The Minister for Climate Change and Energy is well out of his depth, yet he’s ankle-deep at the shallow end of the pool. His climate policies are destroying an economy underpinned by energy and are based on an unbalanced green ideology underpinned by hysterical apocalyptic lies and not science, environmentalism, economics, common sense, or the interests of the nation.

A cheap, reliable electricity system has been replaced with an unreliable horrendously expensive system that profits foreign wind and solar companies and sounds good if one has no knowledge and asks no questions. Knowledge, experience, curiosity, and scepticism are the only way of picking the bones out of the modern information age carnage.

The Minister must have been told that no one has ever shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming and that ice cores show that the atmospheric carbon dioxide increased after global warming and hence could not drive warming.

Time with real people would have led the Minister to conclude that we are living in times of mass delusion, universal political and bureaucratic deceit, and censorship. For example, a ‘fact check’ on August 1, 2023 by Facebook declared that my latest book which was being printed at that time was fraud. Either the fact checker was psychic or someone was telling porky pies.

Maybe if the Minister read rigorous science at university rather than the dismal science, he might have absorbed some basics. The past can be understood using sedimentary rocks, fossils, and mineralogy. These give a window into past and present surface processes.

Undergraduate geology shows that all past climate changes have been driven by the position of the continents, the Earth’s orbit, and the energy released by the Sun. The planet’s climate was boiling until oceans formed some 4,000 million years ago. In the past, carbon dioxide has not driven climate change, as shown by the diagram (after Berner). Why should it now?

Over the last 542 million years, despite five major mass extinctions and more than 20 minor mass extinctions of multicellular life, the number of species on Earth has increased. The number of species is still increasing despite frequent extinctions.

Species turnover by extinction is normal whereas conservation of species is not. We humans will join the 99.9 per cent of the other multicellular organisms that have become extinct. The best solution is to mutate now and avoid the rush. Extinction Rebellion will be out of a job, which is not possible as they are unemployable.

The planet has been cooling for the last 50 million years. We have been in an ice age for 34 million years which will end when the continent of Antarctica fragments into micro-continents or moves from the pole. Don’t wait up.

There have been 4 major ice ages over the last 500 million years. Before that, the atmosphere contained 20 per cent carbon dioxide and, during three major ice age events, there were kilometre-thick ice sheets at the equator at sea level. The current and previous ice ages were all initiated when there was far more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than at present. Carbon dioxide did not drive past global warmings. Why should it now?

Since the appearance of multicellular animals and plants 542 and 470 million years ago respectively, there has been a drawdown and sequestration of atmospheric carbon dioxide into limey rocks, shells, reefs, organic-rich sediments, oil, gas, and coal.

Over the last 500 million years, the atmosphere has decreased from 0.7 per cent carbon dioxide to 0.04 per cent carbon dioxide. During this decrease, plants tried to adapt and C4 plants such as maize and sugar cane evolved to live in an atmosphere with a lower carbon dioxide content.

If the atmospheric carbon dioxide content halves again during one of the future inevitable orbitally-driven glaciations, there would not be enough carbon dioxide in the air to keep plants alive. Do vegans know this? With no plants, there will be no animals and this future extinction will be greater than the largest mass extinction of multicellular life 251.2 million years ago when 96 per cent of all species became extinct.

Will we see the appearance of yet unknown C5 and C6 plants or the evolution of the Earth’s fourth atmosphere comprising inert nitrogen and argon with little or no carbon dioxide and oxygen? Who knows? The ultimate survivors, bacteria, will live on.

When the major coal deposits formed 300 million years ago, there was a huge decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide and, by burning coal, we put carbon dioxide back to where it came from to be recycled again as plant food. This is environmentally responsible.

Another way to put carbon dioxide back into the air is to drink a fermented fluid. I urge Spectator Australia readers to take this plant-assisting environmentally responsible action as many times as possible. Extinction could be just around the corner and there’s no point in shuffling off with a full cellar or drinking heated wine that has suffered climate boiling.

Emeritus Professor Plimer’s latest book is a trilogy for primary, secondary, and post-secondary children on climate change to enable parents and grandparents to deprogram those exposed to “education” and eco-anxiety (The little green book, Connor Court Publishing; release 19th August 2023).