In the spirit of the "for dummies" series of books, Professor Ian Plimer has released the Little Green Book to explain the whole climate shebang. It's in three versions: ankle biters, teens and adults.
TRANSCRIPT:
(This is derived from an automated process. The video recording is authoritative.)
Well, thank you for coming. A lot of us are concerned about the future. The older you get, the more you're concerned about it. And my concern is that our children and grandchildren are getting absolutely and totally contaminated at school with information that's not gonna be able to help them get a job or put bread on the table.
A lot of these kids haven't learned to write or think or do simple arithmetic, yet. They know everything about climate and their rights. And on we go and we are enjoying the results of 50 years or maybe 70 years of dumbing down our education system.
And now we have the teachers and their teachers, people in universities who do not have basic knowledge, who have had no basic life experience, who do not know how to think, yet they are creating eco anxiety in our children.
We are having something that's totally unprecedented, and that is mental illness. Kids concerned about the future. Now, that to me, is child abuse. And that's what our kids and grandkids are getting at school today.
And it doesn't really matter if it's a state school or a private school, they are getting it. Only a few minutes ago I got an sms from my nephew telling me that his daughter proudly announced that electricity comes from wind.
Now, um, that kid is not getting an education. So with various children who I call my genetic terrorism and grandchildren around the world, I thought maybe there might be a different approach.
Kids don't read books, but parents and grandparents read books to the kids, and this is aimed at you. These books are aimed at trying to deprogram the little ones to try to not have them fearful about the future, to try to make them laugh, to try to be a little bit seditious, which teenagers love, and to try to arm them with something which is really contestable today. And that is facts.
I get accused of being controversial because I speak the truth and I use facts. Teenagers like to cause trouble. We give them some facts and they can fight it out with their teachers.
So the first one is written for eight to 12 year olds, and I've called it 'for ankle biters'. Now, what really makes our eight to 12 year old kids laugh, is farts. And so what I do is I go into what they might eat, and I've used the American word "cookie", so they eat it cookie, and from that, they grow bigger, but they also have to excrete material. And the, so I talk about poo, I talk about we, uh,
I talk about farts, I talk about boogers. I talk about ear wax. And um, I tie that in to net zero carbon. I don't use those words. And the message is very simple. If you don't eat, you die. If you don't poo you die. You are part of the carbon cycle. And so there are little things here where I get them to do experiments, um, an scientific experiment for boys.
Find a private place, and we on the same plant as many times as you can over a period of a few months, will the plant grow or die? Do the experiment. And another one, and this is, this is educational for kids.
Did you know we is yellow because of chemicals formed when blood breaks down into waste products, we should be colorless if your we is yellow, drink more water. Now, if you go to any mine site, there's a sign up there saying, observe the color of a urine.
And if it's this color, drink more water. Kids should know that that's basic health. So we go into poo and what's in poo and all the pathogens and bacteria, et cetera, and, and why poo is a poisonous.
But how there are still 2 billion people in the world who have to go outside and find somewhere to poo. You are very lucky. And there's 2 billion people who don't have electricity.
And the cheapest electricity they could have would be from fossil fuels, from coal. And so I try to compare kids with those who might be in third world countries, how well off people are in the western world, and how you need coal and how you need energy.
And then I go into the farts. Now, um, archeologists have found clay tablets with fart jokes written on them. These tablets are 4,000 years old. And I go into what makes a fart loud and my dog farts aren't loud. That's all about your bum muscles. And they're, they're words that kids love. And I, and then I, I love it too.
And then I get them to, um, do a few naughty things. You know, what makes a fart deadly smelly. You know, why does some farts smell like rotten cabbage? Uh, why does some smell like rotten seaweed? And I say, well, look, if you wanna be the fart king of your school, you gotta be able to say that that rotten cabbage smell is methyl my captain.
You can be the fart king of your school. Uh, if you use these words. And I talk about some people having brain farts, et cetera. I talk about a French entertainer who used to be able to gulp air and fart tunes. And one of the very first recordings that Thomas Edison ever made was that this chap, uh, farting. And then I give them the, the really important information. And this is absolutely vital. Every kid should know this.
And it's called a scientific experiment. How do I stink out the whole bus on the school excursion? Eat as many eggs as possible, eat cabbage, and wait for the action to start.
And then I point out that if if you smelt it, you dealt it. So you've gotta keep quiet. 'cause farts go 10 kilometers an hour, wait a while, and you've gotta wait. And then you can blame someone else. Um, and then I tell, I've give them an experiment not to do.
Don't get into an elevator as the doors are shutting and then fart or don't do that. Um, so we will see. Um, so I, I basically appeal to the kid's sense of humor.
Then I go into things like, um, ear wax. And I've got a little section here where I say, there is a video of a man eating his own earwax in the Australian parliament. Yuck.
He later became Australia's Prime Minister. Could you become prime minister if you eat earwax in public? And then I say, do an internet search using the key words, Rudd, earwax, eat and do it. It's there.
So, um, this is to try to get kids, uh, laughing and try to get kids being a bit naughty, which is, and I've got a few things here, um, not to try unless your grandparents are present. Um, but basically I say, look, without carbon, there's no food, there's no plants, there's no animals, there's no you.
And maybe there are people out there saying things that are not quite true, just to make themselves look important. I don't, I don't want to have the kids, I don't want to use the word lies to kids, but you know, just, I'm trying to persuade them not to believe everything that you are told.
And I then go into a few fundamentals, which they should know. I talk about reefs, how reefs just grow when it's warm and when there's carbon dioxide. How hundreds of years ago, most trees in Europe, America and England were chopped down and burned to make glass and steel. And then I give something which is very uncomfortable for the teachers, but not for the kids, that wood was used to make charcoal.
And charcoal was used to make, um, to heat a house and for cooking, but to make steel and glass. And when we started to use coal, the forest grew back. It was cold that saved the forests.
So I want them to try that one on their teachers. Um, I point out that a long while ago, we killed whales, boiled them down, made blubber, which we used in lanterns.
Now after, uh, that period of time we used mineral oil, a fossil fuel in lanterns. It was fossil fuels that saved the whales. I talk about when motorcar were first used, used in cities.
And the cities then were full of horse poo. And this used to wash into wells. People used to drink that water and they died. It was the motorcar that saved people's lives and just giving them a few little things, which, uh, they probably don't get at school.
And then I finish off with pointing out how you are living in a time where it's quite a bit cooler than we've had for most of history. And I don't give big numbers. Kids can't comprehend those. And, and I finished it off with something really very seditious and very naughty, which I'm sure kids will like. Now, that's, that's for eight to 12 year old kids. And I, on, on a FaceTime call with my seven year old grandkid, uh, he in Montreal, he showed me his latest book and I knew that I'd hit the target with this book. And the title of that book was Do Girls Fart? And he was rolling around whimpering with laughter.
So this one is for little children. I love it. Um, so do I. Um, and the interesting thing about that is I did a sound recording of that, if that's the press, I'm busy. Um, I did a sound recording yesterday in Perth. I've flown across from Perth this morning to to be here. And the sound recordist was a real greenie. And I was reading this book out, and I think I changed his mind. So, um, this is not only for little kids, it's for people who might have closed minds.
The second one is for teenagers. And we all know what teenagers are like.
They're horrible. Uh, they'll open the fridge and say, oh, there's nothing to eat. Or they will want to complain and whinge and groan, or they'll say, oh, that's not fair. Well, I'm trying to exploit that.
So I firstly start out with extreme weather events and just looking at storms and hurricanes and how over time fewer and fewer people have been killed. Yes, we live in bigger, better, stronger buildings, but fewer people have been killed. Um, I look at forest fires and look, look at over time the number of forest fires has been decreasing enormously.
There is still 75% of forest fires lit, lit by arsonists. Most of the others come from sparking machinery or power lines, which are, have fallen down as, as recently happened in Hawaii. So, um, I go into, um, floods and how floods are quite normal and for some odd reason, if you live on a flood plane, you get flooded. Um, strange isn't it?
And how that your flood just here in this part of the world couldn't be related to global carbon dioxide, otherwise you'd have global floods. So I go into the extreme events that are meant to be unique, that are meant to have, have occurred only in your life.
And at no other time. And I go into just the basic facts. I go into, um, heavy rains and I actually relate some of the heavy rains to events they would never hear about dirty, big volcanic events like this recent one in Tonga, most volcanoes put dust up to about 25 kilometers in the atmosphere, and that reflects light and heat, and we cool down.
But the Tongan eruption in January last year, that put a, it was a submarine eruption that put a column of water up into the stratosphere, 50 kilometers above the earth.
And 10% of the water in the stratosphere at present is from that one volcano. No wonder we're having heavy snowfall. No wonder we're having rain bombs. And I talk about the biggest floods that you've ever had here in Brisbane that was due to a volcano in South America. And that was in 1893, I think it was. Um, so I just try to tell them that in the past we've seen events which are much bigger and more destructive than anything today. And then I go into the word unprecedented. Yes, things are unprecedented if you don't read history, totally unprecedented. But I give them a few other unprecedented events like the sudden appearance of multicellular life on Earth that never happened before.
That was unprecedented. There was a Tuesday, 4,000 million years ago when it rained for the very first time on planet Earth. That was unprecedented. But these other things, no, they're not unprecedented.
They're not going into the temperature record and say, look, we've got long records going back hundreds of years, and we've measured temperature and there's nothing that is surprising, nothing unprecedented. There is nothing to worry about, nothing to have our anxiety about because we have a variability of temperature. And what we are measuring is within that.
I don't use those sort of words. They're the words for, um, people who are a little bit older. And then I look at what's been happening in the last few thousand years, and we started an interglacial.
That's when the ice sheets started a retreat, and we got warmer. I don't use those words, but we started an interglacial 14,700 years ago. We were at the peak of that interglacial 7,000 to 4,000 years ago.
And since then we have been cooling. And in that cooling we had spikes of warming, like in manoan times, Roman times, medieval times, and spikes of cooling like in the dark ages and the this life age.
So basically what I'm trying to tell them is that we've had change all the time. And then I'll give 'em a trick question, and this is for somebody that might have kids or grandkids. There's a, a sequence of books called Horrible Histories, and this is written in the style of horrible history. So I've got a a a quick, uh, a trick question here.
If you are ever asked whether the planet is warming or cooling, the only answer to give is yes. Because when you look over the history of time, it is warming or cooling, depends upon when you start the measurements. So since the time of Jesus, it's been cooling since the Dark Ages.
It's been warming since the medieval warming, it's been cooling since the little ice age. I mean, it's not gonna cool down since a little ice age. It's gonna warm up.
And that's exactly the situation we're in now. And then I go to why at sometimes the whole community goes nuts. And, and we're in one of those stages now and saying, look, don't worry.
You're just living in a period of time when everyone's gone nuts. It's happened before. And I go into a period in the little ice age when witches were rounded up and killed, and they were killed when we had very, very cold seasons.
And I've got a plot here showing temperature and the number of witches that were killed. And there's a perfect correlation between witch killing and the ultra cool periods of the little ice age, because we all know that witches caused, uh, crop failures.
And the most amusing thing about this is that when they'd killed the witches, the temperature actually started to warm up. So I, I posed the question, well, does killing witches change climate? Now kids know that's ridiculous.
But then I go into exploiting a few other things about climate saying it's always changing. I've looked at the last 500 million years of climate and how we've been cooling for the last 50 million years. And we had our, the Ice age we're currently in 34 million years ago. It started, we're still in it. And I, you know, don't worry about it, we've only had six I ICE ages. Don't worry, there's no legislation, nothing will do to change that. And I just,
I just try to put the current weather into perspective. But I come then to something which is really important. And that is that the gas of life carbon dioxide, the gas that plants use is called pollution. And I ask them questions, well, what really is pollution? Tell me about pollution.
And if you really want to show that carbon dioxide is poisonous, I've got an experiment for you. And I suggest that they find someone they don't really like very much and give them a big kiss because we're breathing in 0.04%, carbon dioxide, breathing at 4%. If it's poisonous, kiss them and they'll die.
Do the experiment. So, um, these are things where I'm trying to get kids to think a little bit differently, but then I try to, to hit the, the morality of teenagers where they say, this is not fair. Well, is it fair?
You can turn a switch and cook a meal? Whereas for billions of people, they have to collect twigs, leaves, uh, bits of wood, and try to heat food or heat a hutt.
And that low temperature fire gives out carcinogens. It kills your mother, it kills people your age. Is that fair? Shouldn't they have coal fired electricity that's cheap? I go into those wonderful new things, electric cars, and you know, electric cars were invented in the 1830s and they failed.
We tried to use them again at the turn of the 20th century. They failed and they fail again for the exactly the same reasons. They're too heavy. And we don't have electric cords that are thousands of kilometers long.
So you can keep them fully charged all the time. But then I then I pose a question. If you are wandering around in an electric car feeling morally superior, are you really, because there's children your age in the Congo who are mining the cobalt for that battery. These kids die of cobalt poisoning.
These kids die in underground mines in an open pit mine. Is it fair that someone your age should die to give you the materials for your electric car? So trying to make kids feel a bit uncomfortable. And, um, I'm looking at, um, various things that they might've been given that are, are wrong. For example, I show them that the forests of Canada or Australia or the US or even the planet, if you measure the amount of carbon dioxide that the plants use, and then, um, use it as plant food and then release oxygen, which we breathe. But if you measure the amount of carbon dioxide the plants use and the amount that's given out by industry, then industry is putting out far, far less carbon dioxide. Then the plants use.
It's gotta come from somewhere else. And so I, I'm, I'm trying to educate the kids and their parents also that carbon dioxide is actually extremely valuable and important. For example, I say in Canada there are 318 billion trees that use 7.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide. There's food each year.
Canadians release 540 million tons of carbon dioxide. So Canada's already at net zero. What are we talking about? This is just garbage that we're being fed and trying to get kids to, um, look at some of these realities and look at some of the fundamental things that they get, um, given at school. And then I, I of course talk about methane and nitrous oxide or laughing gas and get them to do an experiment. If you think laughing gas is, is unnecessary, go to the dentist and don't have an anesthetics. See how you go.
Um, just, just putting it into reality. But again, pointing out that net zero has just got nothing to do, um, with reality. And a lot of did you knows about the temperature, did you knows about sea level changes, uh, which I'll go into later in the other book. Um, and I, I finish up with basically looking at the technology that has arisen out of this hysteria about human-induced global warming.
Now, teenagers, they don't earn money. They, they don't under don't understand economics, but just pointing out that you won't be able to buy yourself a house when you're older, the way things are going, um, we have totally destroyed a cheap, reliable energy system.
And then I give them clues as to how you identify propaganda dressed up as science, how you identify that someone's not quite telling you the truth and why that might be the case.
And finish off by telling them that governments like to keep people frightened. Kids have gotta learn these things earlier and um, basically about how much carbon dioxide wealthy people emit compared with poor people. And in fact, uh, the solution to all your global problems is to get wealthy and then you have less kids. Um, it, it's, it's well known.
The third one is written for older people. And this is basically a very, um, abbreviated summary of my first year university lectures, but written in a language such that people, uh, can understand it.
So I start like all scary novels, uh, with it was a dark and stormy night on a Thursday 4,560 million years ago when bits of space junk, uh, coalesced, et cetera. Then I, in the first page I go into something that we've all wondered about is the moon made of green cheese.
Now I've got some scientific information that can support that argument in geology, we work out what the composition of a rock is from the speed of an earthquake wave through that rock. And we can say, oh yes, that's basalt.
Some clown got funded by a research organization to look at the earthquake shock wave velocity through cheeses. You know, this is true. And, and that person found that the earthquake shockwave velocity of a Norwegian green cheese was exactly the same as that of moon rocks. Therefore the moon is made of green cheese. And, and i I say, well, prove me wrong. And this is an exercise in scientific thinking where you don't use one strand of evidence, you have to use a lot of other strands of evidence.
So I go into the history of the planet, how we've had six great ice ages. Each one of those six started when we had more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than now. So how the hell can carbon dioxide drive warming?
That's just not possible. The, the what's written in stone tells us a different story. I go into the five major mass extinctions and, and look at how we get mass extinctions, what happens. And yes, we are getting extinction at present, which is called turnover of species.
Some critter dies and a new one fills the ecology we have for the last 500 million years had an increase in the number of species on planet earth. They're still increasing despite extinctions. So, um, it's basically trying to put it into perspective.
I write about the industrial revolution emissions of carbon dioxide. How we've got two great experiments that were able to be used to show that human emissions of carbon dioxide do absolutely nothing to the climate.
The first was nine 11 when airplanes in the US were shut down. The amount of carbon dioxide that the Americans were emitting went down enormously. The second was Covid 19 when we had a great, um, um, crank back in the, uh, amount of travel that people did. And again, the emissions of carbon dioxide went down.
What happened to global carbon dioxide? It kept going up. So there's another source of the carbon carbon dioxide, which is very clearly the oceans. So this is a book for people who are a little bit more advanced.
And I look at the proportion of fossil fuels that we've used over the last 120 years. And we're still using 82% fossil fuels. Just the amount of energy we use has gone up.
And I then go into a section of called sea breezes and sunbeams that's pointing out how ridiculous, uh, wind and solar and how, uh, wind turbines are manufactured by a country that's closing down our coal mines.
These turbines are made out of a laminate of bolsa wood. So you've gotta chop down Amazon forests for that bolsa wood and resins, which contain an extremely toxic chemical called bisphenol A. It's banned in most countries in the world.
That's why you can't recycle blades. That's why we bury them, uh, for the best fennel. A to leach out into soils and waterways. So that is obviously environmentalism. And I, I point out that the whole sunbeams and sea breezes crave has got nothing to do with the environment. It's got nothing to do with climate.
It's follow the money. It's all about other people. For example, most of our big wind farms in this country are either foreign owned or owned by union superannuation funds. And look at the solar panels. How do we make them what's in them?
And solar panels are leaching out, cadmium and lead, selenium and urib into soils all the time. These are prime agricultural lands that we are contaminating. Now, if we did that as a chemicals company or a mining company or as a farmer, you would be strung up and shot. Yet the, uh, wind industry that um, isn't a renewable, the only thing that's renewable about the wind industry are the subsidies.
They just keep coming and you pay as a result. So I go into a few basics in the third book, which is written for older people, people who might be earning an income and then point out in all three books. I point out, well what are you gonna do?
Are you gonna stop using your mobile phone? Are you gonna stop using a computer? Are you not gonna have a heated house or cooked meals? Are you gonna live in a cave?
And I give them questions to ask their teacher if their teacher starts, uh, moralizing out about them, point out about the car they drive, or do they walk to school having, um, had a successful night of hunting and gathering from their cave.
In other words, exposing the kids to the absolute hypocrisy, which, which, uh, they face. So these three books are an attempt, uh, to be seditious, uh, one of those other books there I have the great joy of having put out this book, how to Get Expelled from School.
And I give the kids 101 questions to ask their teachers Special Friday afternoon question so you can get home early. And when we had the Gillard government, they set up a website, cost them half a million dollars to try to answer the 101 questions. Well, they couldn't do it 'cause they phrased in such a way you couldn't answer them.
But, um, they stole half a million of your taxpayer's money to attack me and to attack my publisher, Anthony Capello, um, to make sure that people would not read these books. Um, I'm praying that the current government is just as stupid and, and wants to cancel or ban these books. Now I've been, I've been canceled from speaking to a couple of universities.
I've been canceled on Facebook. I've been, um, I've had the Sydney Morning Herald, or the Socialist Morning Herald, as I call it. They had a crack at me. I think it was last week.
The Age which I called Prada Upon Yara, they had a crack at me. Um, I've had a fact check done on this book, which I told Anthony this book was fact checked and found to be a fraud. And the fact check was done while it was being printed. No one had ever seen the book.
So, uh, I'm up against a group of lying people who want to steal your money and pollute your children. And I think it's time we have to fight them. That's why I wrote these books.
Thank you.
