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Business-Managed Democracy »Environment » Global Warming » Denial Scientists » Ian Plimer |
Ian Plimer is a professor of mining geology at the 
University of Adelaide in Australia and a favourite of Australian global warming deniers. None of his refereed articles are in the area of climate science.
According to Plimer's article in IPA Review:
Climate has always changed. It always has and always will. Sea level has always changed. Ice sheets come and go. Life always changes. Extinctions of life are normal. Planet Earth is dynamic and evolving. Climate changes are cyclical and random. Through the eyes of a geologist, I would be really concerned if there were no change to Earth over time. In the light of large rapid natural climate changes, just how much do humans really change climate?... There is no problem with global warming. It stopped in 1998. The last two years of global cooling have erased nearly thirty years of temperature increase.
Plimer's 2009 book disputing climate change science, Heaven and Earth: Global Warming – The Missing Science, became a best-seller. It was launched in Melbourne by business executive Sir Arvi Parbo, former chairman of Western Mining Corporation (WMC), Alcoa of Australia, and Broken Hill Proprietary Company (BHP).
Michael Ashley, professor of astrophysics at the University of NSW, reviewed the book for The Australian newspaper. He wrote:
Plimer claims that scientists such as himself, who do not agree with the consensus, are labelled deniers, "yet their scientific doubts are not addressed". Nothing could be further from the truth. All of Plimer's arguments have been addressed ad nauseam by patient climate scientists on websites or in the literature....
While the text is annotated profusely with footnotes and refers to papers in the top journals, thus giving it the veneer of scholarship, it is often the case that the cited articles do not support the text. Plimer repeatedly veers off to the climate sceptic's journal of choice, the bottom-tier Energy and Environment, to advance all manner of absurd theories: for example, that CO2 concentrations actually have fallen since 1942...
It is not "merely" atmospheric scientists that would have to be wrong for Plimer to be right. It would require a rewriting of biology, geology, physics, oceanography, astronomy and statistics.
Similarly, Kurt Lambert, professor of earth science and president of the Australian Academy of Science, concluded:
Heaven and Earth is not a work of science, it is an opinion of an author who happens to be a scientist...
If this had been written by an honours student, I would have failed it with the comment: You have obviously trawled through a lot of material but the critical analysis is missing. Supporting arguments and unsupported arguments in the literature are not distinguished or properly referenced, and you have left the impression that you have not developed an understanding of the processes involved. Rewrite!
Plimer is the director of three mining companies for which he is paid mainly in share options although he also received $300,000 for the two years 2008 and 9 from CBH Resources. Another of the companies Ivanhoe Australia, is 83% owned by Ivanhoe Mines which in turn owns coal deposits in Mongolia.
Plimer is an associate of the think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs and on the advisory council of the warming-denying Global Warming Policy Foundation. His work is also promoted and distributed by the Lavoisier Group.
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