Monday, July 27, 2009

The Great Climate Change Con

At the Spectator James Delingpole writes up an excellent interview with Professor Ian Plimer Australian geologist and author of a newly published book "Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science":

‘I’m a natural scientist. I’m out there every day, buried up to my neck in sh**, collecting raw data. And that’s why I’m so sceptical of these models, which have nothing to do with science or empiricism but are about torturing the data till it finally confesses.

... Eco-guilt is a first-world luxury. It’s the new religion for urban populations which have lost their faith in Christianity. The IPCC report is their Bible. Al Gore and Lord Stern are their prophets.’
 
... Reading Plimer’s Heaven And Earth is at once an enlightening and terrifying experience. Enlightening because, after 500 pages of heavily annotated prose (the fruit of five years’ research), you are left in no doubt that man’s contribution to the thing they now call ‘climate change’ was, is and probably always will be negligible. Terrifying, because you cannot but be appalled by how much money has been wasted, how much unnecessary regulation drafted because of a ‘problem’ that doesn’t actually exist.

Excellent comment thread too.

[via]

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Have you read 'Blue Planet in Green Shackles'?

The author, President of the Czech Republic, spend a 30-year career as a statistician who analyzed data in Czechoslovakia's Science Academy. He understands data and how to analyze it. It is his field of expertise.

He rips the AGW crowd to shreds.

BUT - that is only the 1st part of the book! Then he tackles the economic questions....

One must search for the book a bit, and I am not crazy about some of the translating, but - truly worth the read.

JR said...

Thanks for the ref Xanthippa, I wasn't aware of it. Considering the author it should be an excellent read. With 99% of political leaders solidly on the green/AGW bandwagon Vaclav Klaus is to be admired.

Zookeeper said...

AGW had its zenith as temperatures appeared to warm at the same time that westerners had more wealth and optimism than ever. But when markets cooled and temperatures declined to confirm the climate models' predictions of thermaggedon, people began to notice that (a) they were broke and (b) the weather was not hot like those fellers from Greenpeace said it would be.

AGW is a rich person's religion. Of the many things that will cool in the decade to come, AGW hysteria is surely one of them.