by IAN PLIMER – FOR more than 80 per cent of time, Earth has been a warm wet greenhouse planet with no ice.
We live in unusual times, when ice occurs on continents. This did not happen overnight.
The great southern continent, Gondwanaland, formed about 550 million years ago. It occupied 20 per cent of the area of our planet and included Antarctica, South America, Australia, South Africa and the Indian subcontinent.
- Past warming has never been driven by an increase in carbon dioxide.
- If activist governments want to stop the normal planetary process of climate change, then they need to stop plate tectonics.
- We have a crisis of single-minded stupidity exacerbated by a dumbed-down education system.
Gondwanaland was covered by ice when it drifted across the South Pole 360-255 million years ago. Evidence for this ice age is in the black coal districts of Australia, South Africa and India.
The breakup of Gondwanaland started about 180 million years ago.
EVOLVED
About 140-120 million years ago, Australia was joined to Antarctica and enjoyed a temperate climate, had alpine glaciers that shed icebergs into warm seas and plant and animal adaptations evolved to cope with the long periods of winter darkness.
If Antarctica is to lose its ice sheets to end the current ice age, plate tectonics must move the continent northwards or fragment Antarctica into smaller land masses.
Parts of Antarctica are currently being fragmented which is why there are more than 150 hot spots and volcanoes in rift valleys beneath Antarctic ice.
Plate tectonics must also widen the Bering Strait to allow more warm Pacific Ocean water to enter and warm the Arctic.
Australia separated from Antarctica 100 million years ago and continues to move northwards at seven centimetres per year.
The current ice age started when South America separated from Antarctica some 34 million years ago. Plate tectonics isolated Antarctica after South America had moved northwards and the Drake Passage formed.
Circum-polar currents formed and prevented warm, southward-moving water from reaching Antarctica. As a result, the Antarctic ice sheets formed.
Arctic ice formed 2.5 million years ago when plate tectonic-driven volcanoes in central America joined North America to South America and stopped Pacific and Atlantic Ocean waters from mixing.
This was exacerbated by a supernova explosion that bombarded Earth with cosmic particles to produce cloudiness and cooling.
COOLING
The Earth has been slowly cooling for the past 50 million years from times when life thrived and rapidly diversified. In these warmer times, there were no mass extinctions due to natural warming and, if the planet is warming today, the past shows us that life will thrive and diversify even more.
Once the Antarctic ice formed, ice sheets waxed and waned depending on whether Earth was closer or more distant from the Sun.
Within these cycles there were smaller cycles driven by variations in energy emitted from the Sun producing many short warm spikes during long glaciations and very short cold spikes during short interglacials with average temperature rises and falls of more than 10°C a decade.
On a scale of tens of millions of years or more, the Earth’s climate is driven by plate tectonics. On a scale of hundreds of thousands of years, the Earth’s climate is driven by orbital cycles which bring Earth closer to or more distant from the Sun.
On a scale of thousands of years to decades, the Earth’s climate is driven by variations in energy emitted from the Sun.
If governments, the UN or climate activists want to stop the normal planetary process of climate change, then they need to stop plate tectonics, stop variations in the Earth’s orbit and stop variations in solar output. Even the omnipotent, omnipresent Kevin Rudd couldn’t manage this!
No past warming events have been driven by an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
No past cooling events were driven by a decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Six of the six most recent ice ages were initiated when the Earth’s atmospheric carbon dioxide was far higher than at present.
Atmospheric temperature rise occurs before the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere rises. It has never been proven that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming despite numerous requests to climate activist scientists for the published evidence.
INVALID SCIENCE
Trillion-dollar bankrupting decisions on energy policy are being made using invalid science.
The peak of the last orbitally-driven interglacial was 7000 to 4000 years ago and for the past 4000 years the Earth has been cooling as the climate changes from an interglacial into glaciation.
There were solar-driven warm spikes such as the Minoan Warming, Roman Warming, Medieval Warming and the Modern Warming and cold spikes (eg Dark Ages, Little Ice Age) during this 4000-year cooling trend.
In 2020, we entered the Grand Solar Minimum which is calculated to end in 2053. Whether there will be a solar-driven cooling, similar to the Little Ice Age (1300-1850 AD), or a full-blown orbitally-driven glaciation, such as the last glaciation from 116,000-14,400 years ago, is unknown.
The former cooling could last for hundreds of years whereas the latter would last for at least 90,000 years. If there was another period of sustained subaerial volcanism, cooling would be accelerated.
During the last glaciation, Europe was covered with ice north of the Alps, as was Russia; Canada and northern and alpine USA were covered by ice; southern South America and the Andes were covered by ice; Himalayan ice expanded to lower altitudes; and alpine Australia, Tasmania and the South Island of NZ were covered by ice as were the southern and elevated portions of Africa.
In the last glaciation, vegetation contracted and tropical areas such as the Amazon Basin only had copses of trees occupying some 10 per cent of the area of the current Amazonian rainforests; large areas of inland Australia, China, India, USA and Africa were covered by sand deposited from cold dry cyclonic winds; inland lakes evaporated; sea level was 130 metres lower than at present; there was no Great Barrier Reef; sea ice isolated Greenland, Iceland, northern Russia and northern Canada; Antarctic sea ice extended hundreds of kilometres north and there was a reduction in rainfall and plant and animal species.
WASTELANDS
Areas that now support pastoral and grain-growing activities were sandy wastelands during the last glaciation. Humans struggled as hunter-gatherers around the edge of ice sheets and at lower latitudes.
We are putting all our efforts and wasting trillions of taxpayers’ dollars into trying to prevent mythical human-induced global warming, yet we still don’t prepare for the inevitable annual floods, droughts and bushfires, let alone longer-term solar – and orbitally – driven global cooling.
We have a crisis of single-minded stupidity exacerbated by a dumbed-down education system supported by incessant propaganda, driven by financial interests and political activist authoritarianism.PC
I’M WRITING THE BLOODY OBVIOUS HERE, BUT IT NEEDS TO BE WRITTEN – & SHOUTED AGAIN & AGAIN – UNTIL THIS DESTRUCTIVE GOVERNMENT IS CHUCKED RIGHT OUT!!!
WE ARE THE MORONS! Prof. Plimer’s huge, unstoppable truths should be mandatory texts for ALL Aussie schools and universities to obliterate all the monstrous, obsessive, AGW garbage that abounds!
We’ve turned our backs on the OPTIMAL ENERGY SCENARIO — a mix of MODERN, coal-fired generators and small, modular, nuclear reactors.
Yes, MORONICALLY, we are blowing up our generators, we are following the lies, the false science and jumping over the cliff like little LEMMINGS, permitting our governmentS to drastically retard our economies with their peak-stupidity, net-zero insanity. — In a nightmarish scenario, they have decreed that all our electricity is to be produced by completely UNRELIABLE, EXPENSIVE, TOXIC and oft-to-be-renewed ‘renewables’!!!
Meanwhile, CHINA’S anti-democratic, repressive, Uighur-enslaving, one-Party Government is actually doing something SERIOUSLY SHREWD:- they are powering their huge economy rapidly forward by building more and more fossil-fuelled electricity generators!
Right observation. Millions of years are involved normally in gradual changes.
Wrong conclusion: because the dramatic changes that have occurred recently have only happened over a few decades – and NOT Millenia.
But there IS good news – keep reading!
Right observation: Australia has devastated our forestry by 95% over 230 years that previously stood for ? thousands or millions of years.
They numbered roughly 3 times the tree numbers in Borneo – “the lungs of Asia”.
Right conclusion: given trees’ ability to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air, convert the carbon to wood and release oxygen in the process – AND also given their ability to cool land by an endothermic, photosynthetic-driven chemical mechanism that acts like a refrigerator – my money is on the removal of trees to have been a major factor in sudden global warming. And Australian tree-removal has played a huge part in this.
Discussion
The ridiculous increase in megatons of CO2 being released annually, by the equally ridiculous increase in dirty-coal-burning furnaces in China and India, means that the CO2 increase (at least 3 times the level of the pre-industrial age) has to be considered as a cause of warming, especially as our means of recycling it to wood and oxygen has been largely removed.
By the way, frenzied manufacturing of wind turbines, solar panels and batteries is adding impetus to all this.
Secondly, the melting permafrost layers are releasing methane at least 4 times as fast as they once did. Methane (CH3) is said to have a 50 times greater impact than CO2.
Thirdly, as the global warming-induced released icebergs increase in quantity and then melt, the ocean level rises and cools water locally.
Fourthly, as the planet warms – accelerated by the fluorine-depleted ozone layer – so does the tropical ocean.
Fifthly, as the tropical ocean warms the tectonic plates, they expand while the cooling Polar plates shrink, causing movement at the edges and therefore earthquakes and volcanoes.
And finally, the cooling effect of melting ice creates super-cold weather fronts just as the super-warmed tropics also do. Alas – superstorms happen when the systems collide.
What’s the answer? No single one but here are a few suggestions: But the best suggestion overall is to start now.
1) Collect the methane and convert it to urea and hydrogen (already being done – so consider supporting the Oz company. Sorry – I can’t remember its name).
2) Burn coal cleanly to provide baseload power. (Simple – I think the Oz National Party are all over this technology). You just run the smoke effluent back into the furnaces like an after-burner – and then down abandoned mines where UV lights and various plants and algae can grow, cooling it down, absorbing the CO2 and making oxygen.
3) Use this also to produce that great Aussie invention of current turbines. They protrude for about one kilometer, at right angles to the coastline, are designed not to harm marine life, and produce power day and night.
4) Like in Israel, build solar HEAT towers that work in daytime but save the cost of creating solar panels. Work well along coastline.
So C’monnn Aussies – let’s get our spark back and get going. We can do it!
PS
Glad to see that we are bagging our own people less and getting stuck into Labor more. Keep it up!!
The continued demise of reliable base load power from the likes of Liddell coal fired power station (to close in April 2023), driven by continued demonization of CO2, that minuscule, invisible, odourless, tasteless, non-toxic, atmospheric trace gas necessary for life on this planet that’s supposedly a pollutant & primary driver of so claimed global warming (nowadays climate change), absent empirical evidence proving the case against CO2 (as so well opined here by Prof Ian Plimer), will put our base load energy supply on Australia’s eastern seaboard on a knife’s edge.
An opportunity to ‘fix the problem’, arrives next month in NSW on Sat 25th March 2023 at the coming State Election.
Whom-ever has the most sensible Energy Policy ie an Energy Policy that’s market driven & focused upon customers interests, NOT the industry’s interests and is;
1. Technology agnostic (fears & favours none);
2. Removes current subsidies – a level playing field for ALL;
3. Requires industry to comply with clearly defined QOS (Quality of Service) standards of reliability & availability (eg 99.98%);
4. Invites industry to respond by way of AEMO auction to provide reliable, base load electricity at their best competitive price(s);
5. Imposes SUBSTANTIAL financial penalties upon generators for any failure to deliver in accord with their mandatory QOS obligations (Force Majeure notwithstanding eg earth quakes, floods, bushfires etc);
6. Requires an environmental bond paid to restore the environment ie; recycle aged solar-PV’s & wind turbine blades, as is already required of the coal mining industry for restoration / rehabilitation resulting from mining activity;
7. Repeals anti-CO2 legislation (eg the RET, LRET, Safeguard Mechanism, etc) together with the ban on nuclear power.
Is the Political Party that I’ll be voting for.
Asserting that you don’t believe in climate change – as one of the commentators below has stated – is not a good idea because that just feeds the left with an excuse to call us ‘climate deniers’. Of course our climate is changing as it has been doing since our planet was created but the point to get across is that there is overwhelming evidence that global warming is not caused by CO2. This is the central argument in Professor Plimer’s excellent book and articles. It is also strongly supported by the research undertaken by the CO2 Coalition in the USA and Viv Forbes’ Saltbush Club in Australia …. and many other organisations who are all trying hard to stop morons like Chris Bowen and Matt Kean from wasting billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money on unworkable schemes and virtue-signalling.
You hit the nail on the head!
Prof. Plimer always writes and speaks measured reasonable common sense based on scientific enquiry and yet the left bandwagon on climate emergency and hateful CO2 continues and governments (well, some governments) take it as gospel and demand we all kowtow to this new religion. I don’t and never have because I am always sceptical of mass trends and make a point of reading and listening from alternative sources. I suspect many readers do the same. But although I suspect we are the majority there appears to be no dent in enforced governmental climatic measures which affect us all and make no difference other than ruining economies. The message isn’t getting through because it isn’t acceptable to have alternatives to government, media and corporate thinking. We must do as we are told. Time to change all of this.
Mr Plimer along with Tony Heller and DR J Christy and even NASA have debunked the Climate Hoax many times over . How stupid have we become when we have been blackmailed via a Flu and The Chicken Little Sky is falling Climate Hoax and all without looking at the facts and research by actual experts and listening to politicians and groomed spokes people ( Gretta Nutter Thunberg ) and anyone who says build back better , or has climate , integrity, economy in their political slogan are all WEF,UN,WHO lackeys . 2023 and I was told when I was 13 that by the year 2000 the Sydney Opera House would be under water ???? Well ?!
Why are the press, political parties and the education system ignore this very well researched position?
I don’t believe in climate change. It is concocted by the UN which is not our friend, but is working to bring in one world government control over the planet using various tools. Climate change is fake, phony and false. The only problem is that nobody is allowed to speak against it, or they get cancelled, which is not how free speech is supposed to work.
The alarmists have no counter arguments to the scientific sense of professor Plimer; all they do is their usual puerile tactic of smear: Plimer worked for mining companies. FFS! He is a geologist; all geologists work for mining companies except the faux ones in academia. To follow up Plimer’s excellent exposition of why alarmism is unmitigated BS, 3 quick, non-scientific reasons why the absurd idea of man made global warming (AGW) is junk.
1 Al Gore movie Judgment. In 2007 a single English HC Judge, which meant his judgment could be appealed, after listening to the best scientists argue for and against AGW, found each of the 9 examples of AGW shown in Gore’s movie were all either non-existent/unproven, exaggerated/alarmist or not proven to be caused by AGW. Gore’s name may have been on the movie but the scientific advisors to the movie were all prominent alarmist scientists.
2 Climate Gate; in 2010 a whistle blower released the private emails of all the alarmist scientists. In public these alarmist scientists said the science was settled, AGW was real. In private they admitted the science was not only not settled but a mess. As well they agreed they must continue to lie to the public and censor sceptic scientists, like Plimer.
3 In 2020, at the height of the China virus economic downturn atmospheric measures of CO2 showed NO change. This contradicted the alarmist basic assumption that ALL the increase in atmospheric CO2 was due to human activity. During 2020, in some months human emissions of CO2 were down by nearly 40%. The connection between emissions of CO2 and atmospheric concentration is immediate so if humans were responsible for ALL the increase in CO2 the atmospheric concentrations should have shown drastic and measurable changes. They didn’t.
AGW is a lie.
I look forward to Q+A, in the interests of balance and diversity, having a panel discussion with Ian Plimer, Bjorn Lomborg, Andrew Bolt and Michael Schellenberger vs any one of a dozen high-powered pro-Global Warmists.
Am waiting………….waiting……hello? HELLLOO?
What really annoys me about this whole climate debate is the sheer lack of courage shown by the thousands of scientists around the world who totally agree with Prof. Plimer but won’t speak up and say anything. In the USA, the CO2 Coalition has a huge number of supporters – most of them scientists – and they certainly put out a lot of useful educational material. In the UK the Global Warming Policy Foundation does much the same. But here in Australia we have Prof. Plimer and Viv Forbes – and that’s pretty much it. Show a bit of backbone you scientists who know that CO2 is not the cause of global warming but are clearly just too scared to speak up!
Did you know that the UN IPCC made up their claim “the science is settled”, knowing that science is never settled, to try and discredit an audit report of IPCC climate modelling by UK mathematician Christopher Monckton not long before the IPCC Copenhagen Conference was held? They also banned Monckton from addressing IPCC meetings.
Around that time hackers released many emails between IPCC “scientists” plotting the creative accounting for their modelling, emails revealing their plotting and even comments wondering what might happen if their creative accounting was discovered. There were two batches released and people referred to them as climate gate 1 and 2.
Australian scientist Doctor Jennifer Marohasy and colleagues researched and audited Bureau of Meteorology media releases and checked them against historic weather record data and advised the Abbott Coalition Government that BoM releases were not reliable, in fact they ignored their own weather records earlier than 1910 when heatwaves had been recorded that would have changed BoM modelling of a warming trend. Only recently as a photograph published by newspapers revealed a solar panel was positioned at ground level targeting a BoM automatic weather station recording temperatures at the Sydney Observatory Hill location, already a heat sink because of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, roadways and nearby city buildings compared to when the Observatory was built. The Abbott Cabinet Minister who wrote to BoM management apparently was advised that the points made by Dr Marohasy, acknowledged, were due to errors and omissions and steps would be taken to stop them from continuing.
Climate changes naturally, weather are much shorter term events, climate change based hoax and warming creative accounting is a disgusting developed nation based cooperative of governments following UN IPCC lead, but the political objectives are redistribution of developed nation’s wealth to developing nations like China, UN Lima Protocol signed by Whitlam Labor in 1975 (look it up) agreeing to the transfer of most manufacturing industry and know how to developing nations. And the Coalition here did nothing to overturn the Whitlam Labor agreement, even the Unions failed to oppose it. Look also at UN Agenda 21 signed by Keating Labor and many other economic vandalism decisions, Coalition signing the UN IPCC Kyoto Japan Agreement and Paris France Agreement on emissions reduction and now failing transition to unreliable energy electricity supply from wind and solar, the most expensive system to provide essential baseload electricity that requires a dedicated electricity grid (Labor planning to build), hundreds of thousands of acres of land to replace power stations on far less land area, “firming” back up equipment and replacement of wind turbines and solar panels in far less time than a power station well maintained providing 50-70 years generating capacity. To even achieve 50 years operation wind turbines would be removed and replaced so: original installation and two removal and replacement costs.
And don’t be fooled by “renewables” fans counting hydro, biomass (wood chips) and others and lumping them together as one. Wind turbines and solar panels are not 24/7 supply sources, they are intermittent in operation subject to wind availability, sunshine and few clouds, etc. So called renewables will never stand alone, they must have back up generators and storage systems and the added costs.
Net zero emissions is another very expensive exercise in futility, more economic vandalism, the perfect solution to a problem that doesn’t exist given the facts ignored deliberately by the political agenda.
06:43 PM ET 02/10/2015
Economic Systems: The alarmists keep telling us their concern about global warming is all about man’s stewardship of the environment. But we know that’s not true. A United Nations official has now confirmed this.
At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said.
Referring to a new international treaty environmentalists hope will be adopted at the Paris climate change conference later this year, she added: “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”
The only economic model in the last 150 years that has ever worked at all is capitalism. The evidence is prima facie: From a feudal order that lasted a thousand years, produced zero growth and kept workdays long and lifespans short, the countries that have embraced free-market capitalism have enjoyed a system in which output has increased 70-fold, work days have been halved and lifespans doubled.
Figueres is perhaps the perfect person for the job of transforming “the economic development model” because she’s really never seen it work. “If you look at Ms. Figueres’ Wikipedia page,” notes Cato economist Dan Mitchell: Making the world look at their right hand while they choke developed economies with their left.
End of 2015 was when the UN IPCC Paris Conference on Climate Change was held.
This adds to the breath of understanding and needs more publicity and media savvy promotion. So far it is a modern man problem, but Prof Plimer says these observations simply sit inside larger uncontrollable climate oscillations. While anthropologists say climate change drove aboriginal migration from inland to coastal areas 4-5000 years ago approx and created new smaller carriable flint blades etc, we are not hearing a word about this. It was during the human occupation of Aust, pre colonial and pre industrial but profound. I think it would be useful for SMH, The Age Guardian and ABC TV Q and A to have a sharpened discussion of this subject. Perhaps our concern with climate change is a matter of the hubris of me and the immediately foreseeable ‘now’.
The last lost Aboriginal tribal people were discovered in a remote desert area of Western Australia during the late 1950s or early 1960s.
An elder in the Northern Territory early 2000s told me that the rivers in our country flow upside down, just dig for water.
Also, as I understand the climate zone here the last major change began over 130,000 years ago resulting in the rainforests retreating and today cover about 3 per cent of Australia replaced by eucalypts tolerant of the much dryer conditions developing and prevailing today, our country, land of droughts and flooding rains.