Chris Guest

Review: Ian Plimer - How to get Expelled from School

Chris Guest -

How to get Expelled from School -
A guide to climate change for pupils, parents and punters
By Ian Plimer
Connor Court, A$29.95

Capitalising on the popular success of his previous book, Heaven and Earth: Global Warming – The Missing Science, Professor Ian Plimer has returned to our bookshelves inviting insurrection from the youth against the politically correct science that they are being taught in school. In contrast with Heaven and Earth, this book is much lighter on the science. Chapters that deal with scientific topics quickly divert into attacks on Tim Flannery, Al Gore and the IPCC. The text lacks footnotes and the skeptical reader is left to guess the sources of many of the claims that run counter to conventional science. At the heart of this book is what purports to be a scientific argument demolishing the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming.

  • For most of time, the planet’s atmosphere had a far greater carbon dioxide content than now yet the planet both warmed and cooled. This clearly shows that other great forces drive climate change, that CO2 does not and that the hypothesis is wrong. (pp170)
  • Each of the six major ice ages, including the current one that started 34 million years ago, began when the atmospheric CO2 content was higher than now. These six ice ages show that the hypothesis is wrong. (pp171)
  • Ice core measurements show temperature rises some 800 to 2000 years before the atmospheric CO2 content rises. Again, the hypothesis is shown to be wrong. (pp172)
  • Some 24,000 years ago, during the peak of glaciation there was a sudden warming of about 15C. Was this warming due to smoke stacks emitting CO2? Of course not. The hypothesis is again wrong. (pp173)
  • Roman times were warmer than now but this could not be due to human emissions of CO2 and again the hypothesis is wrong. (pp176)

And so on. Plimer believes that he has demonstrated to us 16 times in six pages why the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming must be wrong. He concludes: “How many times does a hypothesis have to be shown to be wrong before it is rejected? Only once! The climate industry still clings to the carbon dioxide hypothesis and the only way this can be done is to ignore the history of the planet and pretend that the planet had a stable benign climate until the Industrial Revolution. This is not science. I would like to know what particular drug these catastrophists are ‘on’ as it clearly obliterates the past and creates a wonderful false reality!” (pp175)

Of course, these are all straw man arguments. Most of the evidence that Plimer uses in these arguments is acknowledged by scientists in the field, though some of his claims such as the Roman era being globally warmer than today are disputed. There is no contradiction between saying that there have been natural temperature variations in prehistory and stating an AGW hypothesis. As CO2 is not purported to be the only driver of climate, an enumeration of prior ages with higher CO2 and lower temperatures does not refute the hypothesis. Anyone that grasps a feedback mechanism will have no problem reconciling peaks in temperature have historically occurred 800 years or more prior to peaks in CO2 levels in the ice core data with the notion of CO2 increases giving rise to a temperature increase.

Much of Plimer’s critique of historical CO2 levels and his uncertainty of any anthropogenic rise appear to be derived from the work of the Polish physician and scientist Zbigniew Jaworowski. Jaworowski’s argument is that preindustrial CO2 levels have been systematically underestimated by a range of circumstances including:

  • a misdating of the CO2 in the Antarctic Siple ice core;
  • a natural attrition of CO2 in older ice deposits that masquerades as an apparent historical increase of CO2;
  • poor positioning of the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii has led to atmospheric CO2 levels being corrupted by vehicle exhaust and
    volcanic eruptions; and
  • historical CO2 measurements back to the 1820s have been systematically discarded if they don’t match presumptions from the Siple ice core.

This argument was made in various articles and books that Jaworowski published in the early 1990s[1]. The subsequent advances in ice core drilling at Vostok base in Antactica have given researchers a 420,000 year record that shows CO2 levels fluctuating in accord with the Earth’s orbital cycles and that CO2 levels have never exceeded 300ppm. This is a strong refutation of Jaworowski’s hypothesis of CO2 levels being lower in deeper core samples because of a gradual release into the atmosphere. Similarly, the corroboration of the Mauna Loa data set with samples taken at the South Pole over a similar time period eliminates any suggestion that the increase in atmospheric CO2 is a localised phenomenon.

Plimer presents Jaworowski’s arguments against the reliability of CO2 monitoring without criticism but also uses evidence from the Vostok ice core and the corroboration of South Pole and Mauna Loa data in other parts of How to get Expelled from School.

On sea level changes, Plimer gives significant weight to the views of Swedish geophysicist, Nils-Axel Mörner. According to Plimer: “In the past 2000 years, sea level has oscillated with five peaks reaching 0.6 to 1.2 metres above the present level. There is actually a Commission on Sea Level and Coastal Evolution, an independent body unrelated to the IPCC. … It states that by 2100 AD, sea level will have risen by 5 ±15cm.” (p144)

This statement is interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA) did convene a Commission on Sea Level and Coastal Evolution, but it was disbanded after Mörner’s term as president was completed in 2003 and INQUA has been at pains to distance itself from the Mörner claims ever since[2]. Mörner made the following statement about a 21st century sea levels rise on the commission’s website: “My personal evaluation (Mörner, 1995) is ‘10 cm, at the most 20 cm, in the next century’.” [3]

In later writings, Mörner had refined this figure to the “5 ±15cm” that Plimer quotes, rather than 47 ±39 cm of the IPCC. The statement that sea level has oscillated with five peaks between 0.6m and 1.2m in the last 2000 years is also to be found in the writings of Mörner. This runs counter to most research in this area that shows stable conditions for most of the last 2000 years, aside from a steep rise since 1800AD[4]. It appears from numerous papers that Mörner has written that his estimates are based on visual inspections where he attempts to identify and date high water marks in stone formations, soil and exposed tree roots. Mörner’s methodology seems eccentric when compared to the standard techniques such as as the dating strata in coral reefs using an isotopic analysis. In recent years, Mörner has also taken an interest in finding a scientific basis for dowsing, discovering a calendrical alignment in a Swedish stone circle and identifying an ancient Greek trading post in the south of Sweden.

Plimer produces a diagram that shows the annual increase in methane levels based on ice core data from Law Dome Antartica and atmospheric measurement at Cape Grim in Tasmania. Plimer’s graph ends abruptly at the year 2000 prior to significant methane rises that have occurred since 2007. This cropped data fits his narrative that increasing methane emissions were caused by leaks in Russian gas pipelines. “It was capitalism that reduced human emissions of methane to the atmosphere, not environmental activism, taxation or nature.” (p134).

While dismissing Michael Mann’s reconstruction of past temperatures as a fraud, Plimer gives his own proxies to the past climactic conditions. We learn that the ancient land of Lydia, which according in common wisdom is an inland region of Asia Minor, is now a submerged city (p143) and that Hannibal successfully marched elephants over the Alps in 218BC because the mountain range was ice free (p129).

Professor Plimer concludes this book with 101 questions that students might like to ask their ‘warmist’ teachers. Tree hugging pedagogues will cringe in terror when they are asked, “Do plants know the difference between carbon dioxide emitted from human activities and carbon dioxide from natural emissions?” (p199) or “If water vapour is the main greenhouse gas, why doesn’t the government have a tax for water vapour emissions?” (p203)

Overall, there are few surprises in this book. Professor Plimer regurgitates many of his earlier inaccuracies and polemics. His disaffected readers are unlikely to be expelled from school. Neither will they be any wiser about the science of climate.

REFERENCES

  1. Jaworowski, Z., Segalstad, T.V. and Hisdal, V., “Atmospheric CO2 and Global Warming – A Critical review” Meddelelser 119, Norsk
    Polarinstitutt, Oslo 1992 . http://www.CO2web.info/np-m-119.pdf
  2. Letter from Prof. John J. Clagu to Yuri Osipov, President of the Russian Academy of Sciences July 21, 2004 . http://apps.edf.org/documents/3868_morner_exposed.pdf
  3. Mörner, N-A, 2003 http://pog.nu/sea/07_research_topics/rt5.htm
  4. CSIRO, http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_hist_intro.html

Originally published in The Skeptic Vol. 32, No 3. September 2012
(https://www.skeptics.com.au/wp-content/uploads/magazine/The Skeptic Volume 32 (2012) No 3.pdf)