Seldom has a book been more cleanly murdered by scientists than Ian Plimer's Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth, which purports to show that manmade climate change is nonsense. Since its publication in Australia it has been ridiculed for a hilarious series of schoolboy errors, and its fudging and manipulation of the data. Here is what the reviews have said.

Professor David Karoly, University of Melbourne's School of Earth Sciences:

"Given the errors, the non-science, and the nonsense in this book, it should be classified as science fiction in any library that wastes its funds buying it. The book can then be placed on the shelves alongside Michael Crichton's State of Fear, another science fiction book about climate change with many footnotes. The only difference is that there are fewer scientific errors in State of Fear."

Michael Ashley, professor of astrophysics at the University of NSW:

"Plimer has done an enormous disservice to science, and the dedicated scientists who are trying to understand climate and the influence of humans, by publishing this book. It is not "merely" atmospheric scientists that would have to be wrong for Plimer to be right. It would require a rewriting of biology, geology, physics, oceanography, astronomy and statistics. Plimer's book deserves to languish on the shelves along with similar pseudo-science such as the writings of Immanuel Velikovsky and Erich von Daniken. "

Professor Kurt Lambeck, earth scientist and President of the Australian Academy of Science:

"If this had been written by an honours student, I would have failed it with the comment: You have obviously trawled through a lot of material but the critical analysis is missing. Supporting arguments and unsupported arguments in the literature are not distinguished or properly referenced, and you have left the impression that you have not developed an understanding of the processes involved. Rewrite!"

Here are a few examples of the nonsense in this book (thanks mostly to Tim Lambert at Scienceblogs):

1. Plimer uses a graph, without attribution, produced for the Great Global Warming Swindle on Channel 4. The programme altered the timeline, creating the false impression that most of the rise in temperature last century took place before 1940. After an outcry by scientists, subsequent editions of the programme corrected the timeline. But Plimer leaves the graph – and its convenient error – intact.

2. He claims that Arctic sea ice is growing. Oh no it isn't.

3. He claims that Mount Pinatubo released "very large quantities of chloroflourocarbons, the gases that destroy the ozone layer." It didn't.

4. Like the Great Global Warming Swindle (from which several of the claims in his book appear to originate), he claims that volcanoes produce more CO2 than humans. In fact humans produce 130 times more CO2 than volcanoes.

5. He claims that only 4% of the CO2 in the atmosphere is produced by humans. In fact the pre-industrial concentration was roughly 280 parts per million. Human activities have now raised this to 387ppm. Work it out for yourself.

6. He says "it is not possible to ascribe a carbon dioxide increase to human activity". As David Karoly points out, "burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide enriched with carbon isotope 12C and reduced 13C and essentially no 14C, and it decreases atmospheric oxygen": in other words you can ascribe the increase directly to human activity.

7. Professor Michael Ashley noticed in Plimer's book: "an almost word-for-word reproduction of the abstract from a well-known loony paper entitled "The Sun is a plasma diffuser that sorts atoms by mass". This paper argues that the sun isn't composed of 98 per cent hydrogen and helium, as astronomers have confirmed through a century of observation and theory, but is instead similar in composition to a meteorite. It is hard to understate the depth of scientific ignorance that the inclusion of this information demonstrates. It is comparable to a biologist claiming that plants obtain energy from magnetism rather than photosynthesis."

8. He confuses the Sun's rotation with orbital motion around the solar system's centre of gravity.

There are dozens like this. Ian Enting shows that Plimer:

- misrepresents the content of IPCC reports on at least 13 occasions as well as misrepresenting the operation of the IPCC and the authorship of IPCC reports;

- has at least 17 other instances of misrepresenting the content of cited sources;

- has at least 2 graphs where checks show that the original is a plot of something other than what Plimer claims and many others where data are misrepresented;

- has at least 6 cases of misrepresenting data records in addition to some instances (included in the total above) of misrepresenting data from cited source.

You'd think all this would be enough to bury the book. You'd be wrong. In one of the gravest misjudgments in journalism this year, today the Spectator has made the book's British publication its cover story, with the headline "Relax: Global Warming is all a myth". Its story consists of a hagiography of Plimer by James Delingpole, a man who knows – and cares - less about science than I do about Formula One. Plimer's book, he says, is "going to change forever the way we think about climate change", as it demonstrates that anthropogenic global warming "is the biggest, most dangerous and ruinously expensive con trick in history." Delingpole takes the opportunity to cite the usual conspiracy theories about the "powerful and very extensive body of vested interests" working to suppress the truth, which presumably now includes virtually the entire scientific community and everyone from Shell to Greenpeace and The Sun to Science magazine. That took some organising.

I have come to expect this sort of rubbish from Delingpole but I'm amazed that the Spectator is prepared to run a story like this on its cover when a quick check would have shown that it's utter nonsense.

What this story shows is that climate change denial is a matter of religious conviction. The quality of the evidence has nothing to do with it. It doesn't matter how comprehensively the sources have been discredited, or how ridiculous the claims are. People like Plimer and Delingpole will cling onto anything, however improbable, that allows them to maintain their view of the world.

monbiot.com