Professor Ian Plimer: When you're a political activist, logic is not used

"Well, when you're a political activist, logic is not used. But the couple of early great ice ages where we covered the planet in ice, the whole planet was covered in ice. We had two periods of time when we had kilometers of ice at sea level, at the equator. Yet we had carbon dioxide about 500 times higher than it is now in the atmosphere. So if carbon dioxide is meant to drive a runaway global warming then the evidence from the past doesn't show that this is the case. And in any science, this is called the coherent criteria in science. And if you're putting up a theory, it has to be in accord with all the other theories from the other disciplines of science. So if you as an atmospheric physicist are putting up a theory that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming and that an increase in carbon dioxide will give you warming, then that's not in accord with what we know from the past.

And that has been validated many, many times. So you have to reject the theory that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming. That's not done. We don't use the scientific method. We don't use logic. This is an activist activity that is trying to stop industrialization. It's trying to make our life more difficult. And we see today where we've got massive objections to our leader of the opposition suggesting that we should actually have seven nuclear power plants. And all the green enterprises are putting out an SOS call. Now, this is not because they have got any technical objections to nuclear power. The SOS is it save our subsidies. They can see that their subsidies have been threatened and there's no such thing as renewable energy. The only thing renewable about renewable energy are the subsidies. So we've got all of those with a dog in the fight now really objecting to Mr Dutton suggesting that we do what the other G20 countries have done, we do what many other countries have done in the world and that is underpin our baseload power with nuclear energy."