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

[kimera]

That explanation doesn’t explain what is happening in our oceans. How is the increased CO2 getting into our oceans?

I dislike the term “Global Warming” because global cooling will also take place. “Anthropogenic Climate Change” is the term I prefer. Now, I’m not the type of person who reads popular press. In fact, back when I did read newspapers regularly, I didn’t believe in it because I saw articles in the Wall Street Journal challenging that it was happening or that humans were responsible.

However, since I have begun my college science education and now that I read all the science journals I can get my paws on, I don’t think that politics was responsible for this movement. There is no controversy that it is happening over here within the scientific community. The greatest controversies are in what we can do to stop it and the exact effects. I’ve seen evidence presented by my astronomy profs, geology profs, geography profs, etc. Link

Yes, there are some scientists who disagree but there are even some scientists who don’t accept evolution!

I don’t care what the politicians say, if the majority of scientists say that it is happening and that we are responsible, then I will accept it until there is more evidence to the contrary.

[Zetetic]

@Quartz

But then, it’s a biased program.

Indeed. Legitimate concern could also be held over the programme director’s ethical rigour. Martin Durkin’s CV includes:-

“Against Nature” - Channel 4, 1997 (anti-environmentalist). 151 complaints were received by the Independent Television Commission (now OFCOM) regarding the programme, “four of the complaints came from contributors to the programmes. All four were distinguished environmentalists, who said that they had been misled as to the content and the purpose of the programmes, and that their known views had been distorted by editing.”… “It was also found that the production company had misled them, when it originally sought their involvement, as to the format, subject matter and purpose of the programmes”. Channel 4 was directed to make an on-screen apology. [OFCOM verdict ]

“Storm in a D-Cup” - Channel 4, 1999 (regarding the safety of silicone implants). Sally Kirkland and Ilena Rosenthal, of the Humantics Foundation for Women Breast Implants, “were totally and unequivocally misled as to the intent and content of that piece” when being solicited for their involvement. [

[quote taken from Guardian article discussing same]
(More digs at Durkin | | The Guardian)]

“The Rise and Fall of GM Food” - Channel 4, 2000. 17 viewer complaints were received regarding this, although none were upheld [OFCOM verdict]. However, participant Dr Ho Mae-Wan claimed that her interview was edited to misrepresent her position and that she “was tricked into taking part”. [

[quote taken from her Institute of Science in Society website]
(http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/MaeWanHo/i-sisnews4.html#condemn)]

(I’m fairly sure the above is relevant enough to avoid a charge of ad hominem.)

[Tyrrell_McAllister]

@villa

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.

:smack: Never mind, then.

[jshore]

@kimera

That explanation doesn’t explain what is happening in our oceans. How is the increased CO2 getting into our oceans?

Well, as I noted above, only about half of our emissions are staying in the atmosphere. The rest are being absorbed, mainly by the biosphere and the oceans. I don’t remember the fraction for each.

But, basically, the oceans respond to the increased concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere by absorbing more of it.

[BrainGlutton]

@kimera

How is the increased CO2 getting into our oceans?

Hm? Is it? Cite?

[BrainGlutton]

BTW, has Thatcher responded to this?

[Squink]

@BrainGlutton

Hm? Is it? Cite?

Ocean acidification

[Rayne_Man]

@BrainGlutton

BTW, has Thatcher responded to this?

She lives in another universe and thinks she’s above criticism.

[Chief_Pedant]

@jshore

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.

Hmmm… I didn’t find this short piece all that debunking.
Here’s an excerpt from one of the replies to the main piece:

*“The answer to this is well known, of course: that there is a T-CO2 feedback: see RC again for more.”

I’ve just read that RC article and it’s one of the flimsiest pieces of “science” I have ever seen.

Some “unknown” mechanism warms the world for 800 years, then the next 4,200 years of warming is down to CO2.

That’s just insane. If the mechanism is unkown how can you possible conclilude that it is not responsible for all 5,000 years of warming?

Don’t get me wrong - in my eyes the jury is still out on whether humans are responsible for global warming. However, you mock last night’s documentary as being blind to inconvenient facts, but if this is one of the facts that you happily take as read then I fear the documentary maker is not the only blind man.

[As far as is known, the mechanism for initiating the warming at the end of glacial cycles is orbital variations - this is because of the coincidence of timings. However the calculated forcings are then too weak (and you can’t blame it on solar variations). The only known mechanism to explain this is then CO2 feedbacks. But the details are not known.

Of course you can invoke unknown mechanisms if you want, but then that is rather uncertain.

It is not a case of 800y of T then CO2 doing the rest. It is (believed to be) a feedback process throughout the 5kyr.

Note, BTW, that the obs on this are not as cut and dried as this suggests: there are problems getting CO2 and T onto the same age scale, for example -W]

Posted by: Kipper | March 9, 2007 08:27 AM"*

I won’t even pretend to have a personal scientific opinion other than general skepticism of nearly everything but here and elsewhere the term “debunked” is frequently tossed about as if this or that alternate opinion thoroughly discredits the first.

[jjimm]

@Rayne Man

She lives in another universe and thinks she’s above criticism.

More to the point, she has (probable) Alzheimers. Not that she didn’t live in another universe before then.

[FRDE]

While I felt sorry for the miners, their leader ‘Life President’ Arthur Scargill was definitely politically motivated.

The miners had historically been a problem, they went on strike in WWI (can’t find a cite) and were historically quite capable of bringing the UK to its knees.

North Sea oil and gas had come online, so there was a pretty strong case for switching from coal for electricity generation.

While I disagree with much that Thatcher did, when elected in 1979 the UK was in an utter mess, we had had the Winter of Discontent, inflation was rampant, secondary picketing was rife.

The miners represented a challenge, if they had suceeded then both Labour and Conservative governments would have been shown up as incapable of handling the unions.

At the time coal was regarded as ‘dirty’, mainly due to sulphur emmissions, but the whole Global Warming stuff had not appeared on the scene.

[Peter_Morris]

@The Librarian

Given the complex nature of our athmosphere, I think there is very little proof for global warming.

As I understand it, there is overwhelming proof for Global Warming.

However, the world has been warming and cooling over and over for aons. The debate is, how much of the current warming is natural, and how much is due to human influence.

And even if it’s 100% natural, it could still be dangerous to us poor fragile humans, so what can we do about it?

[Askance]

@Peter Morris

And even if it’s 100% natural, it could still be dangerous to us poor fragile humans, so what can we do about it?

Stop doing things that can only possibly be making it worse? Seems like a good start.

[Hail_Ants]

For those who wish to view the Channel 4 program, The Great Global Warming Swindle, its on Google Video.

Personally I found it very well done, although mostly because it confirms what has been pretty obvious to me for so long, namely that global warming is nonsense. In a half generation or so, when absolutely nothing whatsoever becomes of it, it will be remembered like the Jupiter Effect was in the 70s, a junk-science based non-issue that simply got hijacked by politics and ridiculously over-sensationalized by the media.

I just hope I live long enough to give a long-overdue Nelson Muntz “Ha-ha!” to all the dopes who bought into it.

[tagos]

This environmental columnist has this to say about the C4 programme.

Red hot debunking

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.

<snip>

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.

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”. The real data for recent years show the opposite: that the length of the sunspot cycle has 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. But this too turned out to be an artefact of mistakes - in this case in their arithmetic.

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. 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.

So the hypothesis changed again. Without acknowledging that his previous paper was wrong, Friis-Christensen’s co-author, Henrik Svensmark, declared there was a correlation - not with total cloud cover but with “low cloud cover”. This, too, turned out to be incorrect. Then, last year, Svensmark published a paper purporting to show cosmic rays could form tiny particles in the atmosphere. Accompanying the paper 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.

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 have seen.” 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.

Christy himself admitted last year that he was mistaken.

I ask myself - who am I going to believe? The vast body of science and scientists who say one thing or a few outliers who believe the opposite, as reported via a purposefully controversial documentary series and a director with previous ‘form’ which ignores the specific refutation of the science in peer reviewed journals?

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. Wunsch says he was “completely misrepresented” by the programme, and “totally misled” by the people who made it.

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”. Channel 4 had to make a prime-time apology.

[jshore]

@Hail Ants

Personally I found it very well done, although mostly because it confirms what has been pretty obvious to me for so long, namely that global warming is nonsense.

And, this statement confirms that you have been duped. The more scrutiny that program receives, the worse it holds up. tagos’s article is a good explanation of some of the problems. There are also issues with graphs presented that were doctored in various ways and, as tagos notes, a scientist [Carl Wunsch] who was misled regarding the nature of the show and then had what he said presented completely out of context so that it sounds like he is supporting a completely different point than the one he was making. Here and here and here are some discussions of the problems with the show, including the doctored graphs.
Here is what Carl Wunsch has had to say.

[tagos]

@jshore

as tagos notes, a scientist [Carl Wunsch] who was misled regarding the nature of the show and then had what he said presented completely out of context so that it sounds like he is supporting a completely different point than the one he was making.
Here is what Carl Wunsch has had to say.

To quote him.

In the part of the “Swindle” film where I am describing the fact that the ocean tends to expel carbon dioxide where it is warm, and to absorb it where it is cold, my intent was to explain that warming the ocean could be dangerous—because it is such a gigantic reservoir of carbon. By its placement in the film, it appears that I am saying that since carbon dioxide exists in the ocean in such large quantities, human influence must not be very important — diametrically opposite to the point I was making — which is that global warming is both real and threatening in many different ways, some unexpected.

Many of us feel an obligation to talk to the media—it’s part of our role as scientists, citizens, and educators. The subjects are complicated, and it is easy to be misquoted or quoted out context. My experience in the past is that these things do happen, but usually inadvertently — most reporters really do want to get it right.

Channel 4 now says they were making a film in a series of “polemics”. There is nothing in the communication we had (much of it on the telephone or with the film crew on the day they were in Boston) that suggested they were making a film that was one-sided, anti-educational, and misleading. I took them at face value—clearly a great error. I knew I had no control over the actual content, but it never occurred to me that I was dealing with people who already had a reputation for distortion and exaggeration.

A programme made by people with such a lack of either integrity or understanding should be ignored.

[APB]

@Quartz

Yes, but not by design. Her [Thatcher’s] 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.

Her speech to the Royal Society was in September 1988, over three years after the 1984-5 strike had ended. As she herself noted, greenhouse gases, the hole in the ozone layer and acid rain were by then already ‘familiar subjects of concern’.

That, having been invited to address the Royal Society, she made some bland, predictable, even complacent remarks about what was already a topical scientific issue doesn’t, in itself, seem to require any deeper explanation.

[Khangol]

@Askance

Stop doing things that can only possibly be making it worse? Seems like a good start.

Does it really?

Stop all human activity that puts CO2 into the atmosphere, huh? A good start?

So nobody burns anything. Put humans back to pre-human times, before the taming of fire. How many heat sources can you name that don’t ultimately come from burning something? And how quickly can they be made available to billions of people? Hmm. Gonna get kinda cold in the non-equatorial latitudes, where the majority of humans live. But really, most of them probably won’t freeze to death. They’ll starve first.

All industry stops. No more steel, or any other metals. No plastics or any other sort of chemically produced materials. Not even ceramics or fired clay. And of course all transportation stops, unless you want to walk it. (Even then, you’re exhaling CO2. Oh oh! Problem!) No cars, trucks, trains, planes, powered ships - none. No way to move freight anywhere. Not even horse-drawn carriages or ox-carts. Horses and oxen both emit CO2 (along with methane and other noxious things, so terrible for the atmosphere). So, no food gets moved from place to place. Every city in the world starves to death. Quickly. In fact, not much food gets produced. Everybody who doesn’t have a farm, and the skills to work it without tractors, trucks, fertilizers, or irrigation is going to get a mite hungry.

But hey, isn’t all that a small price to pay?

Basically, your plan is: Destroy civilization and kill off all or most of the human species. That’s the inherent result of the plan to “stop doing things” that can only possibly (emphasize possibly) be contributing to a possible effect (ACC) that might possibly result in a possibly undesirable result (a warmer planet).

Seems just a tad drastic to me. But then, I happen to have a perverse and apparently unpopular affection for the human species.

The problem with people who have the attitude of “Gee, even if the whole ACC theory has only a one-in-a-million chance of really being right, isn’t it better not to take any chances?” is that they never follow through on what their “better safe than sorry” notions really entail.

Fortunately, the human race isn’t going to revert to pre-fire anthropoid days, no matter how many hysterical Newsweek articles are printed (and distributed with CO2-producing materials and machines, later to be thrown away and burned - thanks, Newsweek, for doing your part in the fight against deadly global warming) proclaiming that “our best scientists” (try to define that term in any meaningful way) all say The End Is Nigh and we must Repent of our sinful technological ways.

But the whole foofaraw is pretty entertaining, anyway. Actually, that’s one of my favorite things about the human species: their entertainment value. It’s just a pity H.L. Mencken isn’t around for this; he’d have loved it.

[BrainGlutton]

@Khangol

The problem with people who have the attitude of “Gee, even if the whole ACC theory has only a one-in-a-million chance of really being right, isn’t it better not to take any chances?” is that they never follow through on what their “better safe than sorry” notions really entail.

[shrug] It’s not a problem that can be addressed through individual lifestyle choices. Once you’ve bought a hybrid you’ve pretty much shot your bolt, and you buying a hybrid isn’t going to help much. Anything that does help will have to involve governmental action on a very broad scale.