This was the highly unpopular message delivered by the outspoken Professor of Geology at Adelaide University, Professor Ian Plimer, addressing the Paydirt Uranium Conference at the Hilton this week.

Even though he was talking to a crowd of investors, managers and fans of uranium mining companies, the subject matter seemed particularly awkward.

There was hushed silence as if he were blaspheming – which of course he was – against our new religion of global warming.

“Ask any plant how it feels about carbon dioxide,” Prof Plimer said. “As you’re hugging a tree think about how it wouldn’t even be there if not for plenty of carbon dioxide in the environment so they can get access to the carbon.”

Prof Plimer, author of six books, a teaching geologist at Adelaide University as well as pragmatic director of a Broken Hill mining company, reckons Australians are being totally misled by the new global warming religion.

He believes that pseudoscientific pedlars of bad news don’t take any notice of the fact that the amount of solar energy hitting earth is not a constant. This is because the sun is not the gravitational centre of the solar system and goes through a lot of gravitational wobble.

The result is an elliptical path which produces variable doses of cosmic radiation.

“Over geological time, high cosmic radiation doses are coincidental with the four periods of glaciations on earth – including the present glacial situation,” Prof Plimer said.

“Then there are 11, 80, 200 and 1500-year cycles so that the solar constant is not constant.”

Prof Plimer said man is not the main supplier of carbon dioxide and most of it arises from volcanoes (86 per cent of which were beneath the sea), earthquakes, intrusions of plutonic rocks (Kamchatka), the pulling apart of the ocean floor, hot flushes from the earth’s core, ocean degassing and comets.

“Human contribution to carbon dioxide, which is really a trace gas, is .117 of one per cent,” Prof Plimer said.