The Great Global Warming Swindle

The Great Global Warming Swindle was a 2007 television programme directed by controversial British television producer Martin Durkin. The film premiered on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom on March 8, 2007.

The film featured scientists who are sceptical of the prevailing consensus that global warming is caused by human activity. Some of the people who are interviewed in the film are Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace; Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist; and Paul Reiter.

One scientist featured, Carl Wunsch said he had been "completely misrepresented" by the programme,[1] calling it "grossly distorted" and "as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two."[2]

The film is critical of the current theory of man-made global warming, and claims that theory has numerous flaws. Channel 4, pre-empting the controversy, said, "It is essentially a polemic and we are expecting it to cause trouble, but this is the controversial programming that Channel 4 is renowned for."[3]

Claims

The film's claims can be summarised as follows:[4]

• Records of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels since 1940 show a continuing increase, but during this period, global temperature decreased until 1975, and has increased since then.

• Theories of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas predict that the temperature in the troposphere should increase the fastest, but satellite and weather balloon data do not show this.

• Carbon dioxide is a tiny proportion of the atmosphere.

• Water vapour is the component of the atmosphere that has the largest impact on the planet's temperature, through cloud formation and associated reflection of incoming solar heat.

• That carbon dioxide levels increase or decrease due to temperatures increasing or decreasing rather than temperatures following carbon dioxide levels.

• Cloud formation is claimed to be related to condensation of water vapour around particles arriving as cosmic rays, originally from exploding supernovae.

• Solar activity is claimed to currently be at a high level, and this is likely to be the cause of the current global warming.

• Analysis of the Vostok Station and other ice cores shows that changes in the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide follow changes in global temperature, with a lag of 800 years.

• Earth's oceans absorb carbon dioxide when they are cooler, and release it when they are warmer. However, oceanic mass is so large that it takes a long time ("decades or centuries") for the reaction to temperature changes to occur.

• There has been a large increase in the research funds available for studies relating to global warming. Including a putative link to global warming effects makes it likelier that a research scientist will get a research grant. Furthermore, producing dramatic and pessimistic results has a positive impact on the standing of scientists.

• It is more likely that vested interests occur among supporters of the theory of anthropogenic global warming, since many jobs in science, the media, and governmental administration have been created as a result of this theory.

• Supporters of the anthropogenic theory of global warming do so because it is in concordance with their ideological beliefs opposing capitalism, economic development, globalization, industrialisation, and the United States.

• The negative effects of the precautionary principle, which has been used by supporters of the anthropogenic theory of global warming, are not widely discussed. For example, the World Health Organization estimates that every year, four million children die globally from respiratory diseases related to inhaling smoke from cooking fires because they do not use electrical cooking methods.

• It is immoral for industrialised populations to demand that developing African nations ignore their reserves of cheap fossil fuels (coal and oil), and instead rely on expensive renewable power generation techniques, such as solar panels.

Contributors

The film includes contributions from the following individuals:

• Professor Tim Ball
• Professor Nir Shaviv - Institute of Physics, University of Jerusalem
• Lord Lawson of Blaby - Former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer
• Professor Ian Clark - Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa
• Dr Piers Corbyn - Weather Forecaster, Weather Action
• Professor John Christy - Department of Atmospheric Science, University of Alabama in Huntsville and Lead Author, IPCC
• Emeritus Professor Philip Stott - Department of Biogeography, University of London
• Professor Paul Reiter - Department of Medical Entomology, Pasteur Institute, Paris
• Professor Richard Lindzen - Department of Meteorology, M.I.T.
• Patrick Moore (environmentalist) - Co-founder, Greenpeace
• Professor Patrick Michaels - Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia
• Nigel Calder - Former Editor, New Scientist
• James Shikwati - Economist and author
• Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu - Director, International Arctic Research Centre
• Professor Frederick Singer - Former Director, US National Weather Service
• Professor Carl Wunsch - Department of Oceanography, M.I.T. (who has since repudiated the programme)
• Professor Eigil Friis-Christensen - Director, Danish National Space Centre
• Dr Roy Spencer, Weather Satellite Team Leader, NASA
• Paul Driessen - Author: Green Power, Black Death

Criticism and Reaction

The documentary received a substantial amount of coverage in the British press, both before and after its broadcast.

A critique by Sir John Houghton (former co-chair IPCC Scientific Assessment working group 1988-2002) assesses 9 of the main assertions by the programme and disagreed with most of them. [5]

Published on March 4, 2007, in a report in The Independent about the imminent broadcast of The Great Global Warming Swindle, Geoffrey Lean pointed out that the director of the documentary, Martin Durkin, had already been discredited in 1997 when it was discovered that his earlier film Against Nature (also broadcast on Channel 4) had been found guilty of selectively editing footage in order to misrepresent the views of several of his interviewees. These interviewees complained to the Independent Television Commission of the UK, which upheld their complaint and ruled, moreover, the documentary filmmakers had "misled" participants over the "content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part."[6][7] Lean went on to compare The Great Global Warming Swindle to Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, remarking that "the clash between the Oscar-winning film and the Channel 4 production is likely to spark new public debate."[8]

Like Lean, Robin McKie, the science editor of The Guardian, pointed out that The Great Global Warming Swindle did not, in fact, add any new information to the debate about the cause of global warming, and that the documentary's claims had in fact been already aired numerous times before in the press, for many years, and by the same people featured in the film. McKie attacked the documentary for opting "for dishonest rhetoric when a little effort could have produced an important contribution to a critical social problem."[9]

Dominic Lawson, of The Independent, also in a pre-broadcast report, had more favorable things to say about The Great Global Warming Swindle, echoing many of the film's claims in his article, and recommending that viewers tune in.[10] (Lawson's colleague Geoffrey Lean, however, points out in his article that Lawson is, in fact, the son and brother-in-law, respectively, of two of the global warming sceptics featured in the program, thus implying that Lawson would have a reason to come out in favor of the film).[11] Lawson noted as well in his article that Martin Durkin was known to have been closely associated with the Revolutionary Communist Party (UK, 1978).[12]

David Adam, in a post-mortem review in The Guardian, wrote a rebuttal of the film's conspiracy theory that alternative views about global warming are being suppressed by scientists and environmental journalists, writing, "it is amusing to consider journalists as anywhere near organised enough to be part of a major exercise to hoodwink, well, the entire world. . . . climate change is caused by human activity, however much some people wish to believe otherwise. (And in that cabal, you can include me.)"[13]

The documentary has received little attention in America. One exception is a comment made by Paul Joseph Watson, a reporter who works for radio host Alex Jones and a founder of Greenpeace, who observed that the criticisms of the film relied upon ad hominems instead of disputing the arguments put forth by the scientists in the documentary. Watson wrote, "The establishment left has already attempted to savage the documentary, but The Guardian's Zoe Williams cannot address the evidence, instead attacking the messenger by discrediting one participant from Winnipeg University, and selectively ignroing the roster of other experts which included MIT and Princeton professors."[14]

See also

• Martin Durkin (television director)
• Global warming

External links

• Presentation at Channel 4
• Brendan O'Neill (former editor of Living Marxism), ‘Apocalypse my arse’, sp!ked, 9 March 2007
• Geoffrey Lean, "Global warming: An inconvenient truth or hot air?", The Independent, 4 March 2007
• Robin McKie, "Why Channel 4 has got it wrong over climate change", The Guardian, 4 March 2007
• Dominic Lawson, "Here is another inconvenient truth (but this one will infuriate the Green lobby)", The Independent, 2 March 2007
• David Adam, "Noxious Emissions", The Guardian, 9 March 2007
• Ian Johns, "The global warming debate overheats", The Times of London, 9 March 2007
• Review from In the Green, Deconstructing Channel 4's Great Global Warming Swindle, March 09, 2007
• Life Style Extra review, 'Global Warming Is Lies' Claims Documentary, 4th March 2007
• RealClimate, review and criticism, Swindled!, 9 Mar 2007