Reply To: Global warming lies and climate change hysteria

#4664

You might think being a university professor might ensure that when you spout supposed facts, you can actually back them up.

But No! – witness the remarkable Ian Plimer, denier extraordinaire. I lately saw an article by him in the UK’s Daily Mail, telling everyone not to worry about climate change, and packed with info suggesting it’s a grand non-event. How comforting this might seem. Heck, he has more in a recent book, Heaven and Earth.

And yet, Ian P turns out to be little more than a big bag of bombast, and something of a scaredy cat to boot, judging by his unwillingness to enter into proper debate (shades of the legendary Lomborg here, I think: present information, and then evade straight answers to questions, even duck for cover, when folk have the temerity to highlight your errors. Not that fans of denialism mind, for they aren’t fond of fact checking, instead favouring cherry picking n twaddle, as this thread shows).

Anyways, on to some Plimer-isms:

Open Mind website quotes Plimer in radio interview:

Quote:
IAN PLIMER: No, in the 1930s, it was much hotter. We had from 1920 to 1940 far less arctic sea ice than now, much, much warmer temperatures.

– and goes on to show Plimer is talking utter nonsense: it’s much hotter now.

Pants on Fire

DeSmog Blog quotes question to Plimer from George Monbiot, the Guardian’s scourge of deniers (of course, the Plimer-ism goes unanswered):

Quote:
"You state that “Volcanoes produce more CO2 than the world’s cars and industries combined.” (p413)

This is similar to the claim in The Great Global Warming Swindle, whose narrator maintained that “Volcanoes produce more CO2 each year than all the factories and cars and planes and other sources of man-made carbon dioxide put together.”

But you do not provide a source for it.

This is what the US Geological Survey says: “Human activities release more than 130 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes”.

http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/gas/index.php

a. Please provide a reference for your claim.

b. How do you explain the discrepancy between this claim and the published data?

Clumsy Denier Ian Plimer Limps AWAY FROM the Finish Line

If you have stamina for it, you can read a radio interview, in which the interview is well prepared and on the ball, and Plimer verbally wriggles around:

Ian Plimer discusses his book denying global warming