It seems everyone is watching the new BBC ITV channel 4 documentary ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’.
It is being describes as out and out propaganda by many establishment climate scientists. I was sent a link to this blog post which includes a short critique by a well known contributor to the IPCC, William Connolley:
“There has been a vast amount of back and forth about the recent propaganda film ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’. Two things have distressed me: that Channel 4 clearly have no interest in whether they broadcast truth or not; and the number of people prepared to fall for this tripe.
It’s possible to go through and analyse why just about everything they said was wrong or misleading, and I’ll try that in a moment. But if you find that going right over your head, then it may be more convincing to point out that:
1. They have faked some of their graphs,
2. One of the most respected scientists interviewed, Carl Wunsch, has since denounced the programme as “an out-and-out propaganda piece, in which there is not even a gesture toward balance or explanation of why many of the extended inferences drawn in the film are not widely accepted by the scientific community.” [end of quote]
Connelley then goes on to justify the approach Al Gore took in ‘An Inconvenient Truth’:
“Comparisons to Al Gores ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ may be instructive. A defence of TGGWS that I’ve seen is “it may be propaganda, but so was AIT”. While I have some quibbles with AIT, the science is fundamentally correct (though I wasn’t impressed with the images of Manhattan flooding, or the bits about spread of disease). Gore, as far as I can tell, hasn’t faked any of his graphs or mislead any of his interviewees. He ignored the tempertaure /CO2 lag stuff, which is probably fair enough as it does little except confuse people. [end of quote]
So it seems Al Gore got a fair bit wrong: the likely extent of flooding, the spread of malaria not to mention misrepresenting the relationship between temperature and carbon dioxide in the ice-core data.
Connelley’s approach to the two movie’s seems a bit partisan to me.
Read the complete blog post here including accusations of faking graphs: http://elleeseymour.com/2007/03/14/who-swindled-who/
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.