Miranda Devine, in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald brings us the sad story of how Ian Plimer is being shouted down and silenced:

Human-caused climate change is being "promoted with religious zeal ... there are fundamentalist organisations which will do anything to silence critics." ...

It is difficult for non-scientists to engage in the debate over what causes climate change and whether or not it can be stopped by new taxes and slower growth, because dissenting voices are shouted down by true believers in the scientific community who claim they alone have the authority to speak.

The same day in Sydney's Daily Telegraph Piers Akerman also carried Plimer's message

Professor Plimer asks why this science is ignored. He would also like to know why the IPCC's models, used by Rudd and Garnaut to justify policies, do not include the heat and C02 emissions from 85 per cent of the world's volcanoes, those under the oceans lying along 64,000km of mid-ocean ridges?

He says volcanoes on the floor of the Arctic Ocean heat the Arctic waters, that subglacial volcanoes in Antarctica erupt and exhale heat beneath the ice from hot gas vents and hot springs, but we don't hear about them or the subglacial lakes and river systems in Antarctica.

Possibly because the total heat flux from the Earth's interior amounts to just 0.075 Watts per square metre, while incoming solar radiation is 342 Watts per square metre, about 5000 times as much. And human emissions of CO2 are one hundred times that from volcanoes on land and under the sea.

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