The road to Damascus

Fascinating review of Prof Ian Plimer’s new book, “Heaven and Earth” by Paul Sheehan of the Sydney Morning Herald.

The subject of this column is not small. It is a book entitled Heaven And Earth, which will be published tomorrow. It has been written by one of Australia’s foremost Earth scientists, Professor Ian Plimer. He is a confronting sort of individual, polite but gruff, courteous but combative. He can write extremely well, and Heaven And Earth is a brilliantly argued book by someone not intimidated by hostile majorities or intellectual fashions.

The book’s 500 pages and 230,000 words and 2311 footnotes are the product of 40 years’ research and a depth and breadth of scholarship. As Plimer writes: “An understanding of climate requires an amalgamation of astronomy, solar physics, geology, geochronology, geochemistry, sedimentology, tectonics, palaeontology, palaeoecology, glaciology, climatology, meteorology, oceanography, ecology, archaeology and history.”

The most important point to remember about Plimer is that he is Australia’s most eminent geologist. As such, he thinks about time very differently from most of us. He takes the long, long view. He looks at climate over geological, archaeological, historical and modern time. He writes: “Past climate changes, sea-level changes and catastrophes are written in stone.”
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Much of what we have read about climate change, he argues, is rubbish, especially the computer modelling on which much current scientific opinion is based, which he describes as “primitive”. Errors and distortions in computer modelling will be exposed in time. (As if on cue, the United Nations’ peak scientific body on climate change was obliged to make an embarrassing admission last week that some of its computers models were wrong.)

I have often read Paul’s articles but have never thought of him as approaching being sceptical about the IPCC global warming litany.

Maybe Professor Plimer has succeeded in encouraging him to see merit in sceptics positions. As the headline linked above says, “Beware the climate of conformity

One thought on “The road to Damascus”

  1. Some casual chat by radio 3AW presenters the other afternoon was quite sceptical about AGW. I have not often heard the media getting stuck into AGW. Andrew Bolt, of course, was an early adopter and one day will be lauded.

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