Ian Plimer's 'doing it for the kids'

Controversial climate change sceptic Professor Ian Plimer says the "average punter" inspired him to write his new tome which teaches students that human-induced global warming is a scam.

Plimer is currently doing the rounds plugging his new book How To Get Expelled From School: A guide to climate change for pupils, parents and punters. It's been promoted as an "anti-warmist manual for the younger reader".

Plimer, a former Broken Hill miner and now a geologist at Adelaide University, says he wrote How To Get Expelled to teach people to "think critically and logically".

"As a result of Heaven+Earth I had many parents contact me saying that their kids had been fed activist information at schools dressed up as science," he told The Power Index.

"I thought, well let's turn the tables and have a few simple questions that one should ask a school science teacher and see how they feel."

When asked who inspired him in his work, Plimer says it is the "average punter" from whom he gets his drive.

"These people they might not have a university education, they might not have a title, but they're not fools," he told The Power Index.

"And they do get treated like fools by politicians and by the media. And they in many ways view me as their voice."

Plimer's controversial theories on global warming have been the focus of intense debate within the science community. Climate scientists have attacked him for various claims, such as not sourcing his work, cherry picking facts, relying on conspiracy theories and being just plain wrong.

In reviewing Heaven+Earth, Professor David Karoly, a lead IPCC author from the University of Melbourne's School of Earth Sciences, said the book was full of errors and inconsistencies.

"Given the errors, the non-science, and the nonsense in this book, it should be classified as science fiction in any library that wastes its funds buying it," he said.

"The book can then be placed on the shelves alongside Michael Crichton's State of Fear, another science fiction book about climate change with many footnotes. The only difference is that there are fewer scientific errors in State of Fear."

Former prime minister John Howard, a self-described "climate agnostic", was on hand to launch How To Get Expelled at the Sydney Mining Club on Monday night.

In his speech Howard said the use of language like "climate denier" is dangerous and that "the science is never in and it ought never to be in".

''People ought to be worried about what their children are being taught at school,'' Howard told the assembled crowd.

"The progressive left has got their grip on the commanding heights of education instruction in this country."

When asked why he thought John Howard was a good choice to launch his new book, Plimer said: "Because I was sitting next to him at dinner a few months ago and I asked him."

"[But] I was quite surprise that John Howard would accept my invitation to launch a book like this."

So does he agree with Howard that the culture wars still exist?

"I think we have more fundamental wars. These are wars where we have people attack on ideology rather than having argument based on evidence," he said. "I don't know what the Right is and I don't know what the Left is."

So is he happy being held up as a climate sceptic poster boy by conservative shock jocks like Alan Jones?

"In my experience with the shock jocks, compared say with the ABC, the shock jocks actually do their homework. They read and get research done," he said.

"But this is not done by the ABC, they don't even read what I've written. They attack me on the basis of completely spurious ideology or unrelated subjects."