You might think in an ostenisbly 'scientific' book that Plimer would
deal with one of the key features of the GHG warming fingerprint --
coterminous stratospheric cooling with near surface warming -- which
affirms the claims about
the role of CO2/GHGs. Plimer ignores it for all of his 500 pages of
polemic because he is either ignorant of its importance or more
likely, can't reconcile it with his central claim.

Plimer reduxes the now discredited graph from Durkin's Great Global
Warming Swindle -- which Durking himself had to withdraw. Plimer was
so impressed with this that he used it three times in the book. Plimer
wanted to keep using it though because he thought Durkin was the
victim of political correctness -- so this was a deliberate
falsification.


He also used (without reproducing) the Graph from AR4 Summary for
Policy Makers claiming that it showed cooling for 100 of the last 160
years. Like his claim about Durkin's graph, that is just flat out
wrong.


Amazingly, he also claims that Mt Pinatubo's eruption released "very
large quantities of chloroflourocarbons, the gases that destroy the
ozone layer" and cites on this point Brasseur and Granier who say
nearly the opposite:

"after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, the input of chlorine to the
stratosphere was probably small".


CFC's are also GHGs so the point was to claim that a rise in GHGs was
correlated with a fall in global temperatures following Pinatubo. Much
later in the book and for the same reason he claims that "Pinatubo
emitted as much CO2 as humans in a year" and yet there is no data to
back this claim and Mauna Loa shows this is bunkum.


He also claims Arctic sea ice is expanding when it is retreating.

He also claims that "In fact, satellites and radiosondes show that
there is no global warming" (p382) but the cite he gives for this says
the opposite.


|||

The big news since CFK03 is the first of these, the collapse of the
climate critics' last real bastion, namely that satellites and
radiosondes show no significant warming in the past quarter century.
Figuratively speaking, this was the center pole that held up the
critics' entire "tent." Their argument was that, if there had been
little warming in the past 25 years or so, then what warming was
observed would have been within the range of natural variations with
solar forcing as the major player. Further, the models would have
been
shown to be unreliable since they were predicting warming that was
not
happening. But now both satellite and in-situ radiosonde observations
have been shown to corroborate both the surface observations of
warming and the model predictions. Thus, while uncertainties still
remain, we are now seeing a coherent picture in which past climate
variations, solar and other forcings, model predictions and other
indicators such as glacier recession all point to a human-induced
warming that needs to be considered carefully.


http://www.thescientificworld.com/TS...anding.asp?jid...


|||


He claims (at p437) "Chapter 5 of IPCC AR4 (Humans Responsible for
Climate Change) .. is based on the opinions of just five independent
scientists". The reference is not only wrong, but there were 50
independent scientists looking at this section.

There's plenty else, but this is simply an opinion piece by an
embittered spruiker for the polluters' lobby.

Following the piece quoted in the original post (originally in The
Australian) one contributor noted:

|||
This screed by Plimer contains more errors and half-truths that it
would be possible to point out here but one or two things stand out.
Plimer demands that we dont' "demonise element number six in the
periodic table" but that isn't CO2 (a gaseous compound) -- it's carbon
and we scientists do no such thing even with CO2. Humans need CO2 to
be in Goldilocks mode -- not too much and not too little. At the
moment, the problem is that we have too much. CO2 may be odourless and
colourless but like oxygen, in excessive concentration it is harmful.

....


Plimer speaks of volcanoes emitting CO2 and implies that because 85%
of them are unmeasured, they could account for warming, but one has to
ask -- if they were indeed emitting all this new CO2 why did they only
startb doing so after 1850 and what happened to the CO2 actually being
emitted by humans since then? One would think that nobody had bothered
to measure the Carbon 12 isotope record which shows the provenance of
most CO2 in the system to be from the combustion of fossil fuels.
Plimer thinks so little of the readers of the Australian that he
thinks this red herring will slip through. His contempt is not merely
fort those who are his scientific peers, but the public as well.

||||

For those interested in a trenchant academic critique of Plimer's
thought bubble ...

http://bravenewclimate.files.wordpre.../plimer1a5.pdf




Fran