Nobody could have predicted the consequences of Ian Plimer’s latest book, Heaven And Earth: Global Warming – The Missing Science, when it hit the shelves in Australia.

Unknown to most American’s still under the spell of the junk science known as global warming, this book’s impact on the Australian public is quite surprising. As I write this, the Australian Senate is on the verge of rejecting its own version of cap-and-trade. As a possible sign of things to come, the collapse of this legislation in Australia offers a glimpse of what the future shape of this debate might take in our own country and provides possible insight into the fate of similar legislation in the U.S. Senate. That is, if the House passes what will amount to the greatest tax increase in American history. It seems the whole global warming hysteria could be on the verge of collapse.

Recently, The Australian described the general trend and its leading cause:

There is rising recognition that introduction of a carbon tax under the guise of “cap and trade” will be personally costly, economically disruptive to society and tend to shift classes of jobs offshore. Moreover, despite rising carbon dioxide concentrations, global warming seems to have taken a holiday….

The same is about to happen here in America. From the Wall Street Journal:

The reality is that cost estimates for climate legislation are as unreliable as the models predicting climate change. What comes out of the computer is a function of what politicians type in. A better indicator might be what other countries are already experiencing. Britain’s Taxpayer Alliance estimates the average family there is paying nearly $1,300 a year in green taxes for carbon-cutting programs in effect only a few years.

Americans should know that those Members who vote for this climate bill are voting for what is likely to be the biggest tax in American history. Even Democrats can’t repeal that reality.

Wondering if senators actually take the time to read actual facts, I sent an email to my state’s senators asking them to read Mr. Plimer’s book. In Australia, so great is the popularity of this book that it is now into its third print run in as many weeks and is now up to the fifth printing. I encourage my readers to do the same for your representatives in both houses of Congress, although it may be too late for the House.

What is most remarkable is that, after reading the book, Australia’s leading global warming hysteric Paul Sheehan wrote a review of Plimer’s book and described Plimer as “one of Australia’s foremost Earth scientists,” and praised the book as “brilliantly argued” and “the product of 40 years’ research and breadth of scholarship.”

Plimer states in his review that much of what we have read about climate change is rubbish, especially the computer modeling on which much current scientific opinion is based, which he describes as “primitive.”…

It is well known by real scientists not on the special interest payroll that our climate is driven by the receipt and redistribution of solar energy. However, all current global warming models ignore the impact the sun has on global climate change. It is quite ridiculous, actually, to reduce climate change to a single variable, carbon dioxide. This ignores a basic tenant of the science of chaotic or complex systems. To call it junk science is to honor the approach and those who practice it. I will leave the worship of fools to the Nobel Peace Prize committe.

Also known as the butterfly effect, chaos and complexity theory study systems so sensitive to the initial conditions of the variables (note the plural here) in your model that it would take infinite computing power to accurately predict the future state of a chaotic system past some point in time. We are talking about changes to the variables under question sometimes in the 6th, 7th, or 8th decimal point and beyond and how they can lead to completely unpredictable outcomes. A butterfly flaps its wings in South America and a hurricane forms off the coast of Africa and heads toward Florida.

Some simple chaotic systems under study require the solution of no less than 12 coupled differential equations – a difficult task even for a supercomputer. Every wonder why the weather is only accurate out to three days – at best? Lack of data is the death of any computational numerical modeling approach for complex systems, and the tendency to simplify models only works for linear systems, for which the level of complexity involved is orders of magnitudes lower than the complexity involved in studying something like the Earth’s climate. There are those who claim that weather is not the same as global climate. You may as well state that jeans are not pants.

Sheehan concludes in his review:

Heaven and Earth is an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence.

Note carefully that Sheehan, in making this statement, concedes the argument to the opponents of anthropocentric global warming. Those who reject global warming are now on the side of being “evidence-based,” and it proponents now properly identified as intellectual lightweights and dogmatic conformists. Remember what I wrote about in my previous post about a cattle herd heading off a cliff?

That’s right folks, it is quite possible that we are on the verge of blowing apart the great global warming scare, decades in the making and a pet of the American left. To implement a cap-and-trade plan now serves only to weaken the American economy and export American jobs. Also, it would be moot to even consider passing such legislation at this point until China and India also agree to do so. Don’t hold your breath. And don’t be surprised if the House passes the climate bill. Nobody ever described the passage of legislation by any liberal as “evidence-based”. Hysteria-based, yes, but what liberal actually wants to hear the facts?

Australian Senator Steve Fielding, impressed by some of the data presented at the US Heartland Institute’s climate change conference issued a challenge to the Obama White House to rebut data that indicated that, although carbon emissions had increased in the last 10 years, global temperature had not.

What the Australian Senator found was that Joseph Aldy, US President Barack Obama’s special assistant on energy and the environment and other Obama administration officials were not interested in discussing the legitimacy of climate science.

They only appear to be interested in pilfering your wallet.

More from Michelle Malkin – Gore to the rescue!

Karl at Hot Air on the Obamacare infomercial. He also posts at Patterico’s Ponficifactions. Always love the comments. Also, it looks like a ratings bomb for Obama and ABC.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 1:27 pm and is filed under General Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.