Tony Abbott on Four Corners last night:

TONY ABBOTT (at press conference): As leader, I am not frightened of an election, and I am not frightened on an election on this issue.

MARIAN WILKINSON: Tony Abbott believed scientists on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC were, ‘alarmist’ and tapped into headline grabbing attacks on the climate science in the media.

But despite those attacks the scientific consensus on climate change remains firm, says Kurt Lambeck, the outgoing President of Australia’s Academy of Science. This afternoon, the Academy released a new report written by some of Australia’s top climate scientists, backing the key findings of the UN’s IPCC.

DR MICHAEL RAUPACH, PRESIDENT, AUST. ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 2006-2010: One is that global warming is occurring, ah, that’s the temperatures in the last century or so have been going up. I think there is no ah, debate about that point anymore. The role of um, CO2 in that is also widely accepted and the fact that the ah, human input of CO2 into the atmosphere is a major contributor of that is a well accepted fact by the committees.

MARIAN WILKINSON: Co-chair of the report is Dr Michael Raupach, a senior CSIRO scientist.

DR MICHAEL RAUPACH: One way of posing a challenge is that if we continue business as usual emissions, then it’s very likely that the world by the end of this century ah, will be somewhere between three and five degrees warmer than it is now.

MARIAN WILKINSON: Tony Abbott brought his party together on climate change by promising he would act, but without putting a price on carbon. He says he will match the government’s commitment to cut Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by 5 per cent of 2000 levels by 2020. But he remains fundamentally sceptical that human activities are largely responsible for climate change.

TONY ABBOTT: I accept that climate change is real. I think government needs to do, ah to take meaningful measures ah, to combat it and that’s…

MARIAN WILKINSON: You’re dispute is the role of man’s intervention is that correct?

TONY ABBOTT: Sure, but, but that’s not really relevant at the moment. Ah, we have agreed ah to get a 5 per cent emissions reduction target. That’s, that’s a bipartisan position. Ah, I think we can get it, ah, by the direct action measures that I’ve outlined and the interesting thing is that the only major political party with a credible policy in this area is the Coalition. Um, the government says that climate change is ah, the greatest moral challenge of our time, but they don’t have serious policy to deal with it.

MARIAN WILKINSON: Do you still believe that the views of the IPCC scientists are alarmist?

TONY ABBOTT: Um, I, I certainly think that there is a credible scientific counterpoint, but in the end, um, I’m not going to win ah, ah, an argument over the science, I’ll leave that to the scientists.

MARIAN WILKINSON: One last question on that because ah, you have said very publicly ah, before this that you believe the earth is cooling not warming and you have cited the work of ah, Professor Ian Plimer on this. Do you still think there is a credible case for that?

TONY ABBOTT: Um, I, I have pointed out in the past, ah that ah, there was that high year um, a few years ago, ah, and the warming ah, if you believe the various measuring ah, organisations, ah, hasn’t increased, but again ah, the the point is not um, um, the science, ah the point is how should government respond and we have a a credible response that will achieve a 5 per cent reduction by 2020 and the government doesn’t.

It’s astonishing to me that these remarks didn’t make a splash in today’s media, and surely a marker for how far backwards we’ve moved in the political debate over climate change. No doubt part of the reason Abbott’s comments slipped through to the keeper was Labor’s own weakness in this area.

Plimer challenged Monbiot to a face-to-face debate which Monbiot accepted provided that:

he agreed to write precise and specific responses to his critics’ points — in the form of numbered questions that I would send him — for publication on the Guardian’s website. I also proposed that there should be an opportunity at the debate for us to cross-examine each other.

Initially Plimer refused, but then Monbiot accused him of cowardice, which brought an acceptance by Plimer and Monbiot’s publication of his questions.

Unfortunately Plimer, instead of answering Monbiot’s questions, responded with a list of his own.

There are real problems and dangers in engaging people like Plimer as Monbiot knows full well.

For starters as Lambert says there is the Gish gallop:

an informal name for a rhetorical technique in debates that involves drowning the opponent in half-truths, lies, straw men, and bullshit to such a degree that the opponent cannot possibly answer every falsehood that has been raised.

I was in that situation once myself a few years ago when I calculated that I’d need a 2500 word comment in order to reply to at least five separate issues, raised in a few deft strokes by a very clever interlocutor. I never solved the problem of how to respond; it still sits somewhere in the archives as an ostensible defeat.

Monbiot had seen how Plimer answers his critics mainly by insulting them.

I was concerned that a face-to-face debate, with all its bluster and generalisations, would let him off the hook.

There is also the problem of giving Plimer some credibility simply by engaging.

Barry Brook faced all these problems in deciding to debate Plimer in public, which Brook blogged about here and here.

It’s interesting that in Brook’s assessment it was an entertaining night out but convinced no-one.

Meanwhile readers will recall that Mercurius in his clever and entertaining post The Rules assembled an impressive list of links to Plimer critiques. I wondered at the time whether they were co-extensive with the ones I had assembled in an earlier blog comment.

Goodness me they were, Merc, apart from you doubling up on Lambeck and adding a later link to Brook! Great minds think alike I’ve communicated with Merc, and indeed it was a case of two people gathering info from the same sources.

Anyway Lambert at Deltoid picked up Mercurius post, which is good because Deltoid has an international readership. I wouldn’t be surprised if Monbiot read it as well, given that he quotes Deltoid and some of the references included in Mercurius’ post. Except that Monbiot’s article precedes Mercurius by about a month. Still, isn’t the internet a wonderful thing!

What I’ve decided to do is list a new selection of Plimer critiques, including one by Jim Lippard, courtesy of Deltoid. Lippard also finds Plimer a completely worthless source on creationism. Ouch!

Michael Ashley, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of NSW No science in Plimer’s primer

Professor Barry Brook, Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change and Director of the Research Institute for Climate Change & Sustainability, University of Adelaide Ian Plimer – Heaven and Earth

Barry Brook The great climate debate 2009 – Brook vs Plimer

Barry Brook Twitter Plimer on ice

Leigh Dayton, award winning science writer and broadcaster Denialist ark a wobbly craft

Ian Enting, Professorial Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems (MASCOS), University of Melbourne Ian Plimer’s ‘Heaven + Earth’ – Checking the Claims*

Professor Kurt Lambeck, President of the Australian Academy of Science and substantively Distinguished Professor of Geophysics at the ANU Comments on Heaven and Earth: Global Warming: The Missing Science

Tim Lambert, blogger who specialises in exposing the follies of climate denialists and other bad science The science is missing from Ian Plimer’s “Heaven and Earth”

Tim Lambert, Ian Plimer lies about source of his figure 3

Tim Lambert, Plimer and Arctic warming

Prof David Karoly, ARC Federation Fellow, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne Heaven + Earth – review by David Karoly

Jim Lippard, (profile here), Ian Plimer on climate change

Then there is Charlie Veron, former Chief Scientist of the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), who says that Plimer was not only wrong about reefs, what he said was mostly the opposite of the truth. Veron said as much on the ABC’s Breakfast program. There had been a link to a subsequent blog piece, but it’s now broken.

The ABC also has a roundup of five scientists’ views on the book.

Here’s a list of the first three Monbiot pieces, plus further developments.

Spectator recycles climate rubbish published by sceptic

Why can’t the champion of climate change denial face the music?

Let battle commence! Climate change denialist ready for the fight

More recently Lambert has complained about the ABC online spot Unleashed giving Plimer a run. I think this happens when their commitment to ‘balance’ overrides their concern for quality control. I think reviews give you an idea whether you want to read a book or not. the reviews on Heaven + Earth are such that it’s not just a waste of time, rather as a non-scientist you run the risk of filling your head with incorrect and misleading junk. So I haven’t listed supportive pieces, such as Andrew Bolt’s blog and the ABC’s Counterpoint.

As Brook sums up on the ABC roundup:

Ian’s stated view of climate science is that a vast number of extremely well respected scientists and a whole range of specialist disciplines have fallen prey to delusional self interest and become nothing more than unthinking ideologues. Plausible to conspiracy theorists, perhaps, but hardly a sane world view — and insulting to all those genuinely committed to real science.”

So on this blog I have no interest in discussing the so-called ‘merits’ of Plimer’s claims. None. This post was to make a one stop spot for assembling genuine scientific critiques to which commenters are welcome to add, plus to follow the kerfuffle with Monbiot. The problem with Plimer is that he keeps on turning up, a virus infecting public opinion, so we need a convenient antidote.

* Updated to version 1.9 – see Barry Brook @ 22 below

Update: Via Deltoid a piece by Bob Ward on Plimer, at Timesonline.

Again linked from Deltoid a piece by Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate answers the questions posed by Plimer.

Schmidt really puts the cleaners through him, concluding:

In summary, the relevance of these questions is extremely low, and even when the basic question deals with an issue that is relevant, the question itself is usually nonsensical and presupposes many assumptions that are certainly not a given (at least in the real world). In fact, for the couple of cases where the scientific content is high, the answer is in contradiction to Plimer’s unstated assumptions. The most obvious use of these questions to support a ‘we don’t know everything, so we must know nothing’ type of argument, which is a classic contrarian trope, and one that is easily dealt with.

These questions have as much to do with a debate on human caused climate change as tribbles have to do with astrobiology. Both are troubling, but for very different reasons.

There is also a link to a list of Plimer critiques at RC Wiki.

Tamino looks at Plimer’s claims about volcanos emitting large bursts of CO2 by looking for the effect of supervolcano explosions. Basically there isn’t any.

Then Tamino examines Plimer’s claim of a 100ppm gain from a decent volcano explosion against what happened with el Chicon in early 1982 and Mt. Pinatubo in mid-1991.

It turns out that 1 ppm CO2 is about 7.8 Gt (billion tonnes) of CO2. The entire output of the Mt. Pinatubo explosion was about 10 Gt. So even if every bit of material ejected by the explosion had been CO2 (which is not the case, not even close, CO2 was only a minor player in the volcano’s exhaust) it would have contributed only 1.3 ppm CO2 to the atmosphere, not the 100 ppm which Ian Plimer painted as a routine occurence. The CO2 output from the Mt. Pinatubo explosion doesn’t even make a “blip” in the CO2 concentration.

Tamino then does some of his clever statistical analysis to find the there was an effect from Pinatubo – in fact it was associated with small decrease in emissions.

Truly, it’s time for Plimer to crawl back under his rock.

I’ve been critical of Ian’s views before (see here and here). In short, my view was that Ian’s assertions about man’s role in climate change were naive, reflected a poor understanding of climate science, and relied on recycled and distorted arguments that had been repeatedly refuted. Ian and I have regularly ‘debated‘ on this issue, so I’m probably more familiar than most with his lines of argument. (I actually think it’s rather silly to debate the science, because this the role of the scientific community as a whole, and in doing so they’ve reached a view that this is a serious problem — but that is what the media demands.) Anyway, after reading the 500+ page tome that is H+E, I find that nothing has fundamentally changed.

By the sounds of it, Plimer’s latest work might well be another example of the genre of scientific writing which I’ll loosely term “Moses down from the Mountain”.

Essentially, a distinguished, often elderly scientist who achieved genuine renkown in some field or other (often physics) will develop a bee in their bonnet about some topic or other away from the areas on which they made their reputation. They will then spend a few years holed up writing their masterpiece in which they explain that the leading practitioners in the field of interest have disappeared up their own fundament, and that their alternative approach is the only one supported by logic and evidence. Without the benefit of putting their ideas to peer review through the regular scientific process, they cobble them together into a popular science book, and because of their eminence get a publisher, and unleash their thoughts on the world’s popular media. Active practitioners in the field then spend a considerable period of time having to explain that the ideas presented by the distinguished elderly scientist are a) wrong, and b) often, rehashed versions of old ideas that were debated and discarded within the field many years ago, and c) just because Professor X was a great particle physicist once, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re right about aerospace engineering, neuroscience, or in this case climatology.

None of this means to suggest that scientific disciplines (or, for that matter, other academic disciplines) shouldn’t be the subject of vigorous external critiques. But if a scientist feels the need to bypass scientific fora and bring their original research contradicting the wider scientific consensus to the popular press, it indicates a need for a large dose of skepticism on the part of a non-expert reader.