Here's another cockle warmer...imagine how wonderful it would be...

...if every weekend was a 3 or even a 4 day revel, if your mortgage was eliminated and if man-made global warming was just a figment of Al Gore’s imagination. Read this delectable article to experience some Monday morning bliss...No more ugly wind farms to darken our sunlit uplands. No more whopping electricity bills, artificially inflated by EU-imposed carbon taxes. No longer any need to treat each warm, sunny day as though it were some terrible harbinger of ecological doom. And definitely no need for the $7.4 trillion cap and trade (carbon-trading) bill — the largest tax in American history — which President Obama and his cohorts are so assiduously trying to impose on the US economy.
Imagine no more, for your fairy godmother is here. His name is Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology at Adelaide University, and he has recently published the landmark book Heaven And Earth, which is going to change forever the way we think about climate change...Plimer’s uncompromising position has not made him popular. ‘They say I rape cows, eat babies, that I know nothing about anything. My favourite letter was the one that said: “Dear sir, drop dead”. I’ve also had a demo in Sydney outside one of my book launches, and I’ve had mothers coming up to me with two-year-old children in their arms saying: “Don’t you have any kind of morality? This child’s future is being destroyed.’’’ Plimer’s response to the last one is typically robust. ‘If you’re so concerned, why did you breed?’...more from The Spectator, here...

Another climate scientist points out the obvious...

...that the science of climate change is not settled, and that Al Gore's propaganda about climatastrophe is nonsense. Now, hot on the heels of Ian Wishart's NZ best seller Air Con, and Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth, comes The Climate Caper by Emeritus Professor Garth Paltridge. Paltridge is an atmospheric physicist and was a Chief Research Scientist with the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research before taking up positions in Tasmania as Director of the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies and CEO of the Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Tasmania and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University...from the review notes...The Climate Caper, with a light touch and nicely readable manner, ...shows that the case for action against climate change is not nearly so certain as is presented to politicians and the public. He leads us through the massive uncertainties which are inherently part of the ‘climate modelling process’; he examines the even greater uncertainties associated with economic forecasts of climatic doom; and he discusses in detail the conscious and sub-conscious forces operating to ensure that scepticism within the scientific community is kept from the public eye...

...and from Harmless Sky a fascinating analysis of the recent European parliamentary elections, pointing to a comprehensive defeat for the green left and their ideas...What seems to have emerged from the elections, in which climate change played a relatively minor part, is that a party which is sceptical about global warming came from nowhere to run the ruling party into third place; that the ruling party, which has the highest profile position on global warming, performed abysmally; and that the Green Party, which is the only one entirely devoted to environmental matters, seemed unable to make major gains when, apparently, their time had come and everything was in their favour.
Whatever the politicians, scientists, and the media may be telling voters about climate change, it would seem that this is not feeding through into radical re-alignment of voting patterns. The people who had most cause for rejoicing on election night were undoubtedly UKIP, whose scepticism about the grand European project, and one of its crucial policies - fighting climate change - triumphed at the ballot box...more here..

An Aussie author responds to his critics...

...IN Heaven and Earth - Global Warming: The Missing Science, I predicted that the critics would play the man and not discuss the science. Initial criticism appeared before the book was released three weeks ago.Well-known climatastrophists criticised the book before they actually received a review copy. Critics, who have everything to gain by frightening us witless with politicised science, have now shown their true colours. No critic has argued science with me. I have just enjoyed a fortnight of being thrashed with a feather...Robert Manne (The Weekend Australian, Inquirer, April 25-26) claims to be a great democrat yet demonises dissent on a matter of science. He is not a scientist. The gains made in the Enlightenment, the scientific method, history and integrated interdisciplinary science are all ignored in an ideological push to remodel the economy...The huge number of recent letters tell me that there are winds of change. The average punter has been told for more than two decades that we are all going to fry. He is not stupid and is blessed with a rare commodity missing in many academic circles: common sense... My correspondents feel helpless and disenfranchised with the unending negative moralistic cacophony about climate change. They know it smells but they cannot find where the smell comes from.The reason why the book has been a publishing sensation is because the average person knows that they are being conned and finally they have a source reference...The hypothesis tested in my book was that increased atmospheric CO2 creates global warming. This was shown to be invalid on all time scales and by a diversity of methods.In the past, climate change has never been driven by CO2. Why should it be now driven by CO2 when the atmospheric CO2 content is low? ...read the full riposte from Ian Plimer in the Australian, here...Ian Plimer, a professor at the University of Adelaide, is author of Heaven and Earth - Global Warming: The Missing Science (Connor Court)...
...consider the case of Professor Ian Plimer and the book he couldn't sell.
Well, couldn't sell until now, because Plimer's Heaven and Earth, debunking the great global warming scare, has become an instant best-seller. It today gets its fourth reprint in little over a fortnight, bringing to 25,000 the number of copies now sold or ordered.
This, in a country where a best-seller is reckoned at some 8000 copies, so we're talking about a publishing hit...more here...

...and here in NZ, Ian Wishart's "Air Con" has shot to the top of non-fiction book sales. There is obviously a hunger to know where the stench of BS comes from...

Academic combat...a lot of hot air...

...THERE'S nothing like healthy academic combat. In the corridors of Adelaide University, two respected professors on opposite sides of the climate change debate are pushing their theories on the subject, sparked by a new book that has sceptics rubbing their hands with glee.
Outspoken academic geologist Ian Plimer yesterday launched Heaven and Earth: Global Warming the Missing Science, concluding that scientific modelling had placed too much emphasis on the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and global warming should not be blamed on increased human activity.
Speaking after the launch yesterday, Professor Plimer accused high-profile climate change advocates such as former US vice-president Al Gore of "scaring people witless" with theories about the world ending.
He also said 2007 Australian of the Year Tim Flannery pushed a "political line" and had considered only a "small body of evidence" when studying global warming.
Many scientists, he said, had not considered the history of the earth when discussing climate change, or factors including the earth's rotation, changing tides and solar winds... more from The Australian, here...

... and while the academics debate, the general public become ever more sceptical...Just one-out-of-three voters (34%) now believe global warming is caused by human activity, the lowest finding yet in Rasmussen Reports national surveying...more from the Rasmussen Reports here...
...and from WUWT...Nearly half (48%) believe the cause is naturally occurring planetary trends. Just a year ago, only 34% said warming was a natural phenomenon, while 47% said human activity was placing the planet at risk of disastrous climate change. That’s a huge shift...

Mmmm. Perhaps, (says Paul Sheehan of The Sydney Morning Herald), I was wrong...

...What I am about to write questions much of what I have written in this space, in numerous columns, over the past five years. Perhaps what I have written can withstand this questioning. Perhaps not. The greater question is, am I - and you - capable of questioning our own orthodoxies and intellectual habits? Let's see...

With these words, Paul Sheehan throws a brick through the greenhouse window, (thanks to the help of Gary Larsen and The FarSide) and introduces "Heaven And Earth", written by one of Australia's foremost Earth Scientists, Professor Ian Plimer. In reviewing Heaven and Earth (due to be released today) Sheehan delicately presents his own confession, that his past assumptions about AGW may have been mistaken... How long before more journalistic recantation becomes routine ? and how appropriate that it should follow my last posting...

Aside from Sheehan's position, Ian Plimer has written a significant summation of the present climate change debate and its political origin... Much of what we have read about climate change, he argues, is rubbish, especially the computer modelling on which much current scientific opinion is based, which he describes as "primitive"..."It is little wonder" he says, "that catastrophist views of the future of the planet fall on fertile pastures. The history of time shows us that depopulation, social disruption, extinctions, disease and catastrophic droughts take place in cold times … and life blossoms and economies boom in warm times. Planet Earth is dynamic. It always changes and evolves."
To sum up...Is dangerous warming occurring? No.
Is the temperature range observed in the 20th century outside the range of normal variability? No...more from Paul Sheehan here...and Anthony Watts (WuWT) here...and Australian Climate Madness here...