A Time Line of Planetary Climate

Ian Plimer,Professor of Mining Geology, the University of Adelaide, has written an article for the Australian magazine Spectator that supplies the basics of earth tectonics and its effect on global climate. Ever reliable Wikipedia adds this to Plimer's CV: He rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. He has been criticised by climate scientists for misinterpreting data and spreading misinformation. Of course, there is no scientific consensus on climate change. We don't know the qualifications of the Wikipedia writer. Maybe he's more qualified than Plimer. Probably not.

Plimer points out some significant facts that have been arrived at through the scientific analysis of geologic structures:

  “For more than 80 per cent of time, Earth has been a warm wet greenhouse planet with no ice. We live in unusual times when ice occurs on continents. This did not happen overnight. The great southern continent, Gondwanaland, formed about 550 million years ago. It occupied 20 per cent of the area of our planet and included Antarctica, South America, Australia, South Africa, and the Indian subcontinent. Gondwanaland was covered by ice when it drifted across the South Pole 360-255 million years ago. Evidence for this ice age is in the black coal districts of Australia, South Africa, and India."

He moves on:

 “The Earth has been slowly cooling for the last 50 million years from times when life thrived and rapidly diversified. In these warmer times, there were no mass extinctions due to natural warming and, if the planet is warming today, the past shows us that life will thrive and diversify even more.”

In conclusion Professor Plimer makes this statement: 

“We are putting all our efforts and wasting trillions of taxpayers’ dollars into trying to prevent mythical human-induced global warming, yet we still don’t prepare for the inevitable annual floods, droughts, and bushfires, let alone longer-term solar – and orbitally – driven global cooling.

“We have a crisis of single-minded stupidity exacerbated by a dumbed-down education system supported by incessant propaganda, driven by financial interests and political activist authoritarianism.” 

 

It's a fair bet that Professor Plimer hasn't been invited to the now-opening World Economic Forum meeting in Davos.