Here's a guest post from kiashu, in the form of a "Letter to the Editor" (or in this case, a journalist at The Age) about a review of Ian Plimer's pseudo-academic novel, "Heaven and Earth".

Gidday James Kirby,

You write in today's Age,

"Heaven and Earth is absurdly long - 500 pages, 2000 footnotes - with enough factual inconsistencies and ill-advised references to some ''loopy'' thinkers to give his critics plenty of ammunition." [http://www.theage.com.au/business/going-against-the-current-climate-20091024-he2t.html]

You then express surprise that he found it difficult to get his book published. As I understand it, you are primarily a financial journalist. Let's imagine then that someone who was not qualified in economics wrote a book critiquing modern economics, and it was full of "factual inconsistencies and ill-advised references to some "loop" thinkers", do you think that person would have difficulty in getting the book published?

Would that difficulty truly be a result of the author's "radical" views, or a result of their poor writing and research?

From your article, it does not appear that you've actually read his latest book. In your Age article, you are careful to note that you are not a scientist. However, you are a journalist, and a good journalist checks facts and references. That is after all the purpose of footnotes in any work with at least pretensions to academic worth: it lets you check for yourself.

Jeff Rubin - the former chief economist at CIBC World Markets - has always struck me as someone who "gets it." I have seen him do a number of interviews, both on television and in print - and he consistently sounds the alarm on peak oil. He understands very well that cheap oil is the lifeblood of the global economy, yet this is an era that will soon come to an end. His new book - Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization - goes through the peak oil story in a way that I initially thought of as "Kunstleresque", but I changed my mind as I got deeper into the book.

The seminar "Mission Earth - Modeling and Simulation for a Sustainable Future" (http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/fcellier/AGS/AGSME_2009.html) was held in Zurich on Jan 26 2009, organized by Francois Cellier and Andreas Fischlin. It was a rare occasion of a truly interdisciplinary meeting where people from different fields of modeling were given a chance to present their work and exchange views. Climate modelers and resource modelers haven't interacted very much, so far; however, resource depletion will surely have a strong effect on the future of earth's climate. While we are still far from integrated world models that take into account all factors, economic as well as environmental, this seminar was a first attempt at understanding what issues are involved.

The “Mission Earth” meeting was about three kinds of models: climate models, world models, and resource exploitation models.

Report authors: Luís de Sousa and Euan Mearns

Part 3 of IEA WEO 2008 analyzes the expected impact of fossil fuel combustion upon climate change.

Page 382: As emissions of greenhouse gases build up in the atmosphere faster than natural processes can remove them, their concentrations rise. The Reference Scenario puts us on a path to doubling the aggregate concentration in CO2 equivalent terms by the end of this century, entailing an eventual global average temperature increase up to 6 ºC.

Rather surprisingly, IEA WEO 2008 does not provide any data on fossil fuel reserves and production forecasts to 2100 to back up this claim. Instead, it chooses to rely upon fossil fuel reserve figures underlying the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) models. Furthermore, using MAGICC (climate temperature model), and the default climate sensitivity constants, we are unable to reproduce the outcome of as much as a 6 ºC increase.

Using a CO2 emissions scenario based on our 2008 Olduvai Assessment combined with MAGICC, we estimate that global average temperatures may peak at around 1.6ºC above 1990 values toward the end of this century. Other climate models may produce temperature outcomes higher or lower than this.