Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science,   ISBN:9781589794726

Customer Rating: 

What a waste of paper. I hardly know where to begin critiquing since the book is literally of no scientific value. That is saying quite a bit by the way. Even books with poorly supported conclusions generally offer something of value but not this book.
This author either does not have even a rudimentary enough understanding of chemistry and climatology or else he is deliberately twisting known facts to support the unfounded idea that a climate debate still exists. Take your pick but it must be one or the other.
With regards to the ozone layer this author imagines chlorine from CFC's that reach the stratosphere are environmentally the same as chlorine in waste water treatment which precipitates out in rainwater. This is spectacularly wrong. Either he knows nothing about the topic or else he hopes his readers know nothing.
He repeatedly makes false claims about IPCC models not figuring in clouds.
He generally supports the idea that climate sensitivity is .5°C while never revealing the source of this claim. However he frequently relies on data that use 1.5°C which of course invalidates his concurrent claim. One is left with the impression he does not understand the idea since he lists equations that, assuming climate sensitivity was actually .5°C, lead the conclusion that minus greenhouse gasses the earth's temperature would be <0°K. A physical impossibility!
He frequently cites completely contradictory studies as if they support his conclusions when in fact they undermine him.
As just one example he cites a study to support his contention that glaciers are not retreating but the study he cites demonstrates that glaciers are retreating.
He also cites studies in support of conclusions when in fact the studies cited do not address the issue at all!
As an example he cites a study claiming Mt Pinatubo released X amount of sulfur dioxide and CFC's but the study he cites makes no such claim.
He claims El Nino's last about one month. They last 15 to 24 months.
One would need a 30 page review to rebut all the contradictory and simply fabricated "evidence" this author presents.
Don't waste your time or money on this nonsense.
I'm glad I had my library borrow a copy of this book rather than having bought this load of BS with my own money. By borrowing the book my library was also spared having wasted its funds as well.
This book should be allowed a negative star rating.

Customer Rating: 

Prof. Plimer wrote an amazing book on the realities, rather than PC BS, surrounding climate change. I stand convinced. One thing, though: the book seems written FOR the scientific community, not for ordinary Joes, like yours truly. A bit tough to chew through. But enormously valuable and interesting. I find it difficult, but I am reading my way through all these millions of facts and data. I have never read a book at such a slow speed...
Perhaps Prof. Plimer or one of his students/associaties could produce a "Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science - FOR ORDINARY PEOPLE" (though not for dummies... they can read their Gore).

Customer Rating: 

"The Great Global Warming Swindle" in print, done by an ignorant, boastful and mendacious mining geologist.

I've read the whole book - pity me - but I haven't much to add that real scientists who reviewed it haven't said already. Each chapter is particularly nasty at the start with its Regnery-style attack-dog summaries of issues that Plimer misunderstands or which have no bearing on anthropogenic global warming. I can see why even when he was "on the other side" of science denialism - and when he doesn't think science begins and ends with monitoring slag heaps, he clearly thinks it's a form of football - he was an unconvincing embarrassment with his clumsy beside-the-point personal attacks on creationists, and actually reinforced the myth that there are two sides in some sort of debate on evolution.

Now that he's clearly in the crank world, he's still doing a very poor job - most denialists don't provoke the scornful reviews this garbage got. For one thing, he should have steered clear of the iron sun hypothesis. For another, he shouldn't have plagiarized, re-labeled, and slightly tweaked the faked sun vs. warming graphic from GGWS, then blatantly lied about its provenance as being from a German climate periodical. Because people check things, and nothing like that was in the periodical listed as the source, whereas the identity of that graphic as being from GGWS was immediate and iron-clad.

Customer Rating: 

I have not yet read a convincing case against the descriptions of
anthropogenic global warming (AGW) by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but I imagine that someone could make a reasonable attempt. Such a book would examine the IPCC's conclusions and explain why different conclusions may be correct. Heaven and Earth is not that book.

Many of the book's arguments are incoherent. Chapter 3 attempts to show that the sun is responsible for 20th century global warming. Actually the IPCC agrees that the sun played an important role in the warming of the early 1900s. Perhaps the point is that the sun caused all of it. First the chapter argues that temperature changes on Earth are caused by cloudiness changes driven by changes in cosmic rays which are linked to changes in sunspot intensity. Later, the chapter
argues that changes in the intensity of solar radiation (as opposed to cosmic ways) can account for global warming. The chapter doesn't mention the fact that neither sunspot intensity nor solar radiation have any significant trend over the last half century or so. There is a graph (with no mention of the source) which presents a third theory relating temperature changes to small changes in the length of the sunspot cycle, but it is not explained in the text. Later, observed global warming is attributed to a lack of volcanoes in the 20th century compared to the 19th. Taking these explanations at face value, they explain over 200% of 20th century global warming!

A large number of references to the scientific literature (around
2000) gives the appearance that there is strong evidence for the
book's statements, but many of the key claims are unsupported or
hardly supported. I list a few under "References?" below.

The book meanders too much. The author can't seem to resist
discoursing on unrelated subjects such as the origin of life on Earth, the threat of supernovas, and the composition of the sun. Even when on-topic, the discussion is often hard to follow. There is a mostly unobjectionable but irrelevant discussion of the details of El Nino followed by a suggestion that El Nino may be caused by undersea earthquakes and changes in the rotation rate of the Earth. That should be good for a laugh from the guys at work. As a physical oceanographer, I learned from this that Plimer will go out of his way to write nonsense even when it isn't central to the main argument of
the book.

A more significant error is his argument that we shouldn't trust 50 year projections of climate change from computers that can't predict the next decade. Models can simulate the effect of a given change in the climate system (such as increases in carbon dioxide), but at present (and perhaps forever) they can not predict individual occurances of shorter term changes such as El Nino. That's why predicting the relatively large effect of 50 years of greenhouse gas emissions is easier than predicting smaller random changes over a decade. For the same reason, climate models can reproduce the change from winter to summer even though it's impossible to predict the individual storms along the way.

Not only does Plimer not believe that society's CO2 emissions are
causing global warming, he does not believe the observed increase in atmospheric CO2. This puts him at the extreme fringe of global warming skeptics. In fact it's a misnomer to apply "skeptical" to someone who believes that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere doubled and then came back to its previous amount over a few decades in the early 1900s.

Plimer's explanation for why his extreme views are not considered
mainstream? He tells us that modern science is like Stalin era Soviet science, when scientists could be shot for opposing Lysenkoism. I am still waiting for a list of climate scientists who have been sent to forced labor camps for opposing Al Gore.

There are plenty of controversial issues about global warming that reasonable people can debate. Heaven and Earth does describe some legitimate scientific controversies, but its flaws make it a terrible resource for learning about them. It saddens me that so much attention is given to a book that was thrown together with so little care and insight.

References?

Figures are generally not referenced, which is important because they show key assertions like how much the Earth has warmed and in many cases seem to be wrong. There is a long email exchange on the web in which journalist George Monbiot attempts (and fails) to get Plimer to explain where he got his figures. Sometimes the figures go against the text. P. 121 accuses the IPCC of wrongly stating the range of solar radiation values as .1% of the average when it should be .22%, but Fig. 13 shows a range of .1%.

Chapter 2 aims to show that 20th century global warming is
unremarkable for the last few thousands of years of climate history. It asserts (p. 59) "Temperatures in the Roman Warming were 2 to 6 C warmer today" without any reference. P. 121 says (with no reference) "a change of just 1% in cloudiness... could account for all of 20th Century warming. However, IPCC computers don't do clouds." The former statement is dubious and the latter is untrue even if we assume "IPCC computers" means "computer models discussed in the IPCC reports." P. 371 says, with no reference or explanation, that doubling atmospheric CO2 will only raise temperature by .5 C when a climate feedback with water vapor is included. That's a major claim in contradiction to the IPCC--perhaps it deserves more than a sentence. The previous and following pages of the greenhouse gas discussion contain many similarly suspect and unreferenced statements.

Customer Rating: 

The book is very well referenced and dense with information.

Professor Ian Plimer is a very well respected geochronologist who also has a passion of debunking pseudo-science.

The main point of his book is that global warming is a frequent, natural, and very volatile fact of life on planet Earth and that any human driven warming would be overwhelmed by these natural fluctuations (getting warmer or colder). As an example, sea level rises due to human activities are projected to be in the order of 1mm per year while during normal warmer interglacial periods the rise is in the order of 10cmm per year, a thousand times more than human impact!

Have you ever wondered how Greenland was colonized and farmed during the period 800-1200AD if the weather was not warmer than compared to now? The colony at the time was so successful Rome gave it its own bishop and trade with Europe expanded to accommodate 1,300 trading ships a year....

Plimer's other focus in the book is the debunking of CO2 as a primary determinant of global warming. CO2 is at best a lagged loose proxy of climate change and CO2 seems to have taken on a quasi-religous quality devoid a credible scientific basis (issue of scientific fraud & vested interests).