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Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science |  | Author: Ian Plimer
Publisher: Taylor Trade Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: $21.95
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Rating:  111 reviews
Sales Rank: 114232
Media: Paperback
Edition: Paperback Edition
Pages: 504
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.9 x 1.4
ISBN: 1589794729
Dewey Decimal Number: 577
EAN: 9781589794726
ASIN: 1589794729
Publication Date: July 25, 2009
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Product Description
Climate, sea level, and ice sheets have always changed, and the changes observed today are less than those of the past. Climate changes are cyclical and are driven by the Earth's position in the galaxy, the sun, wobbles in the Earth's orbit, ocean currents, and plate tectonics. In previous times, atmospheric carbon dioxide was far higher than at present but did not drive climate change. No runaway greenhouse effect or acid oceans occurred during times of excessively high carbon dioxide. During past glaciations, carbon dioxide was higher than it is today. The non-scientific popular political view is that humans change climate. Do we have reason for concern about possible human-induced climate change?
This book's 504 pages and over 2,300 references to peer-reviewed scientific literature and other authoritative sources engagingly synthesize what we know about the sun, earth, ice, water, and air. Importantly, in a parallel to his 1994 book challenging creation science, Telling Lies for God, Ian Plimer describes Al Gore's book and movie An Inconvenient Truth as long on scientific misrepresentations. Trying to deal with these misrepresentations is somewhat like trying to argue with creationists, he writes, who misquote, concoct evidence, quote out of context, ignore contrary evidence, and create evidence ex nihilo.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 111
 Whish side is right? Plimer will convince you July 12, 2009
Ron House (Qld, Australia)
138 out of 175 found this review helpful
Ian Plimer is perhaps best known as the geologist who debunked creationism in "Telling Lies for God". Here he turns his attention to the global warming beliefs that are now resulting in huge (possibly disastrous) policy changes by governments in the hope of avoiding "climate change". In "Heaven and Earth", I think Plimer does pretty well.
First off though, if you are expecting a simple read, this book is perhaps not it. Not that it is difficult to read, but it is technically dense, the average page having maybe ten references to academic papers to support its claims. And it has its mistakes. There is a diagram on temperature forecasts which is not properly explained, another one which, so it is claimed on the web, has been withdrawn by its author for errors. Also the author has a recurring habit of writing the opposite of what he means; it usually happens on unimportant points, but it distracts from following the argument. For example, he writes that the early half of the little ice age was more variable than the latter half (p 75), then a little later says the opposite (p 79). I noticed maybe ten such examples on my way through. They are not by any means fatal to his argument, but I am sure his opponents would dig them out and present them as if they were. But in a 500 page book, absolute correctness from cover to cover is, I think, far too high an expectation. The real question is: does he carry his main arguments?
I believe that he does. He shows, for instance, that CO2 in geological history has been up to 25 times higher than it now is, and that in this era it is at its lowest in the entire history of life on Earth. He shows how malaria is a disease of poverty, not of temperature, and has existed in England in the coldest of times. He discusses the major 'snowball earth' glaciations that most likely took ice all the way to the equator, but which, luckily, preceded the appearance of multicellular life. (If such an ice age happened now, it is hard to see how any multicelled life, let alone human life, could survive.) The main impression the book left me with was 'being given the complete picture'.
The main question I was asking myself when I first started investigating global warming in depth was which side is right? I came to the conclusion that the realists are (climate has always changed, and current temperatures and temperature changes are within historical limits). So this book was not the factor that convinced me. The single fact that did so, however, is included here. Pages 371 onwards discuss the IPCC's climate models, which predict an increasingly warm tropospheric 'hot spot' in the atmosphere, providing a 'warm blanket' that is heating up the planet. This 'warm blanket' simply isn't there, as Plimer explains. It boils down to this very simple fact: on a cold night, if you want to get warm, you must have warm air around you somehow - turn on a heater, put on a blanket, whatever, but unless warm air surrounds you, you won't get warm. The planet does not have any warmer air around it than it ever had, so it simply cannot be heating up due to insulation. Since that is the central claim of global warmism, the theory must be wrong. All the rest is 'sound and fury, signifying nothing'. But Plimer takes on that sound and fury, and shows it for the flim flam it really is.
If I were writing such a book, I might not choose Plimer's organisation. He starts with the geological history of the Earth's climate, and moves on to the Sun, the Earth (volcanoes, extinctions, desertification, etc.), then Ice (ice ages, glaciers, antarctica), then Water (sea levels, acidification, corals),then Air (greenhouse effect, temperature, hurricanes, carbon dioxide), and finishes with a very entertaining chapter called 'Et moi' - perhaps not so rumbunctious as some of the more acidic writings of Bertrand Russell, but good reading nonetheless.
Plimer has had his share of run-ins with shysters, as witnessed by his court battle with creationists, and he doesn't shrink from taking on the latest bunch - even speculating about the judgement St Peter might one day settle upon one of them! The concluding section puts the sheer evil and lunacy of the warming scaremongering into sharp relief. At the risk of spoiling the whole story, here is his final sentence: "Human stupidity is only exceeded by God's mercy, which is infinite."
When the current climate insanity is finally exploded, this book will, I am sure, be seen as one of the turning points.
Ignore the Critics this is a must read or reference. July 13, 2009
H. Edwards (Bangkok Thailand)
100 out of 128 found this review helpful
The one star reviews were written by "Believers." These are individuals who will accept no science, no contrary position and rarely have conducted any research of their own. Mostly they have not even seen the book let alone read it. The so called critics of the book and 'scientific' criticisms have been from advocacy groups in Australia and from people who don't have any climatology' qualifications at all. For each criticism there has been a well constructed counter argument.
With that preamble out of the way this book is about cycles of change on our planet spanning long time periods. The critics have missed this underlying point. It is not a book that is a detailed discussion on all of the hundred or more disciplines that cover the sciences of climatology. The solar cosmic influences for example are, apart from the work of people like Henrik Svensmark (The Chilling Stars), still being investigated.
Plimer is a geologist. This is the science of climate in the truest sense. He is not an expert in all the other fields but like any good researcher can find a plethora of papers that support his thesis, something the Believers cannot do for theirs. Apart from the word "IPCC" Believers don't use references because the science is "settled." Plimer uses over 2000 of them because it isn't.
This book looks at the history of climate from the viewpoint of the galaxy in which we live; to the Sun that provides our heat and the systems on our planet that also affect it. The book is a very significant weight on those on our planet who want to rush off on some fairytale system like ETS based on fear and greed rather than science. If you want the science read this book, if you want fairy tales then read Gore's publications instead.
Challenging the environmental Taliban. May 5, 2009
Peter Hauser (Sydney, AU)
119 out of 160 found this review helpful
Ian Plimer's brave book challenges the climate-change fundamentalism that blinds so many otherwise intelligent people. Indeed, Plimer contends that the entire beat-up serves to fill the spiritual emptiness that pervades the western world. Plimer exposes the "experts" of the IPCC as self-serving, deluded, extremist environmental activists, and reveals the scientific consensus on climate-change as being tenuous at best.
Read this book. Read it carefully. Then read it again. Open your mind to theories that challenge orthodoxy, or you become nothing more than a shrill evangelist, jumping up and down on the spot, yelling "LA LA LA LA LA!" whilst holding a finger firmly in each ear.
extemely well documented May 11, 2009
Lung Doctor (Southern California)
87 out of 117 found this review helpful
Extremely well researched, footnoted and written in easy-to-understand language. Gives information you won't get from the popular press? Fascinating insights.
The definitive demolition of the global warming theory March 5, 2010
Richard Gibson (Woodland Hills, CA)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Ian Plimer is a famous Australian scientist, who has written several science best-sellers down under. His speciality is geology and earth sciences. In this five hundred page book, with 2300 footnotes to peer-reviewed science, he demolishes the theory that human release of carbon dioxide is causing catastrophic global warming.
His technique is simple and exhaustive. In a series of chapters with simple, one-word title he relates the relevant science. He starts with earth history. He shows that the climate of the Earth has varied a great deal, over both very long and somewhat shorter time frames. He shows that the rather slight warming we experienced in the 20th century is completely consistent with past experience. Earth came out of a cooling period, The Little Ice Age, in 1850; the Late 20th Century Warming was both predictable and in line with previous history. The IPCC was able to argue that the recent warming was unprecedented and scary only by suppressing well-established facts relating to the past. At this point, after Climategate, even Phil Jones -- one of the leading pro-Al Gore scientists in the world -- had admitted that the Medieval Warming Period actually occurred, and that it was warmer at the height of that period then it is now.
He then discusses the major issues: the Sun, the Earth, ice, water and air. In each, he discusses all of the relevant science. As he shows, climate varies naturally, in response to a huge number of natural forces. As he shows, climate change is not driven by change in CO2. Many times in the Earth's past, CO2 levels were far higher than they are today, and climate was not warmer.
I have read a great deal on this subject. As I have done so, I have often been frustrated by the lack of discussion of obvious questions. How long does CO2 stay in the air? What are the sources of CO2 in the air? What takes CO2 out of the air? How does the air and the water interact? There are many, obvious issues that I seldom seen discussed in the books on this subject.
Plimer answers all of these questions, and dozens more that I had not thought to ask. This is a definitive book; it summarizes everything that science knows on this subject. The science that he discusses is fascinating. I learned a tremendous amount by reading the book. For example, I always thought that the planets revolve around the Sun. No, not quite. Instead, everything in the solar system, including the Sun, revolves around the solar system's center of gravity which, because of the huge mass of the outer planets, is not quite the same as the Sun. There is an 11 year cycle by which the Sun moves around this center of gravity, sometimes being in it and sometimes not. And, in addition to the axis of the Earth changing its tilt, and the shape of the Earth's orbit changing -- which alters climate -- the entire solar system is revolving around the center of the galaxy, which takes us through huge amounts of space over time, sometimes through empty space and sometimes through more dense spiral arms of the galaxy. There are huge undersea volcanos, which emit immense amounts of CO2 and heat into the ocean. And on and on. There is an immense amount of science in this book, which makes it a very interesting read.
As is to be expected, Plimer's book has meet with furious denunciation from the other side. I have taken a look at some of the websites attacking Plimer, and some of the negative reviews. Their general approach seems to be: (1) strident denunciation; (2) allegations that Plimer is being paid off by the mining industry; and (3) nit-picking about one of the hundreds of small points in the book. The denunciation, of course, is just rhetoric that does not add to the real discussion. As I understand it, Plimer does have ties to the mining industry. From that, it seems fair to infer that Plimer is probably not ideologically committed to an extreme Green agenda, so it makes sense to view what he says with some skepticism. But, hey, every author has a point of view. Particularly on this subject, we should view ALL of them with skepticism. In the end, the question is not, what is the author's ideology, but how good is his or her science?
As for the nit-picking, Plimer has hundreds if not thousands of factual assertions in the book. It is easy for hostile critics to pick out a few facts here and there and to assert loudly that Plimer made them up, or is saying inaccurate things about them. This then requires the reader to go look up the critic's sources, and so on and so on. That game can be continued indefinitely. The real question, of course, is, is Plimer's basic argument sound? I am pretty familiar with this subject. While I am not a scientist, I have read about a dozen books on the subject, including all of the big name books. I actually read the IPCC's big book. I read James Hansen's new book. I have deliberately read both sides. From this reading, I am pretty familiar with the basic arguments, and the basic factual assertions on both sides. Given this background, virtually all of what Plimer said rang true to me. He knows the science; he is not making this stuff up.
In a field filled with pseudo-science, and political posturing, this book is the real thing.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 111
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