Right wing commentators hold it up as the definitive rebuttal of environmental doomsayers; the mainstream media fall back on the principle of getting both sides of the story and in the main give it an uncritical run. Major doubts later emerge. Sound familiar? Ian Plimer’s new book disputing man’s impact on climate looks to be following a familiar path.

Adelaide University's Ian Plimer

Bjorn Lomborg first trod the path in 2001 with his book The Skeptical Environmentalist - The Real State of the World, which reworked a raft of statistics to conclude environmental groups were catastrophising everything from overpopulation to deforestation, water shortages to certain aspects of global warming.

The Economist magazine called it “one of the most valuable books on public policy – not merely environmental policy – to have been written for the intelligent general reader in the past ten years”. The Washington Post chimed in, saying "Bjorn Lomborg's good news about the environment is bad news for Green ideologues. His richly informative, lucid book is now the place from which environmental policy decisions must be argued”.

Some years later the British documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle stormed into the spotlight promising to expose manmade global warming as "the biggest scam of modern times”.

Neither withstood subsequent scrutiny, though their claims entered the blogosphere and are often recycled. Lomborg at least retains supporters and did succeed in having a ruling of scientific dishonesty by his country’s Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty partially called into question, though never resolved.

Enter Professor Ian Plimer, a geologist from Adelaide University, who this week launch Heaven and Earth: Global Warming the Missing Science. Plimer has long criticised the validity of climate models, questioned the greenhouse role of CO2 and disputed the legitimacy of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

He has done the conference circuit for some years – mainly mining events, where he has commercial interests – presenting a barrage of data he says disproves human-sourced CO2 is driving climate change. Climate is instead driven by fluxes in solar radiation, volcanoes and myriad other complex interactions.

"An understanding of climate requires an amalgamation of astronomy, solar physics, geology, geochronology, geochemistry, sedimentology, tectonics, palaeontology, palaeoecology, glaciology, climatology, meteorology, oceanography, ecology, archaeology and history,” he writes.

And later: “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.”

The IPCC and its thousands of scientists of course do not reduce climate forcing to a single variable. What it has done is flag the variable that best explains the rapid increase in global mean temperature over the century.

One of the problems for the lay person, including your correspondent, is they are not qualified to assess the quality of the work. After all, 500 pages and 2311 footnotes seems like a lot. But what keeps coming up is that every point is decided in the negative, from the myopia of thousands of scientists across a range of disciplines to something as absurd as the rising temperatures being recorded in fact only due to monitoring stations being engulfed by urban sprawl. It’s a weighting that seems far too one sided to be objective.

One difference to the Lomborg experience eight years ago is that the debate that followed the headlines splash is also being played out in the mainstream rather than relegated to the special interest fora. Many scientists have already publically spoken out against Plimer’s work.

One is Professor Barry Brook, who at Plimer’s own University of Adelaide holds the Foundation Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change and is director of the Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability.

"Ian Plimer… quotes a couple of thousand peer-reviewed scientific papers when mounting specific arguments. What Ian doesn't say is that the vast majority of these authors have considered the totality of evidence on the topic of human-induced global warming and conclude that it is real and a problem,” says Brook.

“Ian also claims that a huge body of scientific evidence - indeed, whole disciplines such as geology and astronomy - have been ignored. This is an extraordinary proposition and quite at odds with the published literature, as reviewed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“I wonder if Ian has ever read their reports to find out what they actually do say. Terms like 'solar' and 'volcano' get frequent mentions, and there is a whole chapter on 'paleoclimate'.”

Another critic is Professor Matthew England, joint director of NSW University’s Climate Change Research Centre, who says Plimer’s argument that the planet has for long periods been hotter, wetter and had higher CO2 concentrations is misleading.

“Yes, this did occur at various times, for example 40 million years ago during the Eocene. But does Plimer tell his readers that at this time sea levels were 50 metres higher than today? Certainly humanity did not yet exist and importantly all of our cities, agriculture and infrastructure were millions of years from being built,” he says.

“In fact, the building of our cities, infrastructure, and the location of modern farming have all been set during a very stable climate era – the Holocene.”

Challenging orthodoxy is never easy but immensely valuable. However, knowing it will be scrutinised more closely for its stance must see additional rigour brought to bear. Only time will tell if Heaven and Earth has the rigour to do better than its predecessors.

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