We often roll our eyes at the taunt that so-and-so is “not a climate scientist”, partly because many darlings of the climate movement aren’t either. But also, and more importantly, because many people actually trained in technical fields directly related to climate are dismissed in this manner by activists. Brushing aside countless academic disciplines related to the complex mechanics and past history of the Earth and its weather conditions, they instead reserve the cancellation-proofing quasi-official stamp of “climate scientist” for those special few who learned how to spin up a fake climate in a computer but are often woefully ignorant of key workings of the real one. For instance they disregard Professor Ian Plimer, author of Chapter 8 in the Canary volume profiled in this series, even though, or perhaps because, as a geologist Plimer is deeply trained in the physical processes that have shaped the Earth’s surface and atmosphere over its long history, non-stop changes over hundreds of millions of years that refute simplistic CO2-driven explanations and the obsession with humans’ alleged environmental sins. In this Chapter he discusses just a few of the massive historical climate changes visible in the geological record that can’t possibly be attributed to modern fossil fuel use and asks this critical question, “Why would the current warming be due to human activity when the previous 62 were natural?” Which far too many zealots and their approved “climate scientists” deal with by ignoring it and being ignorant of these previous changes.

As Plimer points out: “For more than 80 per cent of Earth’s history, it has been warmer and wetter than now, with sea level 200-300 metres higher.” He adds that we’re currently in an ice age and have been for 34 million years. In common parlance “ice ages” refer to times the glaciers advance well south into Europe and Asia, but to geologists it means a period with year-round ice at one pole and the South Pole has been frozen since the start of the Oligocene. Even if you insist on ice at both poles we’ve been in an “ice age” since the start of the Pleistocene 2.58 million years ago. And properly speaking the episodes during which the ice creeps down over continents are called “glaciations” and the melting event back toward the poles depicted in, e.g., Ice Age, is called a deglaciation.

So there’s some real climate science. On which Plimer goes on to note that sea levels are currently very low compared to much of Earth’s history, not high, as are CO2 levels. What’s more, and highly significant in terms of recent dogma about CO2 and warming, the geological record shows that ice ages somehow began during periods when CO2 levels were very high.

It’s also important that whether we are currently warming or cooling depends on the time frame. Broadly speaking we’ve been cooling for 50 million years. But we’ve warmed since the Permo-Carboniferous ice age. No, not the boringly-named Last Glacial Period between the Eemian interglacial 125,000 years ago and the current Holocene; the massive glaciation around 300 million years ago when the glaciers apparently came as far south as 40˚N, so basically as far as Madrid, Rome and Sofia, as well as Chicago and the outskirts of Reno. By the same token, but on a shorter scale, we’ve warmed since the Last Glacial Maximum and cooled since the Holocene Climatic Optimum. And of course we’ve also warmed since the Little Ice Age. But what makes it legitimate to call the last one, and only it, artificial? What evidence exists, or could, to support that claim?

Drawing on his vast erudition as a real climate scientist Plimer briefly touches on many other topics: reefs (coral and otherwise), ocean alkalinity, rates of sea level rise and others. And on each one he repeatedly refers to the overwhelming evidence of natural variability in the Earth’s past. Precisely the kind of topic on which it is essential to have broad as well as specialized knowledge in order to understand modern climate change in the context of the Earth’s history. And which is sadly lacking in so many of the so-called “climate scientists” we hear from today. Not to mention tinhorns like Al Gore who think climate was totally stable until Henry Ford invented the Model T, or perhaps even since Henry Ford II invented the Edsel.