from The Australian
IAN Plimer calls himself an old-fashioned scientist. That means you question what others won't. You marry yourself to the data; you buck the received wisdom and political correctness of your colleagues.
When it comes to climate change, you say: "I was trained to be sceptical."
This is not exactly the view de jour when the great and the good, from Kevin Rudd to 2007 Australian of the Year Tim Flannery and former US vice-president Al Gore, are singing from the same hymn sheet about the hydra-headed menace of global warming.
Australia's top earth scientist has inserted a typically discordant note into the chorus. In his latest book, Heaven and Earth, Plimer sets out the "missing science" of climate change and challenges the assumption that the world's warming is down to human activity.
Far from heating up to dangerous levels, the planet is in a lull in an ice age that began 37million years ago, he says.
True, the climate is changing within these cyclical parameters, but less dramatically than it has at other times in Earth's history and with none of the catastrophic consequences talked up by the doom-and-gloom merchants.
"There is always change going on," he tells Inquirer. "I don't dispute that. The extent and origin of it are another matter."
Plimer puts forward the case, in 485 closely argued pages, that far too much emphasis has been given to the level of atmospheric carbondioxide in the scientific modelling of climate change.
Contrary to what the Prime Minister may say in spruiking the carbon pollution reduction scheme, Plimer's position is that CO2 is not a pollutant but a necessity of life. For a start, it is food for plants. "Global warming and a high CO2 content bring prosperity and lengthen your life ... without CO2 there would be no complex life on Earth," he writes.
While an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide theoretically may contribute to temperature rise, Plimer says there is no evidence to show this and plenty of proof, if you choose to look for it, to the contrary.
He accepts that people can alter the weather: the "urban heat island effect" has proved towns and cities are warmer than thesurrounding countryside, and in Europe there is evidence that weekends tend to be cooler and wetter because of the drop in human activity.
But that is not the same as changing the climate of the planet as a whole; Plimer takes a very long view of the forces at play here.
By his reasoning, climate changes are cyclical and driven by the Earth's position in the galaxy, the sun, wobbles in the planet's orbit, ocean currents and plate tectonics. When he peers back in time, there were periods when atmospheric CO2 was much higher than it is now yet produced no disastrous shift in the climate.
To reduce climate change to the single variable of carbon emissions abandons "all we know about planet Earth, the sun and the cosmos", Plimer says, and that is a leap of faith no self-respecting scientist should take.
"Global warming has become the secular religion of today," he writes in the powerful conclusion to his book. Logic, questioning or contrary data are not permitted. To thumb your nose at the prevailing orthodoxy is to risk being branded a climate-change denier, a scientific knuckle-dragger, or worse. Plimer doesn't let it worry him. "My job is to profess my discipline and, if people don't like that, bad luck," he says.
WE'RE talking in a borrowed office at the back of the printing works where his new book is being packed. Plimer has been here since 6.30am signing copies. It is a cool morning, overcast outside, with rain spitting from the sky. A nice change for dry-as-a-bone Adelaide, his home for the past three years.
If climate change is biting, this is where the hurt could be most acute. When the PM toured the Murray River's dying lower lakes last winter, he said the parched expanse of exposed soilbed, southeast of the city, testified to the reach of global warming.
Adelaide's water supply is in serious trouble. Despite the state Government's insistence that water for households is guaranteed, the boss of the new Murray-Darling Basin Authority, Rob Freeman, blew the whistle this week when he told The Australian there might not be sufficient "carry" water to offset evaporation and seepage losses of moving supplies to the city's reservoirs.
This after a summer where up to 80 Adelaideans died in a record-setting heatwave and 173 Victorians died in the Black Saturday bushfires. Queensland and northern NSW were inundated with the worst flooding in years; a powerful cyclone threatened coastal communities between Townsville and Gladstone but spun out to sea. More frequent and fierce weather-related disasters, wasn't that what the global warmers were predicting?
Plimer agrees people are right to worry about what's next. Nature, however, has always shown a fierce face in Australia and the destructive summer of 2008-09 should be kept in perspective.
"We should be concerned about bushfires, cyclones," he says. "But they are natural disasters and this is a dry continent prone to them. Things come to pass."
Plimer knows a thing or two about taking on powerful interests. He is not a man to be dismissed easily; his impressive academic and publishing record attests to that.
In addition to his day job at the University of Adelaide's school of environmental sciences, he is emeritus professor of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne and the author of seven books and 120 scholarly papers.
He is Australia's best-known academic geologist and certainly one of the most outspoken. Plimer has never backed away from a fight. In Telling Lies for God, he took on the creationists. When a group of them from Sydney, claiming to have evidence the wreck of Noah's Ark reposed on a mountain in Turkey, sued him for alleged defamation, Plimer hit straight back by mortgaging his house to cross-litigate in the Federal Court.
In part, he alleged that the creationists had breached the Trade Practices Act by engaging in misleading and deceptive conduct. The court disagreed but upheld an aspect of his case over copyright; the German Geological Society made him the first Australian to receive its Leopold von Buch medal.
Plimer went on to win one of Australia's top science awards, the Eureka prize, for his first book on global warming, A Short History of Planet Earth.
Plimer, 62, see parallels with his fight with the Christian fundamentalists. "The creationists were trying to teach a religious fundamentalism dressed up as science ... and they totally changed the nature science," he says.
"The science is now based on consensus, and we have thousands of scientists who have got everything to gain by saying the world is going to end. We have lost the tie to evidence. So I make great comparison ... between the way creationists operate and the way some of the rabid environmentalists and global warmers operate. The parallels are quite similar."
Plimer reserves his sharpest criticism for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has driven the international debate. Very much for the worse, in the professor's judgment. "The IPCC process is related to environmental activism, politics and opportunism," he writes in Heaven and Earth.
Plimer argues that the IPCC is dominated by atmospheric scientists, who in turn are obsessed by carbon dioxide emissions, skewing the process. The problems are compounded by primitive computer modelling. He reviewed five computer predictions of climate made in 2000, underpinning IPCC findings, and found there was no relationship between predicted future temperature and actual measured temperature even during a short period. Ditto for a link between temperature and the atmospheric CO2 content.
"To get a complete view of the planet, you need to have far more than atmospheric scientists on the IPCC," Plimer says. "What they have done is separate the atmosphere from the way the world works ... you need solar physicists, you need cosmologists, you need astronomers, you need geologists, bacterial specialists and on you go ... we don't hear anything about those things from the IPCC."
But what about this ice age business? How does that square with melting polar ice, rising sea levels and 40C summers in northern Europe? Well, taking the last point first, Plimer says none of the temperature variations in the 20th century was outside the range of normal variability. There was alarm in the 1970s that the decreasing temperature was heralding another ice age, he says. After 1976, when temperatures started to rise again, the clamour broke out over the greenhouse effect and global warming. Yet since 1998 temperatures have been falling, to profound scientific silence, he says. "It is not possible to make computer model forecasts of climate change for the year 2040, 2100 or 2300 based on a few decades of data," he says.
The history of the planet is etched in rock, and Plimer says it shows that for half of the past six million years the Earth was warmer than it is now. The ice caps are geologically unusual; people were growing barley and wheat in Greenland 1000 years ago. Ice ages come and go, yet no one knows precisely why. Sea levels rise and fall. It was ever thus, Plimer says. The planet is in a constant state of flux. Why would that dynamic suddenly change?
