Plimerphiles: the dangerous delusions of Murdoch hacks’ pet denialist

A step has arguably been taken back in the direction of the Dark Ages when anyone putting science above the mutterings of the supernatural did so at risk of being burned alive. It is no coincidence that Plimer is devout (the notorious Catholic George Pell is a fan). Also conservative Catholic, National Party Senators Boswell and Joyce won’t admit to being climate change deniers but they did launch Plimer’s book in the interests of balanced debate. Doubtless Plimer and they believe that, since God created humankind in his own image, we could not possibly be responsible for “planeticide”. The believers in an omnipresent, all-seeing and deciding deity can apparently reconcile His failure to intervene in disasters like tsunamis and earthquakes but would surely balk at this.

Secular scientists are more secure now than in three centuries past but many are still coming under attack. Herald Sun fulminator Andrew Bolt hit upon Plimer’s unlikely line that environmentalism is just another belief system and wrote that the ANU’s Dr Glikson, an earth and paleo-climate scientist, was “… a global warming alarmist and his writing is not science but religion”.

Despite the announcement by Rupert Murdoch a year or so ago that he is no longer a climate change denier and considers urgent action should be taken, his Herald Sun and Australian newspapers regularly toe the sceptics’ line. The Australian worshipfully opened its columns to Plimer with an enthusiasm rarely seen since its boss’s phony denunciation in Murdoch’s Brisbane sheet of Manning Clark as an Order of Lenin winner. Further, it gave him a platform to bitterly attack seven fellow scientists who dared write to coal power generators, urging them to make the transition from coal.

Said Plimer: “The cash cow climate institutes now seem to be drowning in their own self-importance.” He encourages the generators to “… reply by cutting off the power to academics’ homes and host institutions, forcing our ideologues to lead by example”. And, “There has never been a climate change debate in Australia. Only dogma.”

David Spratt agrees, but for different reasons: “… most of the public policy debate on climate is delusional, that is, a fixed, false belief resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact. …”

Tim Flannery says “There is no real debate about how serious our predicament is,” nor has there been the “understanding of just how profoundly we are influencing the very Earth processes that gives us life”.

Plimer presses all the clever buttons. “To demonise element number six on the periodic table is amusing.” “… Without carbon there would be no life on Earth.” And indeed, “So depleted is the atmosphere in CO2, that horticulturalists pump warm concentrated CO2 into glasshouses to accelerate plant growth”.

He says every time his book is criticised, sales rise. “This book has struck a nerve. … there are large numbers of punters who object to being treated dismissively as stupid, who do not like being told what to think, who value independence, who resile from personal attacks and have life experiences very different from the urban environmental atheists attempting to impose a new fundamentalist religion.”

His call for “scientific due diligence” before the emissions trading scheme legislation is passed will be music to the ears of the Federal Opposition, particularly the likes of Wilson Tuckey, further undermining current science and polarising the debate, as well as making agreement at Copenhagen less likely.

It is time to stand up for science, indeed it’s our only hope for survival of our species.