Review: Heaven and Earth, by Ian Plimer. From The Objective Standard, Vol. Ian Plimer is perhaps best known as the geologist who debunked creationism in 'Telling Lies for God'. Here he turns his attention to the global warming beliefs that. Start by marking “Heaven and Earth: Global Warming: The Missing Science” as Want to Read. No. 4. Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science, by Ian Plimer. New York: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2. Al Gore, the Weather Channel, “environmental activists,” and many politicians claim there is a worldwide “consensus” among scientists that the earth’s climate is about to change drastically due to human activity. On the basis of this alleged consensus, governments are considering coercive measures to head off catastrophe—rationing fuel, regulating carbon dioxide emissions, dictating the kinds of lightbulbs we can buy, and so on. Of course, the idea that man is responsible for impending climatic doom has its detractors. Some say the science is not settled; some say it is settled, and that human activity is not warming the planet; and some say that even if human activity were warming the planet, that might be good. But who among us truly understands the scientific arguments alleged to support the various claims? Review: Heaven and Earth, by Ian Plimer. Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth. Copyright © 2016 The Objective Standard. Climate changes are cyclical and are driven by the Earth. in a parallel to his 1994 book challenging creation science, Telling Lies for God, Ian Plimer. No. Lee How to Get Expelled From School A guide to climate change for pupils, parents and punters de Ian Plimer. Earth (ABC Books) and his best-selling Heaven. When Heaven And Earth Change Places PDF epub Books. Are you also searching for The Mystery of Spiritual Warfare Amazon Web Services? Get it only.Wouldn’t it be nice if a scientist wrote a book carefully documenting and explaining, in layman’s terms, the cases for and against man- made global warming? Then, we could determine for ourselves which claims are supported by evidence and logic. Based on favorable publicity from conservative media and politicians, Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science would appear to be just such a book. Plimer claims to present an “integrated scientific understanding of the environment,” and the book—chock- full of figures and graphs and containing more than 2,3. Add to that EU President (and noted climate- change skeptic) Vaclav Klaus’s statement that the work is “clear, understandable, and very useful,” and a good grasp of the arguments for and against man- made global warming would seem to be just a few hundred pages away. Unfortunately, Heaven and Earth utterly fails to deliver on its promise. Rather than clearly presenting the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis and specifying the kind and scope of data necessary to evaluate it, Plimer presents the reader with a disorganized hash of poorly- presented data; repeatedly mocks climate models without providing sufficient evidence or argument to warrant such mockery; dismisses the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a bogeyman “unrelated to science” (p. Plimer does say the theory is false, but he does not address the subject scientifically. His work is sloppy, inconsistent, and frequently self- contradictory. For instance, in discussing a correlation between the Wolf Minimum (a period of low sunspot activity) and the start of a cooler climate, Plimer states that the Wolf Minimum “heralded the end of the Medieval Warming and the beginning of the 6. Little Ice Age. It took only 2. But if one checks Plimer’s own dates for the Wolf Minimum (1. AD, p. 1. 28) against his earlier figure 1. Medieval Warming value. Similarly, Plimer claims that El Niño “lasts for a month or so” (p. When discussing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, Plimer claims, “The current CO2 content of the atmosphere is the lowest it has been for thousands of millions of years,” and provides two recent values, 3. Elsewhere, however, he estimates CO2 concentration as being between 2. Further, attempting to specify the value used in calculations to quantify how a doubling of atmospheric CO2 increases equilibrium temperature (known as “climate sensitivity”), Plimer explicitly states at least two different values: 0. C (e. g., pp. 3. 66, 3. C” (p. 4. 26). He later writes that during the Cambrian Period “there was more than 2. CO2,” but temperature was “up to 7ºC warmer than today” (p. C.*In addition to such inconsistencies, Plimer frequently argues from innuendo and authority rather than from facts and logic, makes assertions without providing supporting data or footnotes, and includes diagrams and graphs that are so poorly integrated with the surrounding text that their meaning and purpose are unclear. For example, at the start of the book, in a graph comparing temperature data and climate projections, Plimer misidentifies the data traces as “[f]ive predictions” when two actually show temperature averages, fails to provide citations, and makes an unsupported and sweeping claim that the reader is in no position to evaluate for himself: “This diagram shows that the hypothesis that human emissions of CO2 create global warming is invalid” (p. Although Plimer dismisses climate models as “computer games” (p. But he feels free to attack the use of such models and the ways in which they are used, and his attacks frequently miss the mark. For instance, in discussing the climate models cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), he falsely claims that “the IPCC models just don’t do clouds” (p. He also charges, “Current climate models do not even consider the possibility of another supervolcano eruption” (pp. But such a cataclysm is not only extremely unlikely in the foreseeable future; it also differs in kind from such factors as cloud cover and CO2 concentration, because its impact would be immediate and drastic. Plimer might as well complain that the models fail to account for an asteroid strike. Given revelations from the “Climate. Gate” scandal that cast doubt on (among other things) the integrity of the climate modeling computer code, one might be tempted to sympathize with Plimer’s attack on climate modeling. But Plimer’s attack—as presented in the book—is ultimately baseless. Although he presents information that, given a sufficient scientific context, could help the reader formulate relevant questions about the forecasts of the climate models, he fails to provide that context. Ian Plimer's sequel to his. In every classroom where global warming is discussed Plimer's How to get expelled from school is a. He is also Emeritus Professor of. Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science eBook: Ian Plimer: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store. The reader is thus at a loss to understand why a given piece of information might cast reasonable doubt on such predictions. In addition to the book’s scientific problems, Plimer’s writing is often rambling, jargon- laced, and soporific. This passage is typical of his style: A plot of El Niño from the Japanese Meteorological Agency against increased frequency of earthquakes and increase in the Earth’s rotation speed shows a striking correlation. The exception was the 1. El Niño event which occurred with a higher frequency of earthquakes and a decrease in the Earth’s rotation. In 1. 98. 2, 2. 03 earthquakes were centered in the eastern Pacific at 3°S 1. E. The area had previously been seismically quiet for 4. El Niño ocean warming started in the mid equatorial region (5°N to 5°S, 1. E to 1. 60°E) and then moved eastwards. In the 1. 90. 0s, earthquakes in the eastern Pacific were more common than in the 1. During the 1. 99. Earth’s rotation and, as a result, the frequency of El Niño in the 1. Vaclav Klaus’s praise to the contrary, the power and clarity of Plimer’s prose are quite elusive. Plimer’s use of graphs is also frequently confusing. For instance, in the chapter titled “Ice,” he employs seven graphs, each with a time axis. In the first two, time progresses from past to present as the reader scans from left to right, but Plimer confusingly reverses this convention for his next four graphs (i. As for Plimer’s conveyance of a big picture, he makes it just as hard for the reader to see the forest as he does the trees. How is the reader supposed to grasp Plimer’s explanation of how CO2 affects climate when, for instance, at one point, Plimer states that “there is no observed relationship between global climate and atmospheric CO2” over geological or modern times (p. CO2 and global climate, but that they are due to “changes in solar activity” (p. Does Plimer mean that changing atmospheric CO2 does not cause temperature changes? Apparently not: He concedes that “1. Century can be attributed to the concomitant rise in the air’s CO2 content” (p. Is it true then that “The carbon cycle does not drive climate, it piggybacks on the water cycle” (p. Maybe not: “As the westerlies move, the ocean’s circulation increases, releasing more CO2 from the deep ocean. This leads to more warming and an even stronger circulation in a feedback loop strong enough to push Earth out of an ice age” (p. Could such a feedback loop be said to be “driving” climate? If so, Plimer has contradicted himself (again). If not, then he has no grounds for dismissing the claim of proponents of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis that a feedback loop involving CO2—introduced by human activity as against the ocean—can drive climate. Such a presentation cannot help readers to understand the role—or lack thereof—of CO2 in climate change. Despite its many and deep flaws, Heaven and Earth is not without merit. Because Plimer employs an indiscriminate, everything- but- the- kitchen- sink approach, if anything is out there to discredit the global warming legislation camp (e. Mann “hockey- stick” controversy, the rulings on the merits of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth in a British court, the Peiser- Oreskes controversy), or any scientific or scientific- sounding objection to the man- made global warming hypothesis (e. For this reason, Heaven and Earth serves as a sort of catalog of the issues surrounding the subject of global warming, and thus may be of some value to those in need of such a catalog.[/groups_can].
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