Light and Air on Global Warming

The TIA Daily published this on April 30, 2009. When I read this, I got happy.

[T]here has been a MAJOR change in the way that the Australian media are reporting the AGW [anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming] issue, led nobly by newspaper The Australian. The change has been stimulated by a Canberra Senate select committee that is discussing the tabled ETS legislation, and also by the release of geologist Ian Plimer's new book, Heaven and Earth. Global Warming: The Missing Science….

The trend of balanced media comment has continued this week, culminating with a splendid article…by Jan Veizer in today's Australian.

That article sums up the state of genuine science on the real causes of global temperature fluctuations. The basic picture is that dihydrogen monoxide gas—water vapor—is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and that the natural interaction of solar radiation and water vapor (including the mechanism of cloud-formation discovered by Henrik Svensmark) is what really determines global temperatures.

Atmospheric CO2 is thus the product and not the cause of the climate, as demonstrated by past records where temperature changes precede changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations and fluxes.

Another article in The Australian describes the general turning of the tide on global warming:
With public perceptions changing so dramatically and quickly it is little wonder Ian Plimer's latest book, Heaven and Earth, Global Warming: The Missing Science, has been received with such enthusiasm and is into its third print run in as many weeks.

The public is receptive to an expose of the many mythologies and false claims associated with anthropogenic global warming and are welcoming an authoritative description of planet Earth and its ever-changing climate in readable language.

I checked in on all of this with my antipodean correspondent Tom Minchin, who confirms that this is all true.

The journalist leading the charge is Andrew Bolt of the Melbourne Herald Sun. But The Australian is growing in confidence and the rejectionism is spreading. One of the most remarkable changes occurred two weeks ago [April 13] when leading AGW hysteric Paul Sheehan (who writes for the main Sydney newspaper the Sydney Morning Herald, which has done as much to project the myth of AGW as any newspaper here) reviewed Ian Plimer's new book and admitted he was taken aback.

Here is how Sheehan's review begins:

What I am about to write questions much of what I have written in this space, in numerous columns, over the past five years. Perhaps what I have written can withstand this questioning. Perhaps not. The greater question is, am I—and you—capable of questioning our own orthodoxies and intellectual habits? Let's see.

The subject of this column is not small. It is a book entitled Heaven and Earth, which will be published tomorrow. It has been written by one of Australia's foremost Earth scientists, Professor Ian Plimer. He is a confronting sort of individual, polite but gruff, courteous but combative. He can write extremely well, and Heaven and Earth is a brilliantly argued book by someone not intimidated by hostile majorities or intellectual fashions.

The book's 500 pages and 230,000 words and 2311 footnotes are the product of 40 years' research and a depth and breadth of scholarship.

With this awed endorsement of Plimer's scientific credibility, Sheehan then summarizes Plimer's argument:

Much of what we have read about climate change, he argues, is rubbish, especially the computer modeling on which much current scientific opinion is based, which he describes as "primitive."…

The Earth's climate is driven by the receipt and redistribution of solar energy. Despite this crucial relationship, the sun tends to be brushed aside as the most important driver of climate. Calculations on supercomputers are primitive compared with the complex dynamism of the Earth's climate and ignore the crucial relationship between climate and solar energy.

"To reduce modern climate change to one variable, CO2, or a small proportion of one variable—human-induced CO2—is not science. To try to predict the future based on just one variable (CO2) in extraordinarily complex natural systems is folly."

In response, this is Sheehan's conclusion:

Heaven and Earth is an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence.
The title of Sheehan's article? "Beware the Climate of Conformity." He never actually comes out and says that Plimer's argument against man-made global warming is correct or that he agrees with it. But I don't think this review can be interpreted as anything other than a capitulation. It cedes to the skeptics the high ground of being "evidence-based" and accepts the characterization of the global warming promoters as dogmatic conformists.

Australia is not that different from America. If a shift in opinion against the global warming dogma can happen there, it can happen here, particularly when Plimer's book finds an American publisher.

...

The task of discrediting the global warming propaganda campaign—and fending off or rolling back global-warming regulations—will certainly be long and difficult. But Australia has just provided us with evidence that it is possible.