Global Warming

[Rev.Cambeul]

Ian Plimer: A question of faith

Hendrik Gout | 25/04/2009

http://www.independentweekly.com.au/news/local/news/general/ian-plimer-a-question-of-faith/1495699.aspx

History is littered with grand mistakes. Columbus thought the West Indies looked distinctly oriental, Hitler and Napoleon believed the Russian winter would defrost like a fridge held open, and IBM chairman Tom Watson was convinced there'd be a world market for about five computers.

Then there's the question of faith: that is, the belief in gods and deities. The world once had thousands of religions, and to challenge these beliefs meant death. Ancient Greeks built temples which started at Aphrodite and ended at Zeus, animists believed that plants had souls, and ancient hunter-gatherers held that rivers and mountains were created by giant crocodiles or snakes.

A giant cod did not dig the River Murray, and we know that because of the work of geologists and geographers. Since the beginnings of religion 300,000 years ago, science has challenged faith. Science is evidence, not belief, and scientists don't burn other scientists at the stake because they disagree with each other. But the belief in human-caused global warming, says one scientist, has become the new religion.

"The history of the world is written in the rocks," says Adelaide University geologist Professor Ian Plimer. "We can tell when the earth was born, when the atmosphere developed and the gases which comprised it. We know that continents drift and mountains uplift and erode. If you know the alphabet, if you can read the rocks, you can go back 4.567 billion years to the formation of the world itself."

Plimer is a genial man, 62 years old and with the energy of a new-born gazelle. He's rushing from television interviews to appointments on radio. He's been to his printers and publishers and he's in Adelaide between trips to Broken Hill and Wagga Wagga. It's a busy schedule.

In the boot of his Mercedes he has a box of books, his new opus Heaven and Earth. He parks the car on a steep hill in Beaumont, hands a copy of the book to his passenger while he meets his wife Jill and a real estate agent. As he inspects the house for sale, the real estate agent's parked car rolls down the hill and stops with a crunching noise at the first solid obstacle, which the rear of Jill's car. The professor is unfazed.

"There's space in that house for a library," he says gleefully. "I've got 75 linear metres of books and Jill has the same. We need a house with space. The cars should have been parked with their wheels turned into the gutter on a slope like that but - there's space for a library."

And then the professor moves heaven and earth, literally and figuratively. The book, 500 pages of literature, is an argument against the belief or the faith, as Plimer sees it, that human activity causes global warming. A posse of critics from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, environmental groups and scientists from other disciplines are now out to lynch him. The mild-mannered professor's Heaven and Earth is figuratively tearing his world apart.

"Start with science," Plimer says. "Ignore faith. Science is evidence, not belief." And then he starts with his history of the planet, beginning at the beginning and ending far into the future.

"The world's climate has always changed and always will," he says. "The speed and amount of modern climate change is neither unprecedented nor dangerous. The temperature range observed in the 20th century is in the range of normal variability."

This sounds heretical. Don't the world's eminent scientists agree that humans are burning fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate, that this combustion is releasing carbon dioxide at a similarly unprecedented rate, and that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas? Won't human-made global warming cause wild and unpredictable weather, melt polar icecaps and fry polar bears? Aren't Pacific Islanders going to be flooded out of house and home? Won't there be malarial mosquitoes up and down the high latitudes? Aren't we doomed?

Plimer weaves the Mercedes through the traffic on the way to his next appointment. "Methane is the most potent greenhouse gas," he says before answering. "The effect of driving a diesel car 10,000 kilometres is equivalent to the amount of methane a cow produces in a day."

Yes, but what about polar bears? They don't drive and they don't chew cud.

Plimer stares through the windscreen, wondering where to begin. A starting point may be his previous book, A Short History of Planet Earth, published by ABC Books before the climate change debate really heated up. It talks about earth's encounters with the killer asteroids, the rise and spread of the continents, the appearance of life, mass extinctions and really major climate changes that shaped the life and look of earth.

It even makes a passing reference to some minor animals known as hominids.

"For 80 per cent of the earth's 4600 million years, our planet has been a warm, wet greenhouse planet. Greenhouse conditions are normal. Polar ice caps are abnormal," he says.

"Even 2000 years ago the earth was considerably warmer than now. The Romans were scantily clad, and growing oranges and grapes in northern England."

In Plimer's geological timeframe, 2000 years is less than a modern meteorologist's mini-second. Plimer sees the climate change much as we see changes in daily weather; it can be freezing in the morning, warming up towards noon with an afternoon thunderstorm, then rain and hail followed by a starry night with another frost.

To a man whose scientific discipline measures millions of years, the world's climate is always changeable and variable. The reason we don't notice is our incredibly short lifespan as a species and our incredibly short lives as individuals. If we'd been around as long as algal mats called stromatolites, like those at Shark Bay in West Australia which haven't changed in 2724 million years, we'd have a truer perspective.

"The Dark Ages between 535 and 900 AD were a terrible time to be alive," he writes in Heaven and Earth. "Sudden cooling took place. It was cold, there were famines, war, changes of empires and stressed humans succumbed to plague. Around 540 AD it was so cold trees almost stopped growing. This was a global event because it is also recorded in tree rings from Ireland, England, Siberia and North and South America."

The Black Sea froze. Ice formed on the Nile. South America was gripped by drought; the Mayan civilisation collapsed.

The Dark Ages ended as quickly as they began and the world began to warm. This was the Medieval Warming from 900 to 1300 AD.

"The amount of land devoted to agriculture increased and fields crept up to higher altitudes where farming had not previously taken place. Europe was warm and rainfall was higher. New cities were built and the population increased from 30 million to 80 million. At the same time the thousands of temples at Angkor Wat in SE Asia were built. In China these warmer conditions led to a doubling of the population in 100 years. The Medieval Warming was the zenith of Muslim imperialism, culture and science. Economies boomed."

And then came the Little Ice Age, and it all went wrong again. As Plimer tells it, the world warms and cools as quickly as a steaming hot bath goes tepid. He writes of giant undersea volcanoes spitting out more carbon dioxide than people have released since the start of the industrial revolution, of terrestrial volcanoes like the Toba eruption on Sumatra a mere 74,000 years ago which threw so much acid aerosols and dust into the atmosphere that the human population was reduced to as few as 4000 individuals. We were nearly wiped out, just like 99.99 per cent of all the world's species have since life began. Becoming extinct is something most plants and animals do, and which the rest are still practising.

Unlike the ancient Greeks or the Stone Age hunters, Plimer doesn't believe that gods or beasts created the earth or its life. Nevertheless there's something of a missionary zeal about the man; he'd love to convert the listener. He talks of glaciers reaching down to the shores of the Mediterranean, of their retreat and the spread of hominids to the very north, of Viking settlements on a lush and pleasant Greenland. All these changes, hot and cold, happened well before Man started his lawn mower, before the internal combustion engine, before the Industrial Revolution or Emissions Trading.

So why is his voice seemingly the only one to argue that humans aren't responsible for global warming? How can he be right and all the other scientists wrong?

If Plimer is irritated by the question he doesn't show it. In fact, a smile spreads across his worldly face.

"Now that's very interesting," he says. "The media went into years of brouhaha about global warming and fellow travellers boarded the bandwagon at every opportunity. The cause became fashionable especially among climate experts such as Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, Meryl Streep and numerous other show business folk. Al Gore went from strength to strength and even compared 'true believers' such as himself to Galileo. Those who had other scientific views were attacked.

"The international panel on climate change gathered many climatologists, meteorologists, environmentalists and political activists. Its first report was in 1990. Three working groups had authors who contributed to a series of chapters under the guidance of lead authors. These people are touted as the 2500 scientific experts who constitute a consensus. 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.

"The IPCC process is related to environmental activism, politics and opportunism. It is unrelated to science."

There is much in Plimer's book which could make the blood boil, if not the oceans evaporate. According to the geologist, deniers of human-caused global warming have become the new sceptics, the distrusted, the heretical.

IN THE EARLY 1980s, a team of palaeontologists and archaeologists was excavating a cave on the banks of the Franklin River in Tasmania. They found there evidence of Stone Age man dating back 22,000 years, the most southerly people on the planet at that time.

"Tasmania then was much colder and drier," explained ANU archaeologist Dr Rhys Jones during the dig. "People had walked across a flat plain from what's now Victoria to what is now Tasmania. They arrived in the (Tasmanian) south-west and sheltered in this cave, using it for more than 7000 years.

"Then the climate became much wetter and warmer. The grasslands on which the people depended gave way to thick, impenetrable forest. The forest squeezed out the people, and they were forced to leave.

"The scale of that warming was very quick, and the flooding of Bass Strait incredibly rapid. It would have been possible for a grandfather to sit on the shore of Tasmania, point across the vast sea that's now Bass Strait, and say to his grandson: 'I walked across there.' It flooded in a generation."

Now that's climate change. Archaeologists have found the remains of villages on the bed of what's now the Black Sea before it was either black or sea. There are rock paintings of people herding cattle in what's now the Sahara Desert. Just a few hours north-east of Adelaide is the Mungo Lakes national park, where there's evidence of some of the earliest hominid occupation on Australia around what was once a huge inland sea. There was a time when Lake Eyre and Lake Torrens were fresh, when the Murray River flowed out to sea near Port Pirie. And if you really want to imagine climate change, think of the Himalayas as a boring flat plain or of South America smacking into North America and stopping equatorial currents between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

The story of climate change is the story of the earth itself, of life beginning and often ending, of asteroids and comets smacking into planets and wiping out up to 96 per cent of all marine genera. Were it not for climate change, we might still be shrews scurrying in the night to hide from carnivorous reptiles. Climate change, argues Plimer, is driven by the sun, by eccentricities in the earth's orbit and rotation, by geological and astronomical forces so strong that humans' influence is relatively puny.

But Plimer's latest book, its kindest critic will acknowledge, stays away from sweeping adventures in geology. Desperate to avoid generalities, eager to explain every scientific nuance, it's packed with 2311 footnotes, almost all of them scientific. Al Gore's film is Muzak compared with Plimer's symphony.

"Most scientists are anarchistic, bow to no authority and construct conclusions based on evidence," he writes. "Matters of science cannot be solved by authority or consensus. Scientific evidence is unrelated to politics, ideology, popular paradigms, world views, fads, ethic, morality, religion and culture. If you are a Buddhist, Baha'i or Baptist, the speed of light is still about 299,792.5 kilometres per second. If it is dark, the speed of light is still about 299,792.5 kilometres per second."

And that's about the speed that human-caused climate change believers will respond to Professor Plimer's tract. Few arguments ignite the passions as much as this. Religion comes close, and that too is a belief system where adherents of one faith are so convinced of their own god's supremacy that they will go to war to win converts, is the most grievous mistake to litter history.

Just above Plimer's own basement office at the University of Adelaide is more salubrious accommodation of Barry Brook, who sits in the Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change. They argue, they disagree, and they are equally stimulated by the other's debate.

After all, we now know that the world's circumference is three times the size Columbus thought it was, and that a northern summer will be followed by a Russian winter.

And we know IBM's Tom Watson was wrong. Five computers will never be enough, even just to do climate modelling.

[Rev.Cambeul]

The Great Global Warming Swindle

http://youtube.com/results?search_query=Great-Global-Warming-Swindle

Everything you've ever been told about Global Warming is probably untrue. This film blows the whistle on the biggest swindle in modern history. We are told that Man Made Global Warming is the biggest ever threat to mankind. There is no room for scientific doubt. Well, watch this film and make up your own mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYhCQv5tNsQ

Many, many years ago while reading history books, watching documentaries and so forth, I learned that around twelve hundred years, ago global warming had allowed the Norse – commonly known as Vikings –  to travel across near arctic regions and settle in places such as Iceland, Greenland and North America.

By the time of Columbus in 1492, global cooling had again taken place making it impossible for farming communities to survive in Greenland, and the route the Vikings used to get to North America being via Greenland, was no longer viable, therefore North America was effectively closed off to Europeans until another and more direct route across the ocean was discovered.

By the way: It is known that Viking maps would have been available to Columbus, and being the skilled navigator he was, Columbus would not have ignored any maps of the region he was potentially entering. Especially when those maps were common knowledge to the seafaring communities of Europe.

So when I first heard about how we are causing global warming and must do something about it now! I thought, "What a load of bullshit!"

Don't get me wrong. I agree that we should conserve natural resources. I agree that we should not needlessly pollute the air. I agree that the ecosystem should be protected from big business, urban encroachment, vandals and the like. But buggered if I'm going to believe that I am ruining the planet because I have a car, a computer, a light and a fan.

We know that global warming and cooling is both an historical and an ongoing fact. That being said, why do they bother with the guilt trip they are forcing on us?

Like all guilt trips, look to see who gains from your feelings of guilt and the actions or lack of action they give rise to.

Following this little rant is an article by Robert Kemp, on global warming. The original can be found at http://www.right-now.org. It explains everything I have already said, and much more. Amongst other things, it also explains why I'm not the only person to doubt the lack of self interest behind the global warming, guilt-enhancement lobby.

@Cailen.


Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don't Want You to Know

Is the weather truly getting worse? When it comes to global warming, dire predictions seem to be all we see or hear. Climatologists Patrick Michaels and Robert Balling Jr. explain why the news and information we receive about global warming have become so apocalyptic. The science itself has become increasingly biased, with warnings of extreme consequences from global warming becoming the norm. That bias is then communicated through the media, who focus on only extreme predictions. The authors compellingly illuminate the other side of the story, the science we aren't being told. This body of work details how the impact of global warming is far less severe than is generally believed and far from catastrophic.


Robert Kemp writes: We are constantly being told by 'experts' that global warming is upon us and that in order to avert catastrophe, we must modify our behaviour in various ways, all of which involve self-denial and unpleasant consequences.

Even worse, if we do not Repent, the consequences of our selfishness will be even more dire. Whilst not denying that this very well might be the case, as an old and weary cynic, I mutter sotto voce to myself "Cui bono?"

I remain utterly unconvinced of the disinterestedness of those who are doing the shouting.

Global warming is being pushed as an incontrovertible fact, and a bad fact at that. No-one has a good word to say for it. Another universally accepted truth (unless you live in Alabama) is Darwin's Theory of Evolution. It is one of those things that everyone just knows to be right, without having even to think about it, but Darwin's theory has never actually been proved to be true. I rather suspect that Darwin did in fact get it more or less right but, nevertheless, no-one has ever actually proved him to be right. Likewise, in some areas of measurement, there is solid evidence that the world is now a warmer place than it was a hundred years ago, but that doesn't justify worldwide hysteria. And in any case, even if the world is getting warmer, is that necessarily a bad thing?

It seems to me that the temperature of the earth has always fluctuated and it has been getting warmer and colder for centuries. In the 17th Century, they used to roast whole oxen on fires lit on the ice covering the river Thames at London.

Can you remember the last Frost Fair, or even the last time that the Thames froze from bank to bank? No, neither can I, so the world must be getting warmer, but it doesn't seem to have done us much harm.

In the 19th Century, when our collective subconscious formed its notions of the traditional Christmas, it was still pretty damned cold, as is witnessed by all those Christmas cards with skaters and holly and snow-drifts and what-not.

So the world must be getting warmer. QED, one might say, but before getting too excited, let us turn to the Greenland Question.

Greenland is the biggest island in the world, nominally part of Denmark, but virtually uninhabited and moreover largely uninhabitable. But it wasn't always so.

When you come to think about it, Greenland is a pretty weird name for anyone to give to a country that is now 99% glacier or barren rock and 1% lichens. Not the sort of name that springs to mind for such a grey, treeless and windswept place, is it?

But wait. A thousand years ago, Greenland was settled by the Vikings, who prospered, and grew wheat and flax there, and it was at that time that it received its name.

It was, 1,000 years ago, genuinely a green land.

At about the same time, monks in Yorkshire were tending their vines.

If the Vikings could grow wheat in Greenland, and monks in Yorkshire could grow grapes, it was pretty certain that those two spots did not enjoy the same climatic blessings as they do today.

Since wheat growing in Greenland is now impossible and grape growing in Yorkshire would be a distinctly unprofitable occupation, I would incline to the view that we could have a good deal more global warming without coming to too much harm.

If it was fine for the world to be that warm then, what's the problem with it being quite a good bit colder now, even if the temperature is going up?

It should not be forgotten that these terrible doomsday scenarios are being peddled by those who have a vested interest in our believing them. Whether they are true or not is immaterial; it is whether we will swallow them which is important.

Those who propagate the global-warming-equals-catastrophe thesis are scientists, and other pseudo-scientific hangers-on, but they are first and foremost human beings, with the ordinary worries about ordinary life. Just like the rest of us, they want bigger and newer cars; they want more frequent and more exotic holidays; they want bigger houses; they want to be able to send their children to private schools and so on. Their ordinary life depends upon there being a pay-check every month, and the pay-check depends on there being a crisis. No Global Warming Crisis, and instead you have a domestic balance of payments crisis, consequent upon being fired by your lab.

No-one is going to cough up research grants to a laboratory which comes up with the notion that "It's alright, chaps, nothing to fret about, just a minor blip well within the earth's natural variation; just relax and pour another G&T"

Not many new Volvos in that kind of report, but plenty of P45s. Far be it from me to suggest that the scientists involved are corrupt, or self-serving, but they are hardly disinterested observers either and their findings should be viewed with scepticism.

Thousands of jobs worldwide are dependent upon the menace of global warming, and these people aren't going to roll over and join the dole queue without a fight. For them, global warming has to be right; the mortgage payments depend upon it.

I remember 30 or 40 years ago the boffins were predicting that the next ice-age would shortly be upon us, with the Channel clogged, not by ferries and container ships, but by icebergs. The oil would have all been used up by 1990 and we should go to work on an egg, as it was good for us. Oh yeah?

The wallies who made all those alarming and totally wrong predictions are either now dead, or safely enjoying an index-linked retirement, in their egg-free, oil-fired homes, with nary even an ice-floe in sight, let alone a proper full-size 'berg to scare them. Will one of the survivors kindly explain why we haven't all died of salmonella poisoning or frozen to death in our unheated houses? If they could be that wrong then, why should we believe that the next generation of so-called experts is any better at getting it right?

When a scientist can convince me that it was fine for it to be warm enough to grow wheat in Greenland a thousand years ago, but that to move back to the same climate would be a catastrophe now, then I might start to get worried.

Till then, while we wait for some real scientists to do some proper research, pass me another G&T, there's a good fellow.

Robert Kemp


Australian astronomical Society warns of global COOLING as Sun's activity 'significantly diminishes'
EPW Blog | June 29, 2008

https://canadafreepress.com/article/australian-astronomical-society-warns-of-global-cooling-as-suns-activity-si

A new paper published by the Astronomical Society of Australia has a warning to global warming believers not immediately obvious from the summary: Based on our claim that changes in the Sun's equatorial rotation rate are synchronized with changes in the Sun's orbital motion about the barycentre, we propose that the mean period for the Sun's meridional flow is set by a Synodic resonance between the flow period (~22.3 yr), the overall 178.7-yr repetition period for the solar orbital motion, and the 19.86-yr synodic period of Jupiter and Saturn.

Or as one of the authors, Ian Wilson, kindly explained to me: It supports the contention that the level of activity on the Sun will significantly diminish sometime in the next decade and remain low for about 20 – 30 years. On each occasion that the Sun has done this in the past the World's mean temperature has dropped by ~ 1 – 2 C. Oh. Global cooling coming, then. Obvious, really.

[Albert]

Originally I intended to do a Degree in Geology and it is something I have always been interested in. The really scary thing geologically concerning global warming is the Permian extinction event because the isotopes of carbon in the fossil record seem to be those from methane hydrate. If the earths temperature rises 5 degrees it will melt out the methane hydrate from the seabed causing another 5 degree rise which will actually kill off 99% of all life on earth bar what is left at the poles.
We are all seeing weather extremes lately and I don't see anything to be gained from playing down the billions of tons of carbon being added to the atmosphere everyday. As it pertains to our Religion, the mass pollution of "Our " planet justifies a a global cull of mud races.


Great documentary
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=The+Day+The+Earth+Nearly+Died+%28Documentary%29

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFu6lLz86Mc

[Miss.Jane]

I agree with Rev Albert on this.  From a perspective of "what is best for the White race" we can view the issue of human contribution to climate change as being the developing world being the big problem.  The White race would be able to continue to enjoy technology and develop "green" alternatives but this is all hampered by the two problems of the tolerance towards the non-White world continuing to pollute the planet as well as the problem of certain financial vested interests in continuing to use oil and fossil fuels generally.

Stopping the oil companies and the developing world would be in our collective racial advantage and it just so happens that the science and the morality is also weighted heavily towards that side.