[VIDEO] The Great Global Warming Swindle - Documentary

[Fusen]

tbh, anyone who is solely watching this show and then basing their entire judgement on it should look in the dictionary for "hit piece"

[CzarJunkie]

tbh, anyone who is solely watching this show and then basing their entire judgement on it should look in the dictionary for "hit piece"

And anyone who watches it and ignores the evidence should look in the dictionary under 'brainwashed'

[-AMO-]

And anyone who is solely paying attention to the media scare mongery and then basing their entire judgement on it, and even going as far as becoming global warming crusaders, preaching their so called knowledge on the uninfected, need a fucking beating. (This currently applies to 90% of the global population.)

Of course, the majority of us don't have a clue what the truth is, including me. It frustrates me as i'd love this documentary to be true, but unless I dust off my lab coat and become an expert, im just as lost as nearly everyone else on the subject right now.

[burner1]

And anyone who is solely paying attention to the media scare mongery and then basing their entire judgement on it, and even going as far as becoming global warming crusaders, preaching their so called knowledge on the uninfected, need a fucking beating. (This currently applies to 90% of the global population.)

Of course, the majority of us don't have a clue what the truth is, including me. It frustrates me as i'd love this documentary to be true, but unless I dust off my lab coat and become an expert, im just as lost as nearly everyone else on the subject right now.

Well said, we should all do what we can on maintaining our eco 'system' however small or irrelevent our input seems... take a used Tesco bag the next time you go shopping rather than just pluck a new one off the rack.. take an empty cardboard eggbox to the grocers next time you need more eggs... I do it out of habit for some reason, hate to see such wastage.

[CzarJunkie]

Well said, we should all do what we can on maintaining our eco 'system' however small or irrelevent our input seems... take a used Tesco bag the next time you go shopping rather than just pluck a new one off the rack.. take an empty cardboard eggbox to the grocers next time you need more eggs... I do it out of habit for some reason, hate to see such wastage.

Not sure you read Amo's post.......

[Fusen]

Not sure you read Amo's post.......

I agree, I prefer milk in my tea

[MsDG]

What ever the cause of global warming, initatives to clean up are act can surely only be a good thing?

I'm not sure exactly what the point of the documentry is? But it seems to pushing the thought that its ok to carry on as we are... which in my mind we can not, not because of global warming but just for the enviroment generally. Surely, it doesn't really matter what is causing global warming but if the (incorrect) fear of it is enough to make joe average switch off a few lights and recycle his beer bottles then I can only see that as a good thing.

I also dissagree that just because it may not be causing global warming that it is still ok to build 100 new coal burning power stations and run them full blast just so that china can make us toasters for £3.50

As for CJ's mention of capitalism.... sooner or later its going to be fecked anyway because the whole conncept is based on growth and the planet is getting on the verge of a population crisis. When that happens things like birth control limits (and other bad sci-fi ideas will have to be explored). I have no idea what the world would do without capitalism or what you would do to replace it. So as far as I can see the way to go is to proceed in a globally cleaner way as possible and hence maximise the lifespan of the capitalism system we know and love!

Of course, I may just be talking bollocks!

[CzarJunkie]

Surely, it doesn't really matter what is causing global warming but if the (incorrect) fear of it is enough to make joe average switch off a few lights and recycle his beer bottles then I can only see that as a good thing.

I think part of the reason for the documentary is to highlight the fact that the developed nations can now use this issue as a stick to beat the poorer and developing nations with.

The last thing the developed nations want is more developed nations with better education systems and smaller labour markets otherwise companies such as Nike won't be able to get their trainers made for 50c a pair.

[Dopey Dan]

This should help people see a little sense. I like a conspiracy as much as the next man, but this is just horse shit.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007...-with-science/

Channel 4’s Problem with Science
Posted March 13, 2007

It doesn’t give a damn about whether the facts stack up – as long as it creates a controversy.



By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 13th March 2007.

Were it not for dissent, science, like politics, would have stayed in the Dark Ages. All the great heroes of the discipline – Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein – took tremendous risks in confronting mainstream opinion. Today’s crank has often proved to be tomorrow’s visionary.

But the syllogism does not apply. Being a crank does not automatically make you a visionary. There is little prospect, for example, that Dr Mantombazana Tshabalala-Msimang, the South African health minister who has claimed that AIDS can be treated with garlic, lemon and beetroot, will one day be hailed as a genius. But the point is often confused. Professor David Bellamy, for example, while making the incorrect claim that wind farms do not have “any measurable effect” on total emissions of carbon dioxide, has compared himself to Galileo(1).

The problem with “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, which caused a sensation when it was broadcast on Channel 4 last week, is that to make its case it relies not on future visionaries, but on people whose findings have already been proved wrong. The implications could not be graver. Just as the British government launches its climate change bill and Gordon Brown and David Cameron start jostling to establish their green credentials, thousands of people have been misled into believing that there is no problem to address.

The film’s main contention is that the current increase in global temperatures is caused not by rising greenhouse gases, but by changes in the activity of the Sun. It is built around the discovery in 1991 by the Danish atmospheric physicist Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen that recent temperature variations on earth are in “strikingly good agreement” with the length of the cycle of sunspots(2).

Unfortunately, he found nothing of the kind. A paper published in the journal Eos in 2004 reveals that the “agreement” was the result of “incorrect handling of the physical data”(3). The real data for recent years show the opposite: that the length of the sunspot cycle has in fact declined, while temperatures have risen. When this error was exposed, Friis-Christensen and his co-author published a new paper, purporting to produce similar results(4). But this too turned out to be an artefact of mistakes they had made – in this case in their arithmetic(5).

So Friis-Christensen and another author developed yet another means of demonstrating that the Sun is responsible, claiming to have discovered a remarkable agreement between cosmic radiation influenced by the Sun and global cloud cover(6). This is the mechanism the film proposes for global warming. But, yet again, the method was exposed as faulty. They had been using satellite data which did not in fact measure global cloud cover. A paper in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics shows that when the right data are used, a correlation is not found(7).

So the hypothesis changed again. Without acknowledging that his previous paper was wrong, Friis-Christensen’s co-author, Henrik Svensmark, declared that there was in fact a correlation – not with total cloud cover but with “low cloud cover”(8). This too turned out to be incorrect(9). Then, last year, Svensmark published a paper purporting to show that cosmic rays could form tiny particles in the atmosphere(10). Accompanying it was a press release which went way beyond the findings reported in the paper, claiming it showed that both past and current climate events are the result of cosmic rays(11).

As Dr Gavin Schmidt of NASA has shown on www.realclimate.org, five missing steps would have to be taken to justify the wild claims in the press release. “We’ve often criticised press releases that we felt gave misleading impressions of the underlying work”, Schmidt says, “but this example is by far the most blatant extrapolation-beyond-reasonableness that we’ve seen.”(12) None of this seems to have troubled the programme makers, who report the cosmic ray theory as if it trounces all competing explanations.

The film also maintains that manmade global warming is disproved by conflicting temperature data. Professor John Christy speaks about the discrepancy he discovered between temperatures at the earth’s surface and temperatures in the troposphere (or lower atmosphere). But the programme fails to mention that in 2005 his data were proved wrong, by three papers in Science magazine(13,14,15).

Christy himself admitted last year that he was mistaken. He was one of the lead authors of a paper which states the opposite of what he says in the film. “Previously reported discrepancies between the amount of warming near the surface and higher in the atmosphere have been used to challenge the reliability of climate models and the reality of human-induced global warming. Specifically, surface data showed substantial global-average warming, while early versions of satellite and radiosonde data showed little or no warming above the surface. This significant discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been identified and corrected.”(16)

Until recently, when found to be wrong, scientists went quietly back to their labs to start again. Now, emboldened by the global denial industry, some of them, like the film makers, shriek “censorship!” This is the best example of manufactured victimhood I have ever come across. If you demonstrate that someone is wrong, you are now deemed to be silencing him.

But there is one scientist in the film whose work has not been debunked: the oceanographer Carl Wunsch. He appears to support the idea that increasing carbon dioxide is not responsible for rising global temperatures. Professor Wunsch says that he was “completely misrepresented” by the programme, and “totally misled” by the people who made it(17).

This is a familiar story to those who have followed the career of the director, Martin Durkin. In 1998 the Independent Television Commission found that, when making a similar series, he had “misled” his interviewees about “the content and purpose of the programmes”. Their views had been “distorted through selective editing”(18). Channel 4 had to make a prime-time apology.

Cherry-pick your results, choose work which is already outdated and discredited, and anything and everything becomes true. The Twin Towers were brought down by controlled explosions; MMR injections cause autism; homeopathy works; black people are less intelligent than white people; species came about through intelligent design. You can find lines of evidence which appear to support all these contentions, and, in most cases, professors who will speak up in their favour. But this does not mean that any of them are correct. You can sustain a belief in these propositions only by ignoring the overwhelming body of contradictory data. To form a balanced, scientific view, you have to consider all the evidence, on both sides of the question.

But for the people who commissioned this film, all that counts is the sensation. Channel 4 has always had a problem with science. No one in its science unit appears to understand the difference between a peer-reviewed scientific paper and a clipping from the Daily Mail. It keeps commissioning people whose claims have been discredited – like Martin Durkin and a certain nutritionist of our acquaintance. But its failure to understand the scientific process just makes the job of whipping up a storm that much easier. The less true a programme is, the greater the controversy.



www.monbiot.com



References:

1. David Bellamy, 14th August 2004. An ill wind blows for turbines. Letter to the Guardian.

2. Eigil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen, 1991. Length of the solar cycle: an indicator of solar activity closely associated with climate. Science, Vol 254, 698-700.

3. Paul Damon and Peter Laut, 2004. Pattern of Strange Errors Plagues Solar Activity and Terrestrial Climate Data. Eos, Vol. 85, No. 39.

4. Knud Lassen and Eigil Friis-Christensen, 2000. Reply to “Solar cycle lengths and climate: A reference revisited” by P. Laut and J.Gundermann. Journal of Geophysical Research Vol 105, No 27, 493-495.

5. Paul Damon and Peter Laut, ibid.

6. Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen, 1997. Variation of cosmic ray flux and global cloud coverage: A missing link in solar-climate relationships. The Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, Vol 59, 1225-1232.

7. Peter Laut, 2003. Solar activity and terrestrial climate: an analysis of some purported correlations. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics Vol 65, 801-812.

8. Nigel Marsh and Henrik Svensmark, 2000. Low cloud properties influenced by cosmic rays. Physical Review Letters Vol 85, no 23. 5004-5007.

9. Paul Damon and Peter Laut, ibid.

10. Henrik Svensmark et al, 2007. Experimental evidence for the role of ions in particle nucleation under atmospheric conditions. Proceedings of the Royal Society Volume 463, Number 2078, 1364-5021.

11. Danish National Space centre, October 2006. Getting closer to the cosmic connection to climate.

http://spacecenter.dk/publications/p...ion-to-climate

12. Gavin Schmidt, 16th October 2006. Taking Cosmic Rays for a spin. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...ys-for-a-spin/

13. Carl A. Mears and Frank J. Wentz, 2nd September 2005. The Effect of Diurnal Correction on Satellite-Derived Lower Tropospheric Temperature. Science. Vol 309, pp1548-1551.

14. B.D. Santer et al, 2nd September 2005. Amplification of Surface Temperature Trends and Variability in the Tropical Atmosphere. Science. Vol 309, pp1548-1551.

15. Steven J. Sherwood, John R. Lanzante and Cathryn L. Meyer, 2nd September 2005. Radiosonde Daytime Biases and Late-20th Century Warming. Science. Vol 309, pp1556-1559.

16. Tom Wigley et al, April 2006. Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere – Understanding and Reconciling Differences: Executive Summary. The U.S. Climate Change Science Program.

http://www.climatescience.gov/Librar...al-execsum.pdf

17. Geoffrey Lean, 11th March 2007. An inconvenient truth… for C4. Independent on Sunday.

18. Independent Television Commission, 1st April 1998. Channel 4 to apologise to four interviewees in “Against Nature” series. Press release.

[elephantsoup]

Cheers Dan an interesting read backed up with proper references.

This bit cracked me up...
"Channel 4 has always had a problem with science. No one in its science unit appears to understand the difference between a peer-reviewed scientific paper and a clipping from the Daily Mail."

[CzarJunkie]

I don't see any rebuttal of the programme's claims that increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are as a result of global warming rather than the cause of global warming. After all thats the most damning evidence for the man made global warming theory...........

Anyone got any links to articles that debunk that claim?

[Dopey Dan]

I don't see any rebuttal of the programme's claims that increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are as a result of global warming rather than the cause of global warming. After all thats the most damning evidence for the man made global warming theory...........

Anyone got any links to articles that debunk that claim?

I would like to see that as well, but I think the monbiot article is pretty damming on the programme as a whole. I'll see if I can find out more about the carbon dioxide.

As I was watching the programme I really hoped it as true, as I'm sure we all do, but it looks like it back to push bikes and the old compost toilet

[Dopey Dan]

http://community.channel4.com/eve/fo...4/m/2140003857

Pretty Intresting. But would like to find a more scientific based paper.

The hockey stick is probably the most famous evidence championed by those that support man made global warming. This is for one very good reason: it is almost completely undeniable. For this reason, most of the scientific community has reached a consensus.

WHAT IS THE HOCKEY STICK?

The hockey stick is a graph of average annual temperature against the year going back about 1000 years. It is called a hockey stick because it seems reasonably constant (see later) until the industrial revolution when it shoots up giving the graph the appearence of a hockey stick.

WHY IS THE HOCKEY STICK SO CONCLUSIVE?

The hockey stick on it's own shows nothing. It's only when scientists tried explaining the hockey stick graph that man made global warming became undeniable.

As is common in science, the first step is to consider all the possible factors that could influence global temeratures. Scientists found the following (I think it covers all of them but I might have forgotten one): the sun, including sun spots, solar storms and other solar activities; valcano's; carbon dioxide emmissions.

The next stage was to figure out how each of these factors effect our environment. This is where the hard science came in.

Stage 3 is using the knowledge from stage 2 to plot a graph of what the temperatures should have been given only those 3 factors. This requires heavy computer simulation.

When they included all the factors but for man made CO2 emisions, you get a graph which works very well except for the last 100 years or so.

Using the natural factors (the sun and valcanos) the model's predicted a medieval warm period (in the 1400s or something) and also the mini Ice age in the 1700s or something. It also predicted a new warm period for what is happening now. But although this graph predicted the actual values of the mini ice age and the medieval warm period extremely accurately, it was far too low to explain the size of the hockey stick in the last the years.

Now add CO2. The simulation again (not surprisingly as there were no CO2 emmissions before the industrial revolution) shows the mini ice age and the medieval warm periods. But now, their is a hockey stick almost idential to the one we have actually measured.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN.

Natural factors do suggest we should be going through a warm period. But as is common with science, when we add figures, they simply cannot explain the shear extent of temperature rises today.

It is only when we add CO2 emmissions that today's temperatures can be accurately explained.

GLOBAL WARMING SWINDLE, THE FRAUD

Global warming swindle made out falsly that the hockey stick graph has been altered to show no previous variations (ie the mini ice age and the medieval warm period). It accuses climate scientists of deliberaly ignoring these two natural climatic events. But this couldn't be further from the truth.

Scientists, far from ignoring them, it is only because of these events that the hockey stick is such strong evidence of man made global warming. This is because natural warming accounts so well for those climatic events, but is completely incapable of explaining today's warming without considering man made CO2 as well.

WHAT ABOUT GLOBAL DIMMING?

Not much to do with the hockey stick, but dirty burning of fossil fuels has also caused global dimming. This has caused world wide levels of sunlight to be decreased and this COOLS down the planet. Yet the planet is still heating. How can this be? Because the degree of global warming is significantly higher than any of us realised a few years ago and global dimming only masks us from the true damage that we are doing right now to our environment.

As soon as we start burning more efficiently in other areas of the world, global dimming will go and our planet will feel the full force of global warming.

WHAT ARE THE STAKES OF GETTING IT WRONG?

Scientists predict that if the temperatures rise over 10 degrees, the entire sea will release so much methane gas (a green house gas 100 times more effective than CO2) that our environment could turn into one like Venus: almost completely uninhabitable.

SO IS THERE ANY DEBATE?

Well yes. There is debate. Will global warming, if it continues as it is now, completely destroy our planet in 150 years or will it take 500 years. That is what scientists are trying to find out now.

Are we at the point where the artic ice caps melt irreversibly? We don't know. Debate. How many years until the Amazon dies? We don't know that fully either. And then how much time until that doomsday senario of the methane release from the sea? Again, don't know. Debate. Lots of debate.

But not a single honest part of it is about whether man made global warming exists. Science has moved on from that. It's happening people.

[marcode]

50 years, 100 years or 500 years.. either way, it appears that we are pretty fucked no matter whos truth we believe lol

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2002...outh/#more-818

[CzarJunkie]

50 years, 100 years or 500 years.. either way, it appears that we are pretty fucked no matter whos truth we believe lol

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2002...outh/#more-818

“the American way of life is not up for negotiation”. .................... And that's why they're a bunch of cunts.

[Dopey Dan]

http://news.independent.co.uk/enviro...cle2355956.ece

The more you look into this, the guys making this film are total charlatans.

The real global warming swindle

A Channel 4 documentary claimed that climate change was a conspiratorial lie. But an analysis of the evidence it used shows the film was riddled with distortions and errors
By Steve Connor
Published: 14 March 2007

A Channel 4 documentary that claimed global warming is a swindle was itself flawed with major errors which seriously undermine the programme's credibility, according to an investigation by The Independent.

The Great Global Warming Swindle, was based on graphs that were distorted, mislabelled or just plain wrong. The graphs were nevertheless used to attack the credibility and honesty of climate scientists.

A graph central to the programme's thesis, purporting to show variations in global temperatures over the past century, claimed to show that global warming was not linked with industrial emissions of carbon dioxide. Yet the graph was not what it seemed.

Other graphs used out-of-date information or data that was shown some years ago to be wrong. Yet the programme makers claimed the graphs demonstrated that orthodox climate science was a conspiratorial "lie" foisted on the public.

Channel 4 yesterday distanced itself from the programme, referring this newspaper's inquiries to a public relations consultant working on behalf of Wag TV, the production company behind the documentary.

Martin Durkin, who wrote and directed the film, admitted yesterday that one of the graphs contained serious errors but he said they were corrected in time for the second transmission of the programme following inquiries by The Independent.

Mr Durkin has already been criticised by one scientist who took part in the programme over alleged misrepresentation of his views on the climate.

The main arguments made in Mr Durkin's film were that climate change had little if anything to do with man-made carbon dioxide and that global warming can instead be linked directly with solar activity - sun spots.

One of the principal supports for his thesis came in the form of a graph labelled "World Temp - 120 years", which claimed to show rises and falls in average global temperatures between 1880 and 2000.

Mr Durkin's film argued that most global warming over the past century occurred between 1900 and 1940 and that there was a period of cooling between 1940 and 1975 when the post-war economic boom was under way. This showed, he said, that global warming had little to do with industrial emissions of carbon dioxide.

The programme-makers labelled the source of the world temperature data as "Nasa" but when we inquired about where we could find this information, we received an email through Wag TV's PR consultant saying that the graph was drawn from a 1998 diagram published in an obscure journal called Medical Sentinel. The authors of the paper are well-known climate sceptics who were funded by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the George C Marshall Institute, a right-wing Washington think-tank.

However, there are no diagrams in the paper that accurately compare with the C4 graph. The nearest comparison is a diagram of "terrestrial northern hemisphere" temperatures - which refers only to data gathered by weather stations in the top one third of the globe.

However, further inquiries revealed that the C4 graph was based on a diagram in another paper produced as part of a "petition project" by the same group of climate sceptics. This diagram was itself based on long out-of-date information on terrestrial temperatures compiled by Nasa scientists.

However, crucially, the axis along the bottom of the graph has been distorted in the C4 version of the graph, which made it look like the information was up-to-date when in fact the data ended in the early 1980s.

Mr Durkin admitted that his graphics team had extended the time axis along the bottom of the graph to the year 2000. "There was a fluff there," he said.

If Mr Durkin had gone directly to the Nasa website he could have got the most up-to-date data. This would have demonstrated that the amount of global warming since 1975, as monitored by terrestrial weather stations around the world, has been greater than that between 1900 and 1940 - although that would have undermined his argument.

"The original Nasa data was very wiggly-lined and we wanted the simplest line we could find," Mr Durkin said.

The programme failed to point out that scientists had now explained the period of "global cooling" between 1940 and 1970. It was caused by industrial emissions of sulphate pollutants, which tend to reflect sunlight. Subsequent clean-air laws have cleared up some of this pollution, revealing the true scale of global warming - a point that the film failed to mention.

Other graphs used in the film contained known errors, notably the graph of sunspot activity. Mr Durkin used data on solar cycle lengths which were first published in 1991 despite a corrected version being available - but again the corrected version would not have supported his argument. Mr Durkin also used a schematic graph of temperatures over the past 1,000 years that was at least 16 years old, which gave the impression that today's temperatures are cooler than during the medieval warm period. If he had used a more recent, and widely available, composite graph it would have shown average temperatures far exceed the past 1,000 years.

[FireBlade]

Its all bollocks anyway even if it did make a difference how is the worl going to stop China India and the USA who produce between them more then half the CO2 so things liek the London congestion charge are just another big con to make a few quid in tax`s

[drunkn_munky]

As far as I am concerned, until anyone can actually disprove the arguments made in the documentary, it's true. The great swindle disproves every one of the theories previously put forward. Yet all the media has done is attack the scientists and not disprove or event contest any of the theories. Also the fact that they thought there was going to be an ice age just 30 years ago sealed it for me.

[CzarJunkie]

As far as I am concerned, until anyone can actually disprove the arguments made in the documentary, it's true. The great swindle disproves every one of the theories previously put forward. Yet all the media has done is attack the scientists and not disprove or event contest any of the theories. Also the fact that they thought there was going to be an ice age just 30 years ago sealed it for me.

You should start by reading this thread, there's one or two posts above that counter the evidence presented in the CH4 documentary...................

[/dev/null]

“the American way of life is not up for negotiation”. .................... And that's why they're a bunch of cunts.

I couldn't agree more!