’s best-seller Heaven and Earth are growing increasingly shrill, but no better informed.

The latest, by Michael Ashley, professor of astrophysics, in The Australian is typically abusive (sheer spite is a hallmark of the breed) - and its arguments get pulled apart by Australian Climate Madness.

For me, as a non-scientist, the most persuasive case for scepticism is the fact that scientists of the warming faith write articles as trashy as this to justify their belief.

Simon at Australian Climate Madness clearly highlights the pea and thimble game now being played by the alarmists. Tony Jones of Lateline was at it when interviewing Professor Plimer - find a minor mistake or point to quibble on and pretend that the entire argument rests on it and is therefore invalidated by it.

Though Ashley goes further and indulges in a cheap personal attack on Plimer:

"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."

This is outrageously dishonest muck raking. Even if Plimer is wrong, (and to his credit he has a chapter devoted to just that possibility in his book), he is a scientist of considerable achievement and international reputation.

Yet again I suspect the inwardly perceived weakness of their own position is betrayed by the resort to these kinds of vicious personal attacks (and in science there can be fewer more personal and nasty comparisons you can make than to Velikovsky or von Daniken).

But this shrillness is because I believe they have "smelt" the Zeitgeist and don't like it.

I still believe that the high water mark of climate change hysteria is a year or more behind us.

Looking at the comments left after Simon's blog post I found out that New Zealand has its own equivalent of Heaven & Earth and just like it has become an instant best seller.

Interesting times.

It goes on sale in Australia this Friday.

Heaven & Earth sells 20,000 copies in two weeks

And the major publishers who refused to print it, despite Professor Ian Plimer's previous best sellers, must be kicking their politically correct behinds!

Andrew Bolt

Thursday, May 07, 2009 at 12:04am

Professor Ian Plimer‘s Heaven and Earth - a book sceptical of global warming theory - has been an instant bestseller, already selling 20,000 copies in just a fortnight.

Some have wondered how it came to be published by a small Melbourne firm, Connor Court Publishing, and critics (such as the ABC’s Fran Kelly) have hinted that it’s to Plimer’s discredit.

In fact, the discredit belongs entirely to the bigger publishers who turned down the book, so sure of their faith in global warming that they were unable or unwilling to see there was a big market of sceptics desperate to hear the other side of a debate that the mainstream media had insisted for years was “over” and “settled”.

Here is a list of the publishers who turned down Plimer’s book, even though he already had a proven record of success, having produced best-sellers such as Telling Lies for God (Random House, around 23,000 copies) and A Short History of Planet Earth (ABC Books, around 16,000 copies), which won him a Eureka Prize:
- ABC Books
- Random House
- Allen and Unwin
- East Street
The rest here

Heaven & Earth author returns fire

Hot-air doomsayers

Ian Plimer | May 05, 2009
Article from:  The Australian

IN Heaven and Earth - Global Warming: The Missing Science, I predicted that the critics would play the man and not discuss the science. Initial criticism appeared before the book was released three weeks ago.

 

Well-known catastrophists criticised the book before they actually received a review copy. Critics, who have everything to gain by frightening us witless with politicised science, have now shown their true colours. No critic has argued science with me. I have just enjoyed a fortnight of being thrashed with a feather.

Despite having four review copies, ABC's Lateline photocopied parts of chapters and sent them to an expert on gravity, a biologist and one who produces computer models. These critics did not read the book in its entirety. The compere of Lateline claimed that he had read the book yet his questions showed the opposite. When uncritical journalists have no science training, then it is little wonder doomsday scenarios can seduce them.

In The Age (Insight, May 2), David Karoly claims that my book "does not support the answers with sources". Considering that the book has 2311 footnotes as sources, Karoly clearly had not read the book. Maybe Karoly just read up to page 21, which showed that his published selective use of data showed warming but, when the complete set of data was used, no such warming was seen.

The rest here

Yes, no bias at the ABC at all!

I suppose it's funny in its own way, watching the ABC make a complete fool of itself whenever it deals with those dangerous lunatics called sceptics.

The way it has to preface any appearance of one of them with a leper's bell being rung, just in case anybody watching might be foolish enough to be tricked by them

So has course Professor Ian Plimer's recent appearance on Lateline had to be prefaced by not one, not two, but three scientists taking a contrary view to his. Something you can be sure would never be done for a proponent of anthropogenic climate change.

But Andrew Bolt notices another thing:
ABC’s Lateline still hasn’t put up the transcript of its interview with global warming sceptic Ian Plimer on April 27. But Lateline has put up the transcript of the introduction to that interview, in which three warming believers attack Plimer.

I think they just can't help themselves. Actually, something else that's typical of the ABC also is peeving me here, and that is the way they deliberately misrepresent Plimer's position as "denying global warming," when he doesn't do any such thing.

Reasons not to trust the IPCC

Just got my copy of Ian Plimer's new book, Heaven and Earth: Global Warming:The Missing Science.

Going to be a good read I reckon. It must be sticking in the alarmists craw that 10,000 copies sold here in Australia in just two days and it had to be reprinted.

Here's a snippet:

In the 1996 report on the impact of global warming on health, one contributing author was an expert on the effectiveness of motorcycle helmets. That author had also written on the health effects of mobile phones. Other authors were environmental activists, one of whom had written on the health effects of mercury poisoning from land mines. If a land mine explodes, the last thing one thinks about is the health effects of mercury poisoning. In the 2007 report, the health effects of global warming were expertly dealt with by two lead authors, one of whom was a hygienist and another a specialist in coprolites (fossil faeces). Those who drove the publication of the chapters on the health effects of global warming had no formal expertise in the chapters' subject material, especially tropical diseases. In fact, the expert opinions of tropical disease scientists were ignored by the other lead authors with no experience in the field.

I know that when a biography check was done on a number of the supposed "expert" reviewers listed for the Fourth Assessment Report (from an admittedly less technical part of the report), a number turned out to be administrative assistants, website designers, database administrators, lawyers and the like.