Christmas Books: Ian Plimer

As a collector and lover of books, it is nigh on impossible to throw a book out. Much of my reading, thinking and writing is done at 35,000 ft altitude. I left Paul Howes’ Confessions of a Faceless Man, a vulgar narcissistic diatribe in the Latham class, in a rubbish bin at Schiphol Airport. The Party Thieves (Barrie Cassidy) joined other waste products at Heathrow. Both books told us what we know: Union muscle controls the ALP, Rudd and his tribe have serious personality defects, that the post November 2007 governments are unstable, run by bullies, have no effective policy for a 21^st Century economy and chase power at any costs. Both books did not deal effectively with the abandonment of Labor heartlands, something I hear every time I am in my heartland (Broken Hill). 

Years ago I met and generously lubricated Pierpont in my heartland local. Pierpont has a nose for good reds and scams. He has exposed more crooks than ASIC, is not frightened to name names and reads balance sheets as if he is conducting a tragic opera. His latest book (Trevor Sykes: Six Months of Panic) is compulsory Christmas reading. Predictable tragedies such as the GFC, Babcock and Brown, ABC Learning, Allco, Storm Financial and Opes Prime are incisively dissected. He paints big pictures in vivid colours using simple language, humour and logic, as he has done in all previous books and columns. He has been Australia’s greatest financial wordsmith for 30 years. 

Over the last few months, I have twice read Bob Carter’s Climate: The Counter Consensus. It is a far better book than my Heaven and Earth. Carter’s science is readable and totally demolishes the ideological paradigm that humans can create a climate catastrophe. Politicians, the media, professional societies and other advocate groups do not fare well. The science is so rock solid that it is no surprise that the climate catastrophists attack the man and try to frighten us with even more ghastly scenarios because it is just not possible to present validated scientific data contrary to that presented by Bob Carter. Although Carter receives few accolades in Australia, it is heartening that Dr Václav Klaus (President, Czech Republic) stated “The Australian professor deserves thanks and praise for repudiating the heretic-hunting climate orthodoxy”. Buy one for yourself, one for your local library, one for your local politician and a few for those under 40 who have endured years of propaganda dressed up as education.