The forces of climate science denial have geared down a level. Having failed in their attempt to confuse adults and stop the parliament adopting a timid first step in response to climate change, they are now trying to get at schoolkids.
Ian Plimer, a geology professor and expert mineralogist with no background at all in climate science, has published a new book, “How to Get Expelled from School: A Guide to Climate Change for Pupils, Parents and Punters”.
The book is being promoted by the Institute of Public Affairs, a propaganda unit funded by business to promote an extreme free-market ideology. Its web site doesn’t just deny climate science but also the need to return water to the Murray River, even the health risk of tobacco smoke. The IPA has also argued that we should waive the restrictions on admitting “guest workers” because expanding the minerals industry is too important to be slowed by minor considerations about workers speaking English, being healthy and fitting into the community.
Plimer and the IPA have been working together to spread misinformation about climate science for some time. Plimer has an appeal on the IPA web site, soliciting donations to help the cause of muddying the waters.
His 2009 book, “Heaven and Earth”, was an embarrassing collage of half-truths, misinformation and misquotes of respectable scientists. Climate scientist Ian Enting published a detailed rebuttal of its arguments, while there is now even a web site Plimer vs Plimer, exposing the internal contradictions in Plimer’s case.
Plimer’s new publication purports to be an “anti-warmist manual” that arms children with “101 questions” to challenge their teachers. Plimer claims that his book aims to take politics and ideology out of science teaching. Given that, it’s remarkable the campaign is being promoted by the explicitly ideological IPA.
The book was also launched in Sydney by former Prime Minister John Howard, almost certainly the most ideological Prime Minister in our history. Howard stacked the ABC Board with ideologues and even championed the ridiculous attempts to re-write Australian history, playing down the dispossession of the original Australians.
Howard claimed that “People ought to be worried about what their children are being taught at school”. He said, “It’s a matter of real concern”. He attacked the teaching of climate change science as “one-sided”, presumably advocating the teaching of the uninformed superstition of denial to counter-balance the science.
Plimer said parents write to him saying that their kids are getting “environmental activism at school, rather than the basics of science”. Of course, if they do understand the basics of science, they will know that science proceeds by painstaking analysis of evidence, so they will understand why all the world’s major academies of science accept the evidence of climate change. They will also know that science works by considering the implications of the data they collect, which is why climate scientists are almost universally worried by the rate and scale of the changes they observe.
In my experience, school students do understand the science. I can’t imagine that anyone but a determined adult ideologue would be taken in by the sort of stuff in Plimer’s book. He says that the questions like “Is climate change normal?” will “embarrass poorly prepared teachers”.
They would have to be as poorly prepared as the IPA and Plimer not to know both that climate change has been a factor throughout the Earth’s history and that the scale and rate of change we are now seeing has no parallel in that history.
The irony is that the whole exercise purports to cleanse climate science of ideology and politics. What it is really saying is that the IPA ideology of free markets and unconstrained capitalism should be promoted in schools to counter the scientific evidence that we are straining the capacity of natural systems. Now that would be “a matter of real concern”.
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Comments (28)
Mike Hansen
Mr (logged in via email @gmail.com)
Saturday's Australian has an excerpt from Plimer's book.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/glacial-chill-ebbs-and-flows/story-e6frg6z6-1226224280587
At the end of the excerpt he claims
"As snow falls, it traps air. This air is preserved as the snow becomes an ice sheet. This air remains trapped and uncontaminated in ice, otherwise it cannot be used to measure past atmospheres. Antarctic ice core (Siple) shows that there were 330 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air in 1900;…
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Matthew Thredgold
Software Engineer/Secondary Teacher (logged in via email @xtra.co.nz)
I liked reading his "Telling Lies for God", but gee Mr. Plimer is trying to make the biggest ironic joke in history.
He's now got some very unsavoury friends, such as the ex-PM. If there was any evidence needed that John Howard was a right wing ideologue trying to tell teachers how to do their jobs this is it. "Conservatives", really regressives, should keep their nasty ideologies the hell out of schools. Nasty. Nasty. Nasty.
Ian Enting
(Professorial Fellow, ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems at University of Melbourne)
I think that Plimer has "friends" who are far more unsavoury than the ex-PM. My view is that Mr Howard has diminished himself by launching "how to get expelled .." Even Tomy Abbott has learned not to come out in support of Plimer any more.
Gideon Polya
(Cessional Lecturer in Biochemistry for Agricultural Science at La Trobe University)
@ Ian Enting:
Professor Kevin Anderson on how many will survive the century in a “terrifying prospect” (November 2009): “For humanity it's a matter of life or death. We will not make all human beings extinct as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right parts of the world and survive. But I think it's extremely unlikely that we wouldn't have mass death at 4C. If you have got a population of nine billion by 2050 and you hit 4C, 5C or 6C, you might have half a…
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Nick Kermode
(logged in via email @hotmail.com)
Gideon, which article were you reading? This thread is about Ian Plimers book.
Gideon Polya
(Cessional Lecturer in Biochemistry for Agricultural Science at La Trobe University)
@ Nick Kermode:
The key scientific and moral issues implicit in this article are that non-climate scientist Plimer rejects the overwhelming climate scientist and scientific consensus and declares that man-made climate change is not happening whereas top UK climate scientists say that only 0.5 billion will survive this century if man-made climate change is not addressed.
If , by way of hypothetical example, non-medical scientist Plimer were merely disputing the well-established link between…
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Nick Kermode
(logged in via email @hotmail.com)
Going to be a long thread if you want to talk about individual scientists that disagree with Plimer ;)
Tim Scanlon
(Climate and Agronomic Extension at Department of Agriculture and Food - Western Australia)
There has been a lot of discussion about Plimer's two climate books. It is quite clear that he fails to show the basic tenants of science that are required. From his "iron core of the sun" statements to contradictions about what CO2 does, he is a walking disgrace to science.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/12/plimer_suffers_from_crank_magn.php
I had the pleasure of having a group of 13 year old school kids come to our lab at work for a demonstration of plant science in action. I ran them through a chemical reaction to measure nutrients, my friend did a DNA assay. There were some very switched on kids who not only understood science but could think logically and critique the information.
Plimer is a fool if he thinks school kids can be lied to.
Mike Hansen
Mr (logged in via email @gmail.com)
Plimer's involvement with the hard right Institute of Public Affairs is certainly relevant to his views on global warming.
As is his membership of Gina Rinehart's far right lobby group, Australians for Northern Development and Economic Vision. This group includes John McRobert who served as Pauline Hanson's advisor.
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/Rinehart-Fairfax-Media-Ten-Network-MRRT-mining-pd20101222-CCQYQ?OpenDocument
And his mining interests documented at Wikipedia
"He is a director of three Australian mining companies: Ivanhoe,[7] CBH Resources[7] and Kefi Minerals.[8] In 2010, he was appointed chairperson of the board for TNT Mines Limited.[9][10] He is also listed as a director of Australia-based coal gas company Ormil Energy.[11] In 2008 and 2009, according to a columnist in The Age, Plimer earned over A$400,000 from these interests ..."
Andrew Glikson
(Earth and paleo-climate scientist at Australian National University)
The ironies are everywhere:
A. It was John Howard as PM who in 2007 announced new policies to tackle climate change (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5jtiJPlv4Y).
Does Howard's introduction to the book "How to get expelled from school" mean he no longer takes seriously the issue for which his government was prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars when he announced a cap and trade scheme in 2007?
($627 announced - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5jtiJPlv4Y)
B. On 5 May 2009…
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Jane Daly
(Research Consultant, Institute for Sustainable Futures at University of Technology, Sydney)
Thankyou for your article. It is very sad news... But I can only imagine the book would be rather boring for kids. Kids like to have fun. Saving energy and GHG emissions is proving to be great fun for these school kids taking part in Climate Clubs https://www.climateclubs.org.au/ Their parents must be pretty happy too because these kids have saved thousands off their energy bills. https://www.climateclubs.org.au/leagues/school/scoreboard
Mike Hansen
Mr (logged in via email @gmail.com)
Tim Lambert's Deltoid blog has more on Plimer's inability to understand ice core data and his plagiarism of a press release.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/12/the_australians_war_on_science_78.php
David Howard
Home Duties (logged in via email @optusnet.com.au)
I had hoped this would provide an insight into the content and arguments within the book. I come away with the idea that there is guilt by association. One cannot argue that the book was launched by Mr Howard but that doesn't change the content. The fact that the book is promoted by an organisation that promotes other causes is hardly relevent, otherwise any community announcement on TV would be discounted because of the promotion of alcohol or less nutritional food. In fact, I have it on good authority that a former PM has a close association and can speak the language of one of the worlds more oppressive governments.
This is hardly the forum for this sort of shallow work.
Perhaps there isn't much content submitted at this time of the year or the usual editor has taken Christmas leave.
Nick Kermode
(logged in via email @hotmail.com)
David....
http://www.aussmc.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/ian-enting-review.pdf
David Arthur
n/a (logged in via email @fastel.com.au)
Gday David Howard, to the extent that Prof Plimer's books conflict with the following fairly straightforward set of known facts, the content and arguments of Plimer's books are incorrect.
Earth is warmed by absorbtion of short wave sunlight. Because of this, Earth's temperature can remain unchanged by returning the same amount of energy to space. That is, solar shortwave energy is balanced by the earth re-radiating to space as a 'black body' radiator with a characteristic temperature of ~255K;…
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Matthew Thredgold
Software Engineer/Secondary Teacher (logged in via email @xtra.co.nz)
"The fact that the book is promoted by an organisation that promotes other causes is hardly relevent"
Actually it is hugely relevant. If everything else they espouse is deceitful and ideological it's tarred with the same brush.
Rob Crowther
Architectural Draftsman (logged in via email @westnet.com.au)
I think this article is entertaining but agree with David to some extent.
If you consider aspects of critical thinking namely logical fallacies then Personal attack, Attacking the motive, Look who’s talking, and Red Herring and some that come to mind when reading this.
In critical thinking one must put aside that an organization or a person has a past history of living on the lunatic fringe and judge each article and argument within the article on its merits.
Of course we sometimes short cut that and assume they will just do what they always do – humans being creatures of habit and all that.
Jane Rawson
(Editor, The Conversation)
Hi David - nope, I'm still here! I was about to direct you to Ian Enting's review - which I didn't see the point of replicating here - but I see Nick has already done so. It is a very thorough point-by-point investigation of Plimer's claims.
Ian Enting
(Professorial Fellow, ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems at University of Melbourne)
Just to clarify. My thorough review of Heaven + Earth is at
http://www.complex.org.au/tiki-download_file.php?fileId=91
What Nick has given is a link to some additional comments about "How to get expelled.."
that just settled for giving the link to the longer more detailed document.
Bernie Masters
environmental consultant (logged in via email @iinet.net.au)
As a geologist/zoologist who has no expertise in climate science, the most disappointing part of the current debate is the shallowness of so many comments which are directed against climate change deniers. I agree with David Howard's post that it really doesn't matter who launched a book or who funded it: instead, I need to see an analysis of the book's contents, with science-based evidence to show where it's wrong. Ian Lowe's article and Ian Enting's 'review' of Plimer's book are shallow and lacking…
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Nick Kermode
(logged in via email @hotmail.com)
Gee whiz Bernie how can you be so obtuse. There is over one hundred years of scientific papers and empirical evidence that confirms the greenhouse effect and AGW, that is available at the stroke of a few keys from the comfort of your own lounge room. And Ian Entings original review of "Heaven and Earth" (which Plimer uses as the reference for his current book, and is linked to in Entings current review and much of it still applies to 101 Q's) is 64 pages of jammed packed science with references and data. Go read it before making comments like "I need to see an analysis of the book's contents, with science-based evidence to show where it's wrong." Take some personal responsibility and do some research yourself.
But Bernie, with Ian Plimer its even more simple than that and if you cant understand how illogical, impossible, incompetant, inconcievable, implausable and contradictory Plimers psuedo science is after just reading it (especially as a geologist), well then.......enough said!
Andrew Glikson
(Earth and paleo-climate scientist at Australian National University)
A central theme in Plimer's book 'Heaven and Earth' is the role of the sun versus that of that of CO2 in driving climate change.
For example where it is stated: “the sun tends to be brushed aside as the driver of climate on Earth in place of a trace gas (carbon dioxide – CO2) most of which derives from natural processes” (p. 10), or “The hypothesis that a high atmospheric CO2 produces global warming is therefore invalid” (below Figure 24).
Thus the book questions:
A. More than a century…
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David Arthur
n/a (logged in via email @fastel.com.au)
Gday Bernie, to answer your questions:
1) I've set out all the scientific evidence we need to know that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are trapping excess heat in a comment elsewhere on this page. More detailed debunking of climate change denial was undertaken by Mark Harrigan and myself in discussion with Douglas Cotton after Andrew Glikson's "Last chance at Durban? The geological dimension of climate change" (Dr Glikson's article itself is worth a read).
2) wind, solar thermal, solar PV, biofuels…
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Ian Enting
(Professorial Fellow, ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems at University of Melbourne)
Ok Bernie, exactly what words in either of my reviews constitute political and personal attacks? (as opposed to comment on what Plimer actually says in his books and/or media
appearances).
Gideon Polya
(Cessional Lecturer in Biochemistry for Agricultural Science at La Trobe University)
Excellent article by Professor Ian Lowe.
It was appropriate that Plimer's book was launched by former PM John Howard who failed to "tackle climate change" in his 12 years in power and involved Australia in the Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide (2.7 million war-related deaths including 0.7 million avoidable under-5 infant deaths, 2003-2011; 4.6 million war-related deaths including 1.8 million avoidable under-5 infant deaths, 1990-2011) and the Afghan Holocaust and Afghan Genocide (4.6 million…
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Ian Enting
(Professorial Fellow, ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems at University of Melbourne)
Maybe Lovelock and Anderson said that only half a billion people will survive, but, Gideon Polya takes us though a series of links through his own sites (why not link us directly?) to end up with a link to a newspaper article (and mention of Anderson, not Lovelock) that is "not available".
Of course you need to check what people actually said. There are almost 7 billion people on earth, and most of us are not going to survive into the 22nd century, regardless of the amount of climate change.
Sam Chafe
Retired scientist (logged in via email @iprimus.com.au)
There are several problems with respect to the advocates of global warming, none of which necessarily deny the probability of the science. The first is the extent of warming and the consequences which such warming is likely to have. It is quite possible, from what I have read (and the recent comments from the international panel tend to support this), that such consequences have been rather exaggerated, and that the cataclysmic forecasts of such early prophets of doom, such as Al Gore, cannot be…
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David Arthur
n/a (logged in via email @fastel.com.au)
Gday Sam, we're not going to get much temperature rise without ice melt, pretty much the same as a bathtub filled with ice for party drinks but for two crucial differences.
The first difference is that all the ice in the bathtub is in the bathtub already, and therefore cannot contribute to rising bath levels. This is not the case for terrestrial icecaps (Greenland, Antarctica). 2 degree C is sufficient to ensure 8-10 m sea level rise over the next several centuries.
The second difference…
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