Australia’s top earth scientist: ‘A high CO2 content brings prosperity and lengthens your life’

‘The IPCC process is related to environmental activism, politics and opportunism’

Article Excerpt from The Australian – By Jamie Walker – April 18, 2009 – Full Article here:

Prize-winning Geologist Dr. Ian Plimer of the University of Adelaide’s school of environmental sciences, is also an emeritus professor of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne and the author of seven books and 120 scholarly papers. Plimer’s latest book is titled: Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science

Article Excerpt: IAN Plimer calls himself an old-fashioned scientist. That means you question what others won’t. You marry yourself to the data; you buck the received wisdom and political correctness of your colleagues. When it comes to climate change, you say: “I was trained to be sceptical.” […]

“The science is now based on consensus, and we have thousands of scientists who have got everything to gain by saying the world is going to end. We have lost the tie to evidence. So I make great comparison … between the way creationists operate and the way some of the rabid environmentalists and global warmers operate. The parallels are quite similar.”

Plimer reserves his sharpest criticism for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has driven the international debate. Very much for the worse, in the professor’s judgment. “The IPCC process is related to environmental activism, politics and opportunism,” he writes in Heaven and Earth.

Plimer argues that the IPCC is dominated by atmospheric scientists, who in turn are obsessed by carbon dioxide emissions, skewing the process. The problems are compounded by primitive computer modelling. He reviewed five computer predictions of climate made in 2000, underpinning IPCC findings, and found there was no relationship between predicted future temperature and actual measured temperature even during a short period. Ditto for a link between temperature and the atmospheric CO2 content.

“To get a complete view of the planet, you need to have far more than atmospheric scientists on the IPCC,” Plimer says. “What they have done is separate the atmosphere from the way the world works … you need solar physicists, you need cosmologists, you need astronomers, you need geologists, bacterial specialists and on you go … we don’t hear anything about those things from the IPCC.”

But what about this ice age business? How does that square with melting polar ice, rising sea levels and 40C summers in northern Europe? Well, taking the …