Australian Climate Science Denier Ian Plimer Follows Tony Abbott in Pushing Dodgy Science to London Think-Tank

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Australians have been keeping the London-based climate science denial group the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) busy in recentย weeks.

After former Prime Minister Tony Abbott gave the groupโ€™s annual lecture in October, it was the turn of one of Australiaโ€™s longest-serving deniers to empty another bucket ofย bunkum.

Professor Ian Plimer, an Australian director of multiple mining companies, is featured in a new interview with the GWPF to promote his latest subtly titled denial tome:ย Climate Change Delusion and the Great Energy Rip-off.

When it comes to climate change science, Plimer can be placed very firmly in the file markedย โ€œdenial.โ€

As Plimer demonstrated early in the interview, he outright denies the existence of human-caused climate change โ€” the evidence thatโ€™s backed by decades of research, all the worldโ€™s main scientific institutions, and currently playing out in record-breaking temperatures, melting polar ice, and warmingย oceans.

โ€œNo-one has yet shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming and, if they did, they would also have to show that the natural emissions โ€ฆ which is 97 percent of the total โ€ฆ donโ€™t drive global warming,โ€ claims Plimer with one of his favorite talkingย points.

As even high school science students would know, the issue has nothing to do with the natural cycle of carbon dioxide between the atmosphere, oceans, plants, and the land. Plimerโ€™s extra three percent, which accumulates year upon year, comes mainly from fossil fuel companies liberating CO2 that was actually locked away millions of years agoย and adding it to the planetโ€™sย systems.

โ€œEmissions do not drive global warming,โ€ says Plimer, just to double-down on theย denial.

โ€œWe can live in a very high carbon dioxide atmosphere,โ€ says Plimer. โ€œLife has in the past. Every time in the geological past we have had a carbon dioxide rich atmosphere, we have had a massive explosion of ecosystems. Evolution has been driven very hard byย this.โ€

This is all fine, as long as you donโ€™t think about the mass extinctions in the past when carbon dioxide levels spiked, or how sea levels were many meters higher when the world was warmer (which serves as a slow but inevitable goodbye to all the coastal land where hundreds of millions of people currentlyย live).

Tilting at Tinyย Windmills

The GWPF was founded by Lord Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher’s former chancellor.ย Many of its known funders, including Australian hedge fund billionaire Michael Hintze, are also funders of the UKย Conservative Party.ย Throughout the interview, GWPF director Benny Peiser never once challenges Plimer, who is a member of the groupโ€™s โ€œacademic advisory council,โ€ย on his absoluteย denial.

But Plimer reserves much of the interview for an attack on his second-favorite target โ€” renewable energy and, in this case, wind power โ€” which he blames for rising powerย prices.

Wind farms, he says, contain โ€œslice and dice wind turbinesโ€ that are โ€œmassively disfiguring the countrysideโ€ but apparently, the multiple mining projects he has been involved with over the years have all improved the landscape by stripping itย away.

Referring to wind turbines, Plimer says: โ€œThe amount of energy to make them is more than they will everย create.โ€

โ€œThat’s just nonsense,โ€ says Graham Palmer, a researcher at theย Australian-German College of Climate and Energy Transitions at the University of Melbourne. He studies how much energy it takes to produce electricity technologies, against how much power theyย produce.

โ€œThereโ€™s no doubt that wind turbines generate much more energy than they take to construct. Of course there are different methodologies and different ways of calculating this, but the simple proposition that turbines donโ€™t produce as much energy in a lifetime as that they take to build is out by a least an order ofย magnitude.โ€

One recent scientific paper finds wind turbines produce between 10 and 20 times as much energy as they take to produce, depending on theย conditions.

In the GWPF interview, Plimer also says the imagined issue with wind turbines is โ€œexactly the sameโ€ with solar power.ย ย 

Palmer says this is also โ€œnonsense,โ€ย adding: โ€œWind is generally better than solar PV in terms on net energy, but the proposition that the Energy Return on Investment EROI) is less than one, is simply not supported at all in the academicย literature.โ€

For solar PV, Palmer said studies with different methodologies had given different resultsย butย had found that the panels generated between five and 30 times more power than theyย took toย produce.

He added: โ€œIf you go back to the 1970s when it was much more energy intensive to produce solar panels, then it may have been the case then (that they took more energy to produce than they generated), but for a long time now they have been well above one toย one.โ€

Plimerโ€™s view of wind turbines is similarly stuck in decades longย gone.

In his 2014 book, chirpily titled NOT FOR GREENS. He who sups with the Devil should have a long spoon,ย Plimer tried to undermine wind power with a crude comparative list of whatโ€™s needed to generate one megawatt-hour (MWh) ofย electricity.

You would need, wrote Plimer, to burn just 379 kilograms (835 pounds) of black coal, compared with running a 660 kilowatt (kW)ย wind turbine for 1.5 hours โ€œflatย out.โ€ย 

Thatโ€™s a neat little comparison, except the turbines being installed these days are an awful lot bigger than 660 kWย (or 0.66 MW). Turbines that small might have been installed 15 years ago, but not anyย more.

Take the Oaklands Hill wind farm in Victoria that was commissioned in 2009 using 2.1MW turbines, or the currently under construction Sapphire wind farm in New South Wales thatโ€™s installing 3.6 MW turbines (75 ofย them).

Using Plimerโ€™s crude method, it would take one of those 3.6 MW turbines a little over 15 minutes โ€œflat outโ€ to generate 1 MWh of electricity โ€” six times faster than the 660 kWย turbine that Plimer was using as aย โ€œcomparison.โ€

In the GWPF interview, Plimer complains about his own rising electricity costs, revealing that in the September 2017 quarter, his bill was $3,133. That makes you wonder what sort of drafty mansion he might liveย in!

According to a report from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the average bill in South Australia in 2015-16 was $1,925.ย  This had gone up $624 since 2007-08. The reason for theย rise?ย 

Plimer, along with many other climate science deniers and conservative politicians in Australia, will tell you that itโ€™s all the fault of nasty renewableย energy.

But the ACCC report says more than 70 percent of that rise in electricity bills in South Australia was down to increasing wholesale costs and rises related to the cost of delivering the electricity on theย network.ย 

Only $101 of that $624 rise, or 16 percent, was caused by government schemes to increase the uptake of renewableย energy.

Plimer’s Miningย Jobs

Even so, Iโ€™m sure Plimer can afford his bill.ย Plimer is a non-executive director on several mining company boards, including three ultimately owned by Australiaโ€™s richest person, mining magnate Gina Rinehart who, according to Forbes, is worth about AU$16ย billion.

In the last year or so, Plimer resigned from two firms, leaving him as a director of Lakes Oil, an oil and gas explorer;ย Nuiminco Group, exploring for minerals in Papua New Guinea;ย and Broken Hill-based Silver City Minerals, a firm prospecting for minerals, including copper andย gold.

From those three firms alone, according to their annual reports, Plimer earns about $100,000 a year.ย In November 2017, he resigned from the board of Kefi Minerals, where he was also earning about $35,000 aย year.

But it’s not known how much Plimer earns from his roles on the boards of three companies โ€” Roy Hill Holdings, Hope Downs Iron Ore, and Queensland Coal Investments โ€” which are all owned by Rinehartโ€™s Hancockย Prospecting.

In short, the evidence suggests heโ€™s not short of a dollar orย two.

Plimerโ€™s previous climate books have been heavily criticized, but have had influence โ€” namely on the views of Tony Abbott, who quoted from Plimerโ€™s 2009 book, Heaven & Earth, in his own political autobiography, Battlelines.ย Cardinal George Pell, a senior Vatican figure, has also been influenced by Plimerโ€™s work.

Scientists were outspoken in their criticism of the book, but perhaps the most diligent was the 64-page critique from Professor Ian Enting, finding more than 150 issues with the book, rangingย from the trivial to the serious.

Plimerโ€™s 2011 book,ย How to get expelled from school: a guide to climate change for pupils, parents and punters, was slammed at the time by the governmentโ€™s Department of Climate Change as โ€œmisleadingโ€ and โ€œbased on inaccurate or selective interpretation ofย theย science.โ€

The department went to the extraordinary lengths of putting together a detailed, point-by-point debunking of the book.ย ย 

Plimer praised former Prime Ministerย Tony Abbottโ€™s speech at the GWPF, which he said was โ€œon the money.โ€ย It wasnโ€™t.

Plimer claimed there were โ€œmany people in the Liberal Party โ€ฆ who are of that viewโ€ that climate change might not be caused by humans, and said Australia โ€œhad a few break away minor conservative parties of thatย view.โ€

Perhaps Plimer is referring to Family First โ€” the Christian conservative party that was subsumed in April 2017 by one of those โ€œbreakawayโ€ groups, the Australian Conservatives, led by another climate science denier, Senator Coryย Bernardi.

Plimerโ€™s big electricity bill hasnโ€™t deterred him from splashing cash on those fringe parties. In May 2016, Australian Electoral Commission records show Plimer donated $40,000 to Family First and $45,000 to minor party the Liberal Democrats. Both parties are unconvinced that human actions cause global climateย change.

Plimer, of course, was given space in the Rupert Murdoch-owned The Australian newspaper to promote his latest book.ย Plimer is also a favorite among conservative shock jocks. The GWPF has also been a go-to source for the newspaper on climate scienceย stories.

If there’s one thing you can rely on with Plimer, it’s that his climate science denial will have an uncritical and welcome home among right-wing commentators and dodgy thinkย tanks.

Main image: A screenshot from Ian Plimer’s interview with the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Source: YouTube

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