I'm not really running with Al Gore on this one. Michael Moore showed us that any oaf can string together a bunch of facts into a nice spin to sell movie tickets. Go to any church and they'll show you how nicely stuff can be spliced together to make the end of the world seem plausible. I'm not buying into the whole 'The end is nigh' scheme again. The doomsdayers have been around as long as there have been days to doom and I agree with Ian Plimer when he says that we're naive to think we can influence climate change. Sure, digging up coal and oil and burning it into the atmosphere probably isn't the best thing for it, but I personally don't think we should be running around and stocking up our cupboards with cans as if it were the Y2K bug again. Fossil fuel is unrenewable and perhaps we need to fear 'hell' to keep us in line and conserving it.We modern humans think the world revolve around our existence. We are just a mircosecond in the vast expanse of time and space. South Park had it right about being a "Man Bear Pig". The next thing Gore will come up with is a killer asteriod. Top scientist debunks global warmingBy Simon Kirby
April 11, 2007
MANKIND is naive to think it can influence climate change, according to a prize-winning Australian geologist. Solar activity is a greater driver of climate change than man-made carbon dioxide, argues Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology at the University of Adelaide and winner of several notable science prizes.
“When meteorologists can change the weather then we can start to think about humans changing climate,” Prof Plimer said.
“I think we really are a little bit naive to think we can change astronomical and solar processes.” Prof Plimer said he had researched the history of the sun, solar and supernovae activity and had been able to correlate global climates with solar activity. “But correlations don't mean anything, you really need a causation,” Prof Plimer said.
So he then examined how cosmic radiation builds up clouds.
A very active sun blows away the cosmic radiation, while a less active sun allows radiation to build up, he said. “So you can very much tie in temperature, cloud formation, cosmic radiation and the sun,” he said.
The next part of Prof Plimer's research was to examine the sources of carbon dioxide. He said he found that about 0.1 per cent of the atmospheric carbon dioxide was due to human activity and much of the rest due to little-understood geological phenomena.
Prof Plimer also argued El Nino and La Nina were caused by major processes of earthquake activity and volcanic activity in the mid-ocean ridges, rather than any increase in greenhouse gases.
Nor does the melting of polar ice have anything to do with man-made carbon dioxide, he said. “Great icebergs come off, not due to temperature change but due to the physics of ice and the flow of ice,” Prof Plimer said.
“There's a lag, so that if temperature rises, carbon dioxide rises 800 years later. “If ice falls into the ocean in icebergs that's due to processes thousands of years ago.” On the same basis, changes to sea level and temperature are also unrelated to anything happening today, he said.
“It is extraordinarily difficult to argue that human-induced carbon dioxide has any effect at all,” he said.
Prof Plimer added that as the planet was already at the maximum absorbance of energy of carbon dioxide, any more would have no greater effect. There had even been periods in history with hundreds of times more atmospheric carbon dioxide than now with “no problem”, he said.
The professor, a member of the Australian Skeptics, an organisation devoted to debunking pseudo-scientific claims, denied his was a minority view.
“You'd be very hard pushed to find a geologist that would differ from my view,” he said. He said
bad news was more fashionable now than good and that people had an innate tendency to want to be a little frightened.
But Prof Plimer conceded the politics of greenhouse gas emissions meant that attention was being given to energy efficiency, which he supported.
The professor, who is writing a book on the subject, said he only used validated scientific data, published in reputable peer-reviewed refereed journals, as the basis of his theories.
