Hypocrisy from the warm-mongers

Professor Ian Enting, of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems (what a mouthful) at the University of Melbourne, has written to The Australian complaining about Ian Plimer's book Heaven + Earth, and praising Michael Ashley's "excellent" (shonky) review (see here), so we know where this is going:

Of the 2311 footnotes (not all referring to different sources), many either contradict Plimer’s claims or are irrelevant to the point that he makes. Particularly blatant is footnote 2056 where the cited study reports New Orleans sinking by 15mm to 18mm in the three years prior to Hurricane Katrina, while Plimer cites this reference to support his claim that New Orleans sank by about 1 metre.

Once again, the warm-mongers choose a single point, and extrapolate it out to the entire book. And in this case, Plimer's point is very possibly correct. A comment on my post on Michael Ashley's review has pointed out the following:

Plimer does indeed cite work by Tim Dixon et al (2006) and they do indeed give a figure of 15mm-18mm in their paper but on June 12, 2006 Professor Dixon ALSO reported as follows and used the plural to cover each of his co-authors:

"in some cases, the ground had subsided a minimum of 3 feet".

I reckon this is very close to Plimer's "about a metre".

Enting has even started a web page pointing out the supposed "errors" in Plimer's book (see here) in which the points range from plausible to downright silly, such as this one:

IPCC computers don’t do clouds — totally unsurprising — IPCC computers don’t do climate modelling—presumably they do things like e-mail, desktop publishing, accounting etc. The climate modelling used by the IPCC is done by major research groups using models that do include clouds.

But the real issue, of course, as pointed out in one of the comments on Enting's letter, is the hypocrisy of subjecting Plimer's work to microscopic scrutiny whilst Al Gore's utterly fictional book/movie An Inconvenient Truth is treated as gospel.

Read it here.