Back on-line now after a week in Melbourne at the Australian Institute of Physics conference.<\/p>\n
I have lots of good stuff to blog about, including optomechanics (using light to cause vibrations), physics education (lots on this), the Large Hadron Collider and complicated models of things that might not even exist, but I’ll do this one on climate change.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, we had a very colourful and dynamic plenary lecture by David Kardy, from the University of Melbourne. In short, it was a rant about Ian Plimer’s recent book about Climate Change, and how certain high-profile Australian politicians (e.g. leader of the opposition Tony Abbot) like to draw their science from unscientific sources.<\/p>\n
Essentially, Prof Kardy went through Ian Plimer’s major items of evidence for non-human causes of recent climate change and rebutted them. He covered a lot of ground in a 45 minute talk, which was rather too fast to take in, but the take-home message was that the science says that the bulk of recent warming of the earth’s climate is caused by human activities (and not due to Plimeresque magic underwater volcanoes).<\/p>\n