This Lateline featuring Ian Plimer and George Monbiot has to be seen to be believed. More from Tim Lambert and from James Farrell at Troppo.
Update I must say the response of those on Plimer’s side of the debate has been thoroughly disappointing. Tribal loyalty might perhaps justify silence in the face of an embarrassing performance like this. On the other hand, no one appears to have the cheek to suggest that Plimer came out looking good, and few on the delusionist side are willing to admit that the most prominent scientist on their side came across as a total fraud.
So we get two lines (a) It was really mean of Jones and Monbiot to keep on demanding that he answer the questions (which had been supplied in writing long in advance) (b) It’s too hard to tell. This is truly pathetic.
And, as I’ve said before, this style of dishonesty, originating with the tobacco lobby’s attempts to obfuscate the health effects of smoking, now permeates right wing discussion of any issue you care to name, from the Iraq war to the Global Financail Crisis. It’s hard to see how any kind of political discussion can be sustained in the face of this kind of thing
John Quiggin 
I’m not normally a fan of Monbiot, but he absolutely wiped away any residual claim to intellectual honesty that Plimer may have had.
Senexx:
Ad hom: You are wrong because you are an idiot.
Not ad hom: You are wrong because of X, Y, Z. By the way, you are an idiot.
Monbiot did not make an ad hom argument against Plimer. That you think he did destroys your credibility. Saying you are none the wiser just means you’re being dishonest.
i remember george monbiot as a minor player in the pre-9/11 “global justice” movement. although i was sympathetic to his views, he never seemed to me to be particularly capable or smart. he seemed a bit of a lightweight, really. i winced when tim blair started calling him “moonbot” or something similar (i can’t remember exactly what), partly because of my recognition that such a mean label was not entirely underserved.
so for me, the fact that monbiot holds his own and indeed scores points against plimer is extremely telling.
I thought the similarity between Plimer’s opening claims about world leaders wanting to get their sticky hands on all this money were eerily similar to Abbot’s parroting about a “great big tax” providing a slush fund for Labor. What is the genealogy of this talking point?
Fabulous debate, Monbiot won hands down. I hope Plimer took his blood pressure pills.
A debate
“Though logical consistency, factual accuracy and some degree of emotional appeal to the audience are important elements of the art of persuasion, in debating, one side often prevails over the other side by presenting a superior “context” and/or framework of the issue, which is far more subtle and strategic”
Monbiot won on most counts when it came to emotional appeal and a “superior context”. Monbiot: Mr Plimer please explain climate change, yes or no sir three bags full sir, come on, answer the question, Yeh answer monbiot question Plimer. Stop dodging the question you fraud. Plimer: but, but…….. explaining climate change well its like the ATP cycle you see not a multichoice question. Monbiot: You Fraud, answer the question with all due respect sir.
Monbiot should stick to journalism,hollywood style, stay out of the science except the propaganda version you know the yes or no, good or bad, truth and morality version. Plimer should stick to geology, no more climate change debates without a crash course in debating for dummies.
The winner, Lateline, followed by a close second the climate tax revolutionaries and the deniers dead last.
Now, what a about the science ? That interview contributed nothing to the science but plenty positive Karma for the Climate Change supporters and as much as I had wished in my Bio exam that I could just give a yes or no to the ATP cycle question, I had to draw the damn thing otherwise I would have recieved an F for fail in the science.
Tony G:
The thermometers say the temperature was not hotter in 1998 than it is now (over the 12 months to November). The 1998 anomaly was 0.56°C and so was the average anomaly for the 12 months to November 2009. Given that 1998 had a massive El Niño and the beginning of 2009 had a La Niña, this is quite remarkable.
I wonder what Tony’s point is? He seemed to be starting irony but then just talked the truth.
Ohhh, f’chrissakes, that was all covered on Latteline the other night.
Come on Tony, brighten up and stop leading with your chin, mate.
It wasnt Plimer -vs- Monbiot it was Plimer -vs- Plimer and Plimer lost.
Plimer was asked by Monbiot to confirm specific assertions and references to those assertions made in his book and Plimer declined the opportunity to do so.
I was wondering if Plimer has read his book?
as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of someone using the term “ad hominem” incorrectly converges to 1.
Plimer is just out to sell a book and is prepared to lie to do it. How many times did he wave the thing around or call attention to it during the interview? Not only has he guaranteed sales from the nimbus brains on the wrong side of the science – the deniers, delusionists and delayers – but he has continued sales from the correct side of the science who need to refute his nonsense. The smug pric’s laughing all the way to the bank.
my daughter works in a book store (big chain) – she says they are selling stacks of Plimer
John – I have not read Plimers book, I have not followed his arguments. Other than catching the end of a brief interview of him by Phillip Adams on the radio this is the first time I have listened to him. I have on the other hand listened to lots of attacks on him which seem somewhat hysterical. I don’t know if the man is a complete fool or not. I don’t know if he is right or wrong. I would have liked him to answer the question. Perhaps he was being evasive. Perhaps his answer is complex and he needed space to make his case. I didn’t see enough in the interview to draw my own conclusion.
Yes I would like him to answer the question. Yes I suspect that he can’t do so in a manner that is satisfactory. However I’d like him to have the space to try, otherwise I’ll have to go and read his damn book.
@nanks
LOL nanks – quiet, funny and deadly.
@Salient Green
Exactly Salient – that damn book never left his hand in the debate and did get waved around at every opportunity. Its a wonder Plimer wasnt wearing an ad board strapped under his double chin over his lily white paunch exclaiming “come in spinners, buy me book” so I can get away from Monbiot and get on with the business of flogging my book to the intellectually challenged.
Plimer – rat with a gold tooth.
@nanks
Hell. In that case I think I’ll write a climate change denial book. Misquoting, telling lies, outrageous claims, shouldn’t be difficult. I suppose it would require travelling around, being pompous, to promote it. Difficulty woud be keeping a straight face.
The book would have to contain small words and large type given that it would be targetted at the hard of thinking.
A new variation? A creationist explanation of why AGW is wrong? Why not, targets two hard of thinking markets.
Honestly, Terje, watch the video again. It took Plimer no time at all to come up with the response about the underwater volcanoes. It was only when Jones had him dead to rights on that point that he started dodging. And the other questions he was asked were equally simple and straightforward. Does he still claim that warming ended in 1998? Did he cite the conclusion of a specific paper to say the opposite of the actual conclusion? Plimer didn’t answer any of them because he couldn’t, and he made it obvious that he wouldn’t answer no matter how much airtime he was given.
Meanwhile as I recall, you jumped on the stolen emails, happy to assume the worst based on selective and misleading quote-mining.
I hope this is merely self-deception on your part, Terje. You are certainly not deceiving anyone here.
if you can work in a guilt free self-help to wealth angle in there Freelander you are sitting pretty.
A number of people who have graduated from Australian universities are now very unhappy that a professor, still gainfully employed at one or more universities (lectured this year at Adelaide University, so I am led to believe), could go on TV and radio as well as regular “contributions” to newspapers, and apparently just make stuff up!
Again and again and again.
Without any concern by the relevant Australian universities (Melbourne and Adelaide, possibly Newcastle) that this is damaging to their reputations as scientific research and teaching organisations. It no long matters whether Professor Ian Plimer is convinced that AGW is real or that it is not, what matters is that he apparently makes things up!
Meanwhile, in supreme irony, read the last paragraph of this news article, and if you don’t know who the person is, google them. I don’t want to spoil the irony.
Don.
Teacher: “Young Ian Plimer, you have been a naughty boy. Now stay after school and write this on the blackboard one hundred times.”
Plimer: “I must not make things up, I must not make things up, I must not…”
TerjeP: It is actually stupid to suggest Plimer needed “space” on a television program (where time is the constraining factor) to answer a “complex” accusation that he corrupted a quotation. The “space” Plimer needed on Lateline was the short time required to cite the actual quotation he used to prove that he did not corrupt it.
Are you suggesting Plimer came to the Lateline program without even contemplating that previous claims that he corrupted Charles Keller’s statement would be raised? If he had an answer to them, then one could expect he would come armed with it. It’s called preparation, something a professor should be familiar with.
I am not surprised that you “didn’t see enough in the interview to draw my own conclusion”. You suspect “he can’t do so in a manner that is satisfactory. However I’d like him to have the space to try, otherwise I’ll have to go and read his damn book”.
As I understand it the actual corruption of the Keller quotation is made in Plimer’s book. So please tell how will reading the book allow Plimer have the “space” to answer the accusation (made after the book was published) that the quotation was a corruption?
Let me refresh your short memory span. Chris 0’Neill pointed out at 30 that Monbiot asked Plimer about the corrupted quotation of a statement in one of Charles Keller’s recent papers. Monbiot quoted Keller’s paper as saying: “The recent data from satellites and radiosondes blows away the contention that there has been no further warming.” Monbiot pointed out that Plimer corrupted this to: “The recent data from satellites and radiosondes shows that there has been no further warming.”
Even the most block-headed Plimer apologist would not attempt your argument that “space” is needed to answer this accusation.
@Donald Oats
do you know who brought the charge?
John – I will watch the interview again. My comment wasn’t an attempt at misdirection and I’m sorry if that is what it seemed. I just thought that if the point of the interview was to challenge Plimers heterodox views then Monbiot wasn’t adding value because he didn’t have any questions to ask that Tony Jones wasn’t asking anyway and he didn’t profess any expertise beyond that of an informed journalist (which is what Tony Jones is). This isn’t a criticism of Monbiot who was clearly just a guest who was sticking to his guns.
At face value it seems that Plimer made some claims about volcanoes that have been repudiated. He is probably wrong but I’m not informed enough one way or the other to form a strong view. To be properly informed I’d have to read his book (or an extract) so as to understand his actual claim and I’m not that interested in reading his book. I accept that lots of people say he got it wrong.
I didn’t jump on the leaked emails. I went and read them along with commentary at realclimate and climateaudit and formed my own impressions. My criticism of those involved in climategate is not about them getting things wrong in terms of the science. It is about them using positions of power to deliberately obstructing public criticism and review (both formal peer review and informal public review).
I notice you didn’t have much to say about climategate other than noting that you were ticked off at my views. Perhaps your own tribal tendancies kept you at bay in terms of debating the substance. I did note that Monbiot had no such problem. He was quite scathing of what the leaked emails reveal. Why do you have so much difficulty arriving at the same conclusion?
p.s. Your suggestions (repeated) that I am at the whim of tribal loyalties make even less sense when you bring up issues like the Iraq war. I was a vocal opponent of the US invasion and a constant critic of the WMD evidence. I was also critical (and vocally so) of the propaganda that claimed that Saddam deliberately gassed his own people. Graham Young at online opinion gave me an ear full because I repeatedly calling George W Bush a liar. The blogosphere is littered with my views on all this. The notion that I’m wedded to a tribe is a silly debating point merely designed to denigrate and dismiss.
p.p.s. And if I was really interested in tribal solidarity then I’d spend more time occupying some right wing echo chamber rather than the 30%-40% of my blogging time which is spent in your left wing echo chamber.
I didn’t post about the stolen (not leaked!) emails because I thought I would be too bad tempered about it, but I’ll give some observations
(a) Those who undertook the theft are criminals, and those who took advantage of it are accessories after the fact. None of those involved have any standing on which to make moral judgements
(b) Those who relied on “smoking gun” quotes about “tricks” and “hide the decline” were at best showing their ignorance of the way scientists (including economists) talk amongst themselves, and at worst compounding the dishonesty of the original theft
(c) The suggestion that anything revealed in the stolen emails casts doubt on the validity of the underlying data is similarly false
(d) The remaining question is whether Phil Jones and others acted improperly by trying to obstruct legitimate (if maliciously motivated) FOI requests. My initial impulse was to dismiss this question along with the rest. But Monbiot, whose judgement I respect and who, as a journalist, naturally takes such issues seriously, concludes that there is a big problem here. Since the issue is under formal investigation, I will wait to see what that investigation yields.
PS: I’m aware that you are not a rank-and-file tribalist, Terje. That’s why I’ve been disappointed in your take on this issue.
From someone like Graham Young, for example, i would expect nothing less (or nothing more). If black needs to be white for his political purposes, or yellow needs to be purple, he will find a way to make it so.
@TerjeP (say tay-a)
The essence of the critique of Plimer is not that he has ‘heterodox’ views or that he ‘sticks to his guns’. The essence is that he repeatedly tells lies and makes things up and he does that even when his lies and inventions have painstakingly been brought to his attention. The essence of his problem with telling the truth was made blindingly clear by both Tony Jones and Monbiot. Intellectual freedom and freedom of speech should not be a free pass to allow him to persistently tell lies without sufferring criticism.
@nanks
Not yet…
BTW, and I know this is a bit provocative, but any academic who works at a Plimer-free university and who is a bit bored before the Xmas break (probably reserved for marking exams), could always idly daydream about sending a personal Xmas message to a Plimer-infested university’s Public Relations Dept. Wait, isn’t Adelaide University one such example? Indeed it is, according to their very own Staff Directory Services.
Maybe a message something like:
“Saw this on ABC Lateline 15th Dec 2009 (Video here), and as a professional academic I simply cannot believe what I saw…” Sure looks good with a direct link to the actual video, just to complete the missive 🙂
That sure would send a message, loud and clear 😛
But I cannot in good conscience condone such activities, fun though it may be to idly entertain such an idea in a daydreamy moment.
On climategate:-
a) Yes the email content was stolen. It is now public domain. It isn’t going to go away. We don’t know if this was a whistleblower or a hacker. The former looks more likely to me given the scale and specificity of what was collected and the care taken to veil certain personal details such as email addresses.
b) No real argument. However put those quotes in context and they don’t improve. The emails in full paint a dim picture of those involved.
c) I disagree. Some of the data has been doctored and does not show what it claimed to show. Data sets were spliced and passed off as something different despite public statements by those involved that data sets are never spliced and should never be spliced.
d) I suspect a lot of things in life come down to whos judgement we trust. I don’t know Monbiot beyond the Plimer interview and a recent article he wrote on climategate. I don’t have a whole lot of faith in the review that is proposed.
@TerjeP (say tay-a)
Terje…on some matters you are distinctly tribal if you will pardon me for saying so…somewhat more pleasant and amenable to deal with than the usual tribalist troll…but Terje….you still manage to softly softly peddle quite a few factually incorrect and irresponsible arguments in the interests of tribalism nevertheless, especially on climate science.
You will probably take my comment as a compliment Terje…but dont fail to detect my disappointment in you, as JQs is evident. Detention on Fridays suggested until you drop the soft peddling of arrant nonsense.
@TerjeP (say tay-a)
And Terje – you say this
“p.p.s. And if I was really interested in tribal solidarity then I’d spend more time occupying some right wing echo chamber rather than the 30%-40% of my blogging time which is spent in your left wing echo chamber.”
And you know as well as me that the dialogue is mostly male and mostly dry and mostly boring and often rude and often uncivilised in the right wing echo chambers you may have more in common with….
Enuf said. There are blogs and there are blogs, which is why you are here (dont deny that one!)
In the update you are drawing a long bow again JQ.
I did not see the programme (I’m not very interested in the subject) but understand that Plimer was dreadful and, if you say so, I accept that he looked like a fraud.
From this you draw a line of dishonesty from the tobacco companies through P and his defenders ending up with all discussions involving those on the right – presumably you mean those of your right. You mention the Iraq war and the GFC.
I don’t know what all those on the right say about the Iraq war. I guess I am one and I believe that Bush/Blair/Howard committed one of the most serious errors a government can commit: going to war of false grounds. Under the Westminster system Blair and Howard should have resigned when it was discovered there were no WMDs.
I know many at about my point on the L/R spectrum who believe the GFC was caused by a combination of bad government in the US (going back many years) and a failure of bankers and others to price risk properly. I certainly don’t believe that what happened negates all the economic reforms over the past 30 years.
I have gone on at some length because you tried to put many people, identified by where they are on that spectrum, into your evil and dishonest bucket.
I have a T shirt that says “I think you will find it’s a bit more complicated than that”. Ben Goldrick was talking of science, particularly medical science, but the observation also applies to economics and politics. And people.
@nanks
How about a book that misquotes Plimer, presenting him as a believer in AGW but otherwise as a leading creationist scientist who believer geology proves the earth is at most 6000 years old? Doctoring quotes from his book shouldn’t be difficult. Its not as though he would have anything to complain about, except for having stolen his MO.
@Freelander
I know just the author to do that job Nanks – imagine this – the inimitable Mr Windschuttle tracks through the footnotes and sources of the inimitable Mr Plimer!
Now where is Windcshuttle when he could actually be usefully employed doing what he is best known for (nitpicking)?
The Editorial in the UnAustralian on the 17th Dec 2009 is a stunner in bald face bulls**t. Like Plimer, they don’t even seem to care that they are bullsh**tin’. Anyway, read the third-last and second-last paragraphs after watching the Lateline interview – for maximum impact, in that order.
Dastardly moderation…got me
Alice – I don’t think the left are less rude than the right. In terms of this blog SJ is forever being rude.
You probably can’t see it but you are far more tribal than me. And it blinkers your outlook far more than tribalism blinkers mine.
Ken N, the program is linked in the very first line of the post. Please watch it before commenting further.
I couldn’t agree more.
I was amazed when Plimer did not answer the specific questions; Monbiot asserted fabrication and provided Plimer with an explicit opportunity to prove him wrong in public.
@TerjeP (say tay-a)
Rather than read Plimer’s damn book, you could read Ian Enting’s compehensive list of problems with it. Ian is a mathematician at U Melbourne who has published extensively on the mathematics of the carbon cycle, climate simulations, etc.
@TerjeP (say tay-a)
I happen to like SJ Terje …plus she is funny and certainly nowhere (nowhere) near as rude as some of the troll drop ins. Sea Bass started out rude but has become much more urbane, but no more accurate, Terje….a bit like yourself come to think of it!
No, JQ, I’m not interested in the programme or Plimer’s book. I accept everything you say about the programme and Plimer.
My comments were about your remarks that “this style of dishonesty now permeates right wing discussion of any issue” I do not believe that any style of dishonesty permeates right wing (and I identify myself in that category) discussion as a whole.
There is, I am sure, dishonesty on the left the right and at points in between.
Broad condemnation of any group, identified by where they are on the spectrum, is careless argument. Often used by some on the right towards the left, I agree, but not good argument wherever it originates.
@TerjeP (say tay-a)
I deny that Terje – and at least Im not a climate science denialist.
The last comment was from me. Dunno why WordPress keeps trying to change my identity.
@Donald Oats
Baldfaced Don – I agree – more sickening blatantly biased dishonest news reporting from the sick empire of Murdered Media.
@Alice
Well, if Keith Windschuttle goes through Plimer’s ahh footnotes, we know he won’t find any massacres in them.
I would agree with Terje that it is futile to argue whether the left is less rude than the right, or vice versa. But that is a side issue.
That being said, I thought that, even for someone not across the details, Plimer’s inability to answer the questions were damning. I thought his whole performance was very poor. His tactics were not even clever. Attacking the moderator in a pompous fashion is hardly likely to gain one much sympathy from the moderator or the audience. Those who still insist on defending Plimer after that performance obviously have a high personal psychological “investment” in climate change theories being false.