Labor lawyer wrong on Ian Plimer
Listen to the discussion about Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth. ABC 774’s webcam
shows Jon Faine, Andrew McIntyre and Liberty Sanger in the studio this morning.
On 774 ABC Melbourne this morning, Labor lawyer Liberty Sanger showed how ignorance and misinformation dogs the climate change “debate”.
In a typical example of ABC “balance”, Sanger was discussing Ian Plimer’s best seller Heaven and Earth with fellow traveller Jon Faine and the IPA’s Andrew McIntyre. Sanger declared that she thought Ian Plimer was “all about the short term look of the climate”.
When McIntyre said the exact opposite was the case, Sanger was not convinced. She said that Ian Plimer “ignores the long term trend” and “interviewed on Lateline, that was precisely the question he wouldn’t answer.”
Sanger said she hadn’t read the Plimer book “but I do watch Lateline and I do read the newspapers”.
As anyone who has read Heaven and Earth or watched the Lateline interview knows, Andrew McIntyre was right – as these three excerpts from the transcript of the Lateline program show:
IAN PLIMER: It’s all about that wonderful, four-letter word ‘time’. And if you just look at the last couple of years, you might have a different idea from when you look at the complete history of the planet … Whether you look at climate on a 10-year scale, 1,000-year scale, 100,000-year scale or a million-year scale, climates always change. They always have since the planet formed on that Thursday 4560 million years ago.
IAN PLIMER: … I come back to the wonderful four letter word. If you look at a bracket of 10 years of time, that doesn’t tell us what’s happening to climate – that’s telling us what’s happening to the weather.
IAN PLIMER: [I]f you look at climate over a very short period of time, and the period since 1850. Since we’ve come out of the little ice age, is it any wonder that after we come out of the little ice age, temperature changes. And the only way to understand what climate is doing is to look at history. Now the one point I make in this book is we are ignoring history at our peril. The Hadley Centre might be looking at 10, 20, or 50 years of information – that tells us nothing about the way the world is going.
Sanger made a point of mentioning on this morning’s program that it is wrong to assume that the views of a married woman are informed by those of her husband. Presumably, vice versa is also the case. Let’s hope so, because Liberty Sanger is married to Victorian Labor senator David Feeney.
