You wouldn't trust a climatologist to test you for colon cancer.  You wouldn't trust an oncologist to design a highway overpass.  So, why would you trust a civil engineer to tell you whether or not global warming exists?

After reading a recent letter in my local newspaper touting one Dr. Ian Plimer as an expert on climate change, I decided to check out his published research via Colorado State University's Web of Science database. I discovered that most of Dr. Plimer's papers were apparently related to metalurgy, such as one titled "Exploitation of gold in a historic sewage sludge stockpile, Werribee, Australia," a topic about which as a former computer scientist I know little.  In my ignorance, I will simply assume this refers to a process of alchemy by which gold is harvested from sewage, the theory for which I could easily dispell using a computer science maxim that states "garbage in, garbage out" and proudly proclaim myself one of the many "scientists" who disputes the theory of "Exploitation of Gold from Sewage." 

However, Plimer did have one published paper related to climate change, titled, "Climate change, a geologist's view," possibly a duplicate, in both the March and April 2009 editions of Materials World, which is not a song by Madonna, but a magazine "specifically devoted to the engineering materials cycle, from mining and extraction, through processing and application, to recycling and recovery." An important subject, to be sure, but not exactly related to climatology, a topic I've located in the past through publications like Journal of the American Meteorological Society or Journal of Applied Physics.  Still, I requested the article through Inter-Library Loan, which at two pages was, shall we say, succinct, for a scientific research paper.

Even the title of the article was misleading:  the author information stated that Plimer isn't a geologist at all, but a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Adelaide in Australia.  The distinction may be insignificant down under in Australia, where they harvest gold from sewage, but not here in the good old U.S. of A. where we know the difference between bridges and rock formations.  That Dr. Plimer isn't qualified to speak on the topic of global warming hasn't evidently prevented him from putting himself forth as an expert on the subject.

The paper wasn't research at all, but only a statement of Plimer's own "conclusions," and states no sources for its information, some of which seemed to contradict common knowledge as well as what I learned in the atmospheric science class I took last year at CSU.  The gist of Plimer's paper is that climate change has historically been caused by natural causes; therefore, it cannot now be caused by human activity.  This former premise has been known for some time:  historians believe events like the sacking of Rome and the Viking invasions were the result of cooling climates in northern Europe and Asia.  This is why the U.S. Pentagon is one of the biggest funders of climate change research.  But Plimer's conclusion doesn't necessarily follow, because the precise atmospheric conditions that exist now have never existed before.

Oh, but Plimer argues that they have, and that previously high levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere were caused by volcanic activity and associated with cycles of cooling and glaciation.  This is oversimplistic.  If you've ever been to Yellowstone, you probably noticed the air smelled like rotten eggs.  A real geologist--as opposed to a civil engineer--might know that volcanic eruptions don't only release CO₂ into the atmosphere, but also sulfate aerosols.  Sulfate aerosols reflect incoming sunlight, thus resulting in surface cooling, regardless of the levels of CO₂. 

The 1991 erruption of Mount Pinatubo ejected an estimated 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, creating gorgeous sunsets and resulting in the two coolest years of the 1990s, 1991 and 1992.  Volcanic erruptions are so effective in cooling the earth's climate that I understand one researcher at NCAR in Boulder is modeling the possibility of shooting sulfates into the atmosphere as a means of simulating volcanic activity and combating the effects of global warming.

If Dr. Plimer were a climatologist, rather than an expert on harvesting gold from sewage, he might have known that.