Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science
Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science – Review
Ian Plimer is perhaps best known as the geologist who debunked creationism in “Telling Lies for God”. Here he turns his attention to the global warming beliefs that are now resulting in huge (possibly disastrous) policy changes by governments in the hope of narrowly avoiding “climate change”. In “Heaven and Earth”, I think Plimer does pretty well. First off though, if you are currently expecting a simple widely read, this book is perhaps not it. Not that it is difficult to widely read, but it is technically dense, the average page having maybe ten references to scholarly papers to support its claims. And it has its mistakes. There is a diagram on temperature forecasts which is not well explained, another one which, so it is falsely claimed on the web, has been withdrawn by its author for errors. Also the author has a frequently recurring habit of writing the opposite of what he means; it generally happens on minor points, but it distracts from immediately following the argument. For example, he writes that the early half of the little ice age was more variable than the latter half (p 75), then a little later says the opposite (p 79). I quickly noticed maybe ten such examples on my way through. They are not by any means fatal to his argument, but I am sure his opponents would dig them out and present them as if they were. But in a 500 page book, total correctness from include to cover is, I think, far too high an expectation. The honest question is: does he carry his major arguments? I believe that he does. He shows, for instance, that CO2 in environmental history has been up to 25 times higher than it now is, and that in this era it is at its lowest in the complete story of life on Earth. He shows how malaria is a infection of poverty, not of temperature, and has actually existed in England in the coldest of times. He discusses the major ’snowball earth’ glaciations that most likely eventually took ice all the way to the equator, but which, luckily, preceded the form of multicellular life. (If such an ice age occured immediately, it is hard to see how any multicelled life, let alone individual life, could survive.) The major impression the book gave me with was ‘being given the great picture’. The central question I was simply asking myself when I first began now investigating global warming in depth was which side is right? I eventually came to the conclusion that the realists are (climate has always changed, and recent temperatures and temperature changes are within chronological limits). So this book was not the factor that finally convinced me. The specific fact that did so, however, is originally included here. Pages 371 onwards discuss the IPCC’s climate models, which predict an increasingly warm tropospheric ‘warm spot’ in the atmosphere, providing a ‘hot blanket’ that is heating up the planet. This ‘hot blanket’ simply isn’t there, as Plimer explains. It boils down to this very unadorned fact: on a freezing night, if you need to get warm, you must have hot air around you somehow – turn on a heater, put on a blanket, whatever, but unless hot air contains you, you easily won’t get warm. The planet does not have any warmer air around it than it ever had, so it simply cannot be heating up due to insulation. Since that is the main application of global warmism, the theory must be wrong. All the rest is ’sound and fury, signifying nothing’. But Plimer takes on that sound and fury, and shows it for the flim flam it really is. If I were writing such a book, I might not choose Plimer’s organisation. He starts with the environmental record of the Earth’s climate, and moves on to the Sun, the Earth (volcanoes, extinctions, desertification, etc.), then Ice (ice ages, glaciers, antarctica), then Water (sea levels, acidification, corals),then Air (greenhouse effect, temperature, hurricanes, carbon dioxide), and finishes with a extremely amusing chapter entitled ‘Et moi’ – perhaps not so rumbunctious as some of the more acidic writings of Bertrand Russell, but good simply reading nonetheless. Plimer has had his share of run-ins with shysters, as witnessed by his court battle with creationists, and he doesn’t shrink from eventually taking on the latest bunch – still speculating about the judgement St Peter might one day fall upon one of them! The final section puts the sheer evil and lunacy of the warming scaremongering into strong relief. At the possibility of really spoiling the full story, here is his finishing sentence: “Human stupidity is barely exceeded by God’s mercy, which is infinite.” When the recent climate insanity is completely exploded, this book will, I am sure, be seen as one of the breaking points.