He’s well known for rejecting the majority consensus in science on climate change. But professor emeritus Ian Plimer says he has good reasons to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy.
“More recently, I’ve been concerned about kids who are emotionally distraught about the climate crisis that they’re told is happening,” Plimer told an audience at the CPAC Australia conference in Brisbane on Oct. 5, announcing the release of his new book “The End of the World.”
He said the book, which has seven co-authors, looks at the effects that climate change alarmism is having on children.
“There’s a prominent psychiatrist who looked at the national curriculum, where from kindergarten to when they finished university, [our children] are getting pounded with ideas about how you are sinning, you’re creating the end of the world, you’re destroying the planet, it’s all your fault, you’re not going to live very long.
“Now, I think that’s child abuse and it’s been going on a long time,” Plimer said.
He said that for many young adults, the information about climate change they’re learning in school is leading them to decide later on in life that “they don’t want to have children.”
“We have now a whole generation of kids who are absolutely terrified of the future,” he said. “We have a new class of people out there who are suffering trauma from the activists, and they are being told that the world is ending.”
Plimer said that, as a geologist who has had a life-long passion for education, he believes that the West is facing a major crisis because education systems were taken over by leftist thought “40 or 50 years ago, and kids now cannot critically think, they don’t know how to acquire knowledge.”
“They don’t know how to be able to filter and say, well, that’s not in accord with this,” he said.
Plimer said that the activism surrounding the topic of climate change is ultimately about freedom.
“We have got a whole generation of compliant kids, which is a great step to destroy freedom. And if you can create a generation of people who cannot think critically, you can control them,” he said.
“These books are based on evidence that has taken hundreds of years to accumulate,” Plimer said of his writings based on published science about Earth’s geological record.
“For thousands of years, we’ve had shysters going around telling us that the world’s ending. And if just one of them got it right, we wouldn’t be here,” he said.
“So you cannot be 100 percent wrong on anything unless you’re predicting the end of the world,” he told the audience.
Meanwhile, there is a class of people taking advantage of the situation that has found “new ways of laundering money,” he said.
The professor—who has been persona non grata at the ABC since a controversial 2009 “ambush” interview following the publication of his first book “Heaven and Earth, Global Warming: The Missing Science” that sold 150,000 copies—said he thinks he’s noticing some change in people’s understanding about the climate change issue, almost 15 years later.
Climate Changes
With his books, Plimer said he wanted to point out “the enormous amount of science that’s just not chronicled.”“So I gave thousands of references and looking through the eyes of an earth scientist, said: ‘No, climate always changes. It’s driven by two major factors: one is that great ball of heat in the sky called the sun and that puts out variable amounts of energy, and the second is our distance from the sun, which changes.’ And there are other things too, what the galaxies are doing, where the continents are, what the oceans are doing, but it’s really two factors driving it.”
One criticism against Plimer over the years has been that he is not a climate scientist per se. But Plimer says that as a geologist, he knows a lot about climate.
“Geology textbooks for the last 250 years had been dealing with climate,” he told the audience.
Plimer’s new book adds to other books he’s written for children, including a trilogy called “The Little Green Book” in which he adapts different sections for different ages to challenge students to think critically about the climate.
The first book in the trilogy for 8-year-olds is about aspects of the carbon cycle that “kids at that age really laugh about,” Plimer said. “That’s the aim of the exercise, but it’s a book which is designed to inform kids that net zero will not work. It cannot work. It’s an impossible dream. And if you are fed that. you’re being fed lies.”
For the “moralising” teenagers, Plimer challenges them with a moral question about their use of mobile phones, which have “82 of the 92 elements in the periodic table.”
“Are you going to give that up?” Plimer asked. “Ten percent of the world’s energy is used in computer centers. Are you going to give that up? If you swan around in an electric vehicle feeling that you’re morally superior, kids your age are working in the cobalt mines of the Congo for the Chinese. These are slaves. So where are your morals?” he said.
Plimer said that “probably, the most useful data is that we are so fortunate in the world we live in at present. Very few people have experienced a world like this.”
