The Great Global Warming Swindle - UK's Channel 4: blame Thatcher [ed. title]

Great Debates
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Channel 4 have just finished broadcasting The Great Global Warming Swindle. I’ve recorded it to watch again later, when I’ll make notes and fact-check it, so I’m not interested in debating its claims right now. Their debunking of AGW appeared quite comprehensive: their proposition is that it’s solar activity. But then, it’s a biased program.

But they made a very startling claim: that the main AGW movement was essentially started by Mrs Thatcher! Apparently she started it to promote nuclear power over coal to do down the miners.

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The title of a documentary on the anthropogenic causes of global warming, more here.

The jist of the show was this, man made green house gases are too small in quantity to help warm the Earth. Clouds do more than anything to warm the Earth and are affected strongly by cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are deflected by solar activity and so global warming, when it occurs, is caused by the sun getting uppity.

Human induced (or indeed any) CO2 levels have never apparantly risen enough to cause a rise in temperature and have in fact risen 800 years after a rise in the temperature of Earth’s atmosphere.

I’ve relied on the wikipedia pages on global warming to point me in the right direction but it all seems at odds with the programme. Cosmic ray deflection merits a mere suggestion that was not raised by the IPCC. Does the programme have any merit? Aside from an ex New Scientist editor, the interviewees seem to have some reputable scientific background.

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Given the complex nature of our athmosphere, I think there is very little proof for global warming.
I think many people are arguing the wrong case; Global warming due to human activity may or may not be true, the jury is still out for the final verdict.
But:
We shouldn’t let that cloud our judgement: It is irresponsible for us to change the chemical composure of the athmosphere (too much) while we debate if it will raise the ocean-levels.
There may be other (even nastier) consequences of burning too much fossil fuel our scientist haven’t even thought of. For our own good we should cover every post.

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What does IPCC mean?

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There was a similar article in the paper by the Professor of Climatology at an Australian university only a few weeks ago. He argued that the current “Global Warming” fixation is a political artifact and not really a scientific argument at all. Interestingly he pointed out that, although they may be important scientific figures, very few of the major players in the “debate” are climatologists at all.

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Quarta: I’m confused. You say you’re not interested in debating the claims now, so what kind of conversation are you interested in?

In the absence of indication to the contrary, I think this belongs in Great Debates: just because there’s a TV show, doesn’t mean it’s Cafe Society. Whether it’s about the cause of Global Warming or about Ms Thatcher’s role, it’s still a Great Debate, methinks.

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IPCC.

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What is this Channel 4? Is it a BBC outlet or not?

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That Thatcher thing sounds like a bizarre conspiracy theory. And, are they claiming that Thatcher almost single-handedly got the world worried about climate change? I think it is true that Thatcher was on-board relatively early with her concern about it…but I hardly think that she’s had the power to influence the rest of the world so strongly. Did they present anything approaching evidence to back up this “theory”.

As for the show itself, here is a climate scientist’s take on it…basically, nothing new that isn’t already well-known and previously debunked.

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Channel 4 is a publicly-owned television broadcaster in the UK (it also makes films under the Film Four banner, “Dogma” I believe was a Film Four production). It is not and has never been affliated to the BBC, which is a publicly-owned non-commercial broadcaster. Channel 4 supports itself through advertising revenue whilst the BBC recieves funding through a compulsory TV licence.

Channel 4

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Yes, but not by design. Her idea was to make the miners look bad - they said she addressed the Royal Society (?) and said, “Here’s lots of money, make coal look bad” - at a time when the miners union was trying to overthrow her government.

Anyway, I’ve had no opportunity to check up on anything in the programme, so I won’t vouch for any of it.

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Or alternatively “at a time when the miners’ union was attempting to protect the jobs of its members.”

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Wise words, i agree. Just to expand a little, my thoughts on the matter.

I agree entirely (with the programme makers) that it is being used as a political tool and that is plain wrong. What worries me even more though is that the current propaganda fools people into the mistaken impression that we are actually able to do something about it. If the Global Warming sceptics are correct (and i don’t have the knowledge to call one way or another) then reducing our emissions won’t halt global warming.

Sure it’s important to debate the cause, but i’m firmly in the ‘if you aren’t sure cover all bases’ school of thought. All the focus seems to be on how to stop the warming. I’d feel better if we covered our asses and place as much focus on ‘we can’t stop it so what are we going to do?’

If it is unstoppable (regardless of whether we are actually the cause) then the important thing to concentrate on is preparing for life in a warmer climate. We should be thinking about where food and water supplies will be impacted and make appropriate provisions. We should be planning to move populations away from storm areas if places are going to become too violent weatherwise etc. It would be much better to make gradual adjustments over the course of decades than to have to implement emergency measures at the last minute.

Of course, i know nothing about climatology, feel free to jump in and tell me why my concerns are stupid.

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<mod>

Let’s warm up to the subject over in Great Debates.

We can Gore it to death over there.

Moved.

</mod>

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As it happens we already have a GD thread going on this documentary. I suggest the two threads be merged.

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Once again on this board it must be pointed out that the BBC is not the only broadcaster in the UK. Apart from the BBC there is ITV, Channel 4 , “Five” and the many hundreds of stations (including Sky) which are broadcast on cable and satellite.

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Thread from GQ merged into GD thread (from CS) and title modified.

[ /Moderating ]

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I think that “overthrow her government” doesn’t have quite the same anarchist ring in parliamentary democracies as it does in the United States. For example, you might not have noticed that Japan’s government fell last month.

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I’m also British, lived there throughout the miners’ strike, saw Thatcher unleash the police onto picketers, saw the lies the NCB & the government told miners, watched the biased TV coverage, and feel pretty comfortable saying that miners went out and stayed out to attempt to protect their livelihood, not out of some intent to bring the government down. That wouldn’t have been a disliked side effect for many, but it doesn’t keep you on the picket line for over a year.

Ignoring the miners’ economic claims was one of the methods used to delegitimize the strike.

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I don’t think anyone would disagree with your idea that we are going to need a large amount of adaptation to a warmer world simply because the inertia associated with the climate system…and with the political and economic systems…means we are in for further warming. (And, at any rate, even if the warmer stopped tomorrow, sea level would continue to rise for a long time…because the inertia there is even greater.)

However, I think you have got the whole logic of the scientific argument wrong if you believe that there is going to be some dramatic warming not caused by humans. In fact, if the current warming were due to natural causes (which we know it very likely ain’t), then it would be unlikely that it would persist for a long time. (For one thing, if it did, it would take the planet to temperatures above those that have been seen for the last 750,000 years, which encompasses several ice age - interglacial cycles…and at quite an unprecedented rate.)

The logic is not, “Boy…The planet is warming dramatically, what do you think is the cause?” Rather, the logic is that it has been hypothesized for over 100 years (since Arrhenius worked it out ~100 years ago) that a rise in CO2 levels due to our burning of fossil fuels would in fact lead to considerable warming. Arrhenius even made an attempt to work out how much warming a doubling of CO2 levels would cause…and his result isn’t too far off of modern predictions.

The biggest “fly in the ointment” concerning Arrhenius’s initial calculations was the question of whether CO2 levels were really increasing in the atmosphere…or whether instead the oceans were able to absorb all the CO2 we were emitting. It wasn’t until the late 1950s that accurate measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere indeed showed that about half of the emissions were remaining in the atmosphere and thus that CO2 levels were marching steadily upward over time.

Then the question became one of revisiting the issue of how much warming this is likely to cause. Modern climate models have converged on an answer of ~2 to 4.5 C for a doubling of CO2 levels. This general range is also supported by evidence from the past. For example, we know quite accurately what the “radiative forcing” is due to a doubling of CO2 levels (3.5 - 4 W/m2) and we can estimate what the various forcings and temperature changes were at the end of the last ice age that brought us into the current warmer (“interglacial”) period about 12,000 years ago, allowing us to estimate what the sensitivity of the climate system is to a given level of radiative forcing.

Then, the question becomes: Are we detecting the warming that we would expect and can we in fact attribute it to rising greenhouse gas levels? That is where we make the connection with the empirical evidence that warming is in fact occurring.

This means that any hypothesis that proposes a natural cause for the current warming has to not only come up with a mechanism and evidence that such a mechanism is in fact playing out, but it also has to explain why the known mechanism by which greenhouse gases should be warming the atmosphere is not happening. For example, it must come up with an alternative to the standard explanation of what caused the climate to change from ice age to interglacial (the standard mechanism being that it was triggered by orbital oscillations that allowed ice sheets to contract over the northern hemisphere and also triggered the release of CO2 and methane…and that the forcing were thus the decrease in albedo due to the shrinking ice and the increase in these greenhouse gas concentrations). In order that the climate be relatively insensitive to greenhouse gases, it is necessary that this alternative mechanism provide a quite whopping radiative forcing because we know the global temperature changes were quite dramatic!

So: To summarize, it is not enough to just come up with a plausible mechanism that could explain the current warming. One has to show that it actually does explain the warming at least as well as the theory of greenhouse gas warming. Furthermore, one has to explain how a lot of current paleoclimate theory is wrong and basically come up with a new theory of paleoclimate. It is a pretty large undertaking!