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'The Great Global Warming Swindle': Is Climate Change A Myth?

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The Great Global Warming Swindle​

For anyone who caught the Channel 4 doc last night, it made for very stimulating viewing:

For thos who did not, it made the basic hypothesis that climate change is not, nor ever has been driven by CO2.

It said that historically, CO2 mirrored the temperature pattern, but what was not highlighted in previous reports was that there was an 800 year lag in the past between temps rising and CO2 following it.

It said that heightened CO2 was a result of warming, not a cause.

The doc said that the greenhouse effect should have shown warming in the mid to upper troposphere and observatinos did not bear this out and that instead surface warming was observed.

The doc asserted that the sun, and its natural cycle of magnetic field changes was what was driving global warming and not CO2 emissions by humans or natural occurances.

I have to say, it was compelling stuff.
Thoughts?
A
 
We watched the doc last night & my husband (a geologist) was nodding in agreement over the data shown. Most of the data has been available for at least 30 years and indeed when we were at uni in the 70's it was not CO2 that was seen as the "baddie" but rather propellant gases from aerosol sprays.

It is quite possible that the increase in temperatures experienced recently are just part of the natural changes that the world experiences.

The data shown will have to be addressed by the mainstream but will probably just be discounted.

The use of the CO2 emissions= global warming is too good an excuse to raise taxes on carbon based fuels (supplies of which are running low and are not sustainable) and force the issue on nuclear power.

Whatever, there are a few that are going to get even richer.
 
I feel like I've been waiting for this programme to be made for a very long time.

I've been telling my greenier mates to look up at that big yellow thing in the sky when thinking about global warming for years.

Anyone who thinks a few billion scrawny humans can have more effect on global temperatures than the sun clearly has no idea of the scale and power of the sun.
 
It must be a great comfort to you all to know that the big Business, Corporations, the money men,their lackies and apparently the RCP, are out and about spinning the counterargument against Global Warming.

So, who is controversial Channel4 documentary maker, Martin Durkin? Guardian columnist and environmentalist, George Monbiot, does not like him, from way back.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/1997/12/18/the-revolution-has-been-televised/

The Revolution Has Been Televised

Channel 4’s Against Nature series turns out to have been made by an obscure and cranky sect

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 18th December 1997.

There has never been a series on British television like Channel 4’s Against Nature, which ended with a debate on Tuesday night. The environmentalists it interviewed were lied to about the contents of the programmes. They were given no chance to respond to the accusations the series made. They were misrepresentated to the extent of falsification. One couldn’t help suspecting that Against Nature was driven not by healthy scepticism but by shrill ideology.

If this were so, where might it have come from? At first we thought the Far Right might have been involved. But, over the last three weeks, another picture has begun to form. Against Nature IS the product of an extreme political ideology, but it comes from a rather different quarter: an obscure and cranky sect called the Revolutionary Communist Party.

Frank Furedi, the series’ key interviewee and a protagonist in Tuesday’s debate, has been described as the father of the modern RCP. He is a regular contributer to the RCP’s journal, Living Marxism. Of the two main contributers to the third programme, one, John Gillott, is Living Marxism’s science correspondent. The other, Robert Plomin, though not RCP, has recently been interviewed sympathetically by the magazine. Martin Durkin, the director of the three programmes, describes himself as a Marxist: the only brand of Marxism which follows the line the series takes is the RCP’s. The husband of his deputy, Against Nature’s assistant producer, is the co-author of the RCP’s manifesto and Books Editor of Living Marxism.

Line by line, point by point, Against Nature follows the agenda laid down by the RCP. Greens, both the series and Living Marxism maintain, present themselves as radicals, but are really doom-mongering imperialists, engaged in the deification of Nature and the rejection of human progress. Global warming is nothing to worry about, while sustainable development is a conspiracy against people. Greens have plotted with the film industry to make science terrifying. Genetic engineering and human cloning are not to be feared but cherished, as they will liberate humanity from nature.

The ideologues in the series have some strange bedfellows, but the RCP has always been good at making selective alliances, whether it is promoting anti-environmental ideas, or campaigning against a ban on landmines and in favour of the Bosnian Serb forces and the Hutu militias. Its members are controversialists, but more than just that: the principle targets for their attacks are alternative outlets for radical action.

I had scarcely broached this subject on Tuesday night’s debate when Martin Durkin began – and I do not exaggerate – screaming. I was a McCarthyite and a despicable conspiracist. What on earth did his personal political views have to do with this series?

Well, rather too much. The RCP and its associates can make as many programmes as they like as long as they do so openly and honestly. Indeed, among its perversities and cheap controversialism, the RCP has some interesting and provocative views, which are worth hearing and debating. But Martin Durkin and his commissioning editor, Sara Ramsden, maintain that Against Nature is not a polemic, but a well-balanced documentary series. There was no presenter; instead we were instructed, in true documentary style, by an authoritative voice-over. The RCP/Living Marxism interviewees were not captioned as such, but presented as independent experts.

It’s an extraordinary coup for a tiny group of cranks: three hours of prime time propaganda. But how on earth did they pull it off? It is inconceivable that Channel 4’s top decision-makers also belong to the party. But many television executives hate environmentalism. They see it as a grim memento mori at the bottom of the picture, spoiling the good news about cars, clothes and consumerism. So when the film-makers suggested an all-out assault on environmentalists, their proposal fell on fertile ground. The revolution, as the RCP sees it, has been televised.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2000/03/16/modified-truth/

Modified Truth

Channel 4 has hired a charlatan to make its science programmes

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 16th March 2000

In October 1998 a television producer named Martin Durkin took a proposal to the BBC’s science series, Horizon. Silicone breast implants, he claimed, far from harming women, were in fact beneficial, reducing the risk of breast cancer. Horizon commissioned a researcher to find out whether or not his assertion was true. After a thorough review, the researcher reported that Mr Durkin had ignored a powerful body of evidence contradicting his claims. Martin Durkin withdrew his proposal. Instead of dropping it, however, he took it to Channel 4 and, astonishingly, sold it to their science series, Equinox.

To help him make the programme, Durkin hired Najma Kazi, a highly respected TV researcher and producer who was previously a research biochemist. After two weeks she walked out. “It’s not a joke to walk away from four or five month’s work,” she told me, “but my research was being ignored. The published research had been construed to give an impression that’s not the case. I don’t know how that programme got passed. The only consolation for me was that I’m really glad I didn’t put my name to it.”

But the programme was broadcast, in May last year. Silicone implants, it insisted, appeared to reduce the incidence of breast cancer. Women claiming that their operations had caused severe health problems were dismissed as cranks, malingerers and compensation chasers. The researchers who believed that there was a problem were accused of practising “junk science”.

Mr Durkin has often been accused of taking liberties with the facts. In 1997 he made a series for Channel 4 called “Against Nature”, which compared environmentalists with Nazis, conspiring against the world’s poor. No one would suggest that green claims should not be subjected to critical examination, but the people he interviewed were lied to about the contents of the programmes and given no chance to respond to the accusations the series made.

The Independent Television Commission handed down one of the most damning verdicts it has ever reached: the programme makers “distorted by selective editing” the views of the interviewees and “misled” them about the “content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part.” Channel 4 was forced to make a humiliating prime time apology. After the series was broadcast, I discovered that the assistant producer and several of its interviewees worked for the right-wing libertarian magazine masquerading as “Living Marxism”, which has just been successfully sued by ITN. All the arguments Against Nature made had been rehearsed in LM.

So what do you do with a director with a record like this, who has brought your channel into disrepute, who has misled both his contributors and his audience? If you are Michael Jackson, the head of Channel 4, you commission him to make more programmes.


On Monday, Channel 4 will broadcast a 90-minute Equinox programme about genetic engineering, made by Martin Durkin and called, appropriately enough, “Modified Truth”. Already it appears that the programme-making has suffered from Mr Durkin’s characteristic approach. “I feel completely betrayed and misled”, reports Dr Mae-Wan Ho, a geneticist Durkin interviewed. “They did not tell me it was going to be an attack on my position.”

Neither Martin Durkin nor, extraordinarily, Charles Furneaux, the commissioning editor of the science series Equinox, has a science background. They don’t need one, for science on Channel 4 has been reduced to a crude manifesto for corporate libertarianism.

When Michael Jackson arrived at Channel 4, he cancelled a series called Global Raiders, on which a quarter of a million pounds had already been spent. It would have examined the adverse impacts of big business around the world. Since 1989, according to the research group 3WE, Channel 4 has reduced its international factual output by 56 per cent. Holiday programmes have boomed, but “ecological programming now appears to be virtually extinct”.

The station, in other words, is censoring not just a few ideas, but entire subject areas. Serious coverage of science, the environment, the developing world and, above all, abuses of corporate power, has been all but stamped out. The Mark Thomas Comedy Product is a glowing exception, but I suspect it is allowed on air only because it makes people laugh.

Perhaps intellectual honesty is too fusty, too boring, for the chic, post-modern Channel 4. But perhaps there is something else at work, perhaps we should question whether senior staff have come to identify themselves with the companies providing their revenues, and are, as a result, seeking to modify the truth. If so, then it is hardly surprising that they have handed so much work to a charlatan.
Durkin even has a profile page devoted to him on the GMWatch website.
http://www.gmwatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=39

Looks like this Revolutionary Communist Party type is back to his old tricks. Maybe there's money in it? 8)
 
I must say I found the programme last night very interesting. I'm genuinely undecided either way on the arguments put for and against man-made climate change. Like most people I don't fully understand the science involved and so generally my attitude has been one of accepting the scientific consensus which, on this issue, has been presented as overwhelming. Last night's programme tended to rebut that view and did so with a fair amount of scientific evidence which, again, like most people I'm in no position to confirm or deny regards its veracity. Also, the sources of that rebuttal (the scientists rather than the documentarians) did seem to have impeccable credentials. What certainly intrigued me, though, was the conspiracies (or counter-conspiracies) that it presented.
 
"How can you take seriously those who reject the now well established science of Global Warming and like to believe something because they find it 'comforting'?" sneers Pietro. :madeyes:
 
Yet another example of us being treated like puppets on strings controlled by the Media.

Even if Global warming isnt our fault after all, weve ruined plenty of other good things in the world and will continue to do so I guess.
 
Pietro_Mercurios said:
"How can you take seriously those who reject the now well established science of Global Warming and like to believe something because they find it 'comforting'?" sneers Pietro. :madeyes:

I guess because the concept of it being "well established" has rather been brought into question by the programme. The fact is that most people are ill equipped to determine from the current level of mainstream reportage who is telling the truth and who is not. I'm not neccessarily sure it is more comforting to everybody who disbelieves the theory that climate change is happening and there might be little that we can do about it.
 
Pietro_Mercurios wrote:
"How can you take seriously those who reject the now well established science of Global Warming and like to believe something because they find it 'comforting'?" sneers Pietro.


I guess because the concept of it being "well established" has rather been brought into question by the programme. The fact is that most people are ill equipped to determine from the current level of mainstream reportage who is telling the truth and who is not. I'm not neccessarily sure it is more comforting to everybody who disbelieves the theory that climate change is happening and there might be little that we can do about it.

Theres a great program on next weekend all about the fact the EARTH IS FLAT after all and we've been badly informed for 600 years apparently.
New evidence of Dragons being seen at the edges has prompted a new investigation BY BBC EXPERTS.
 
All I know is that I saw daffodils in Janurary.

I also know that that shouldn't happen normally.

Something has gone wrong.
 
techybloke666 said:
New evidence of Dragons being seen at the edges has prompted a new investigation BY BBC EXPERTS.


I think you're misinterpreting the programme Dragon's Den. It's actually about Reggae Reggae Sauce.
 
rjmrjmrjm said:
All I know is that I saw daffodils in Janurary.

I also know that that shouldn't happen normally.

Something has gone wrong.

There's no dispute about climate change. Some dispute the causes of it, though.
 
I´m also quite skeptical of the idea of man-made global warming. It seems any scenario can be used to support it, because the models make so many different predictions. So arctic ice getting thinner is proof of global warming, as is the ice getting thicker or just staying the same.
I´m doing first year geology, and we have had some on climate currently and in the past. There was also a seminar by a guy who has done some solar research. Judging from what he has said, the changes in solar radiation has not really been high enough to cause the changes we have seen.

I sadly couldn´t watch the documentary. But I found something interesting in the article about the supposed makers of it:
"...but are really doom-mongering imperialists, engaged in the deification of Nature and the rejection of human progress. Global warming is nothing to worry about, while sustainable development is a conspiracy against people."

Strange, it is the communist tree-huggers I find to be keenest on global warming. After all the anti-global warming people are supposed to in a right wing conspiracy.

Tilly50: Spray cans was about the ozone layer, that´s a whole other thing to global warming.
 
Bear in mind that alot of anti-global warming pundits are right-wing extreme free market types. Ironically, it's funny that the RCP agree with them - then again the SWP have been very pally with Islamic fundamentalist groups.

Either way, there is a strong rationale with extreme free market advocates who don't like the idea that the market should be held in check over concerns over the environment, and are thus opposed to the very idea that it's a man-made problem.
 
On another thread I posted this story

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/ ... 91,00.html

which rubbished the documentary and its makers.

One extract:
Given that the world's climatologists have just published a careful, sober report showing global warming is real and worrying, the programme is an astonishing foray into the debate. Certainly, there many reasons to deride it. Its contents are largely untrue, for a start. That is Channel 4's problem. Yet a couple of important points do emerge from this nonsense and we should not make the mistake of ignoring them. To back his case, director Martin Durkin interviews climate-change deniers including Phillip Stott, Piers Corbyn, Nigel Calder and Nigel Lawson who reveal their antipathy to the idea we are altering Earth's weather systems.

These names are scarcely unknown. Listeners to Today and viewers of Newsnight have been hearing Stott and the rest promote their views for years. Indeed, they have dominated and distorted the whole global warming debate, a point stressed by Alan Thorpe, head of the Natural Environment Research Council. 'These people are never off the radio or TV, yet now they claim debate is being suppressed? It is preposterous.' So what, we might ask, is the deniers' problem? Examine their movement and you see a common thread: most proponents are elderly, only a few are scientists and several have pronounced pro-market views. And hereby hangs a tale.
 
Are the scientists who've produced these reports in anyway funded by the likes of exxon and the big oil companies?
 
There´s also a lot of money to be made on the other side you know.
 
I don't care if it was the chairman of Shell himself that discovered the the correlation betwen solar activity and global temperature fits better than the correlation between global temperature and atmospheric CO2.

The FACT that it does should be enough to put the brakes on the CO2 bandwagon by itself. Unfortunately there is no room for that particular inconvenient truth.

Instead of concentrating on the facts people seem to be trying to discredit who discovered them, not really a logical arguement IMHO.
 
Scunnerlugzz said:
I don't care if it was the chairman of Shell himself that discovered the the correlation betwen solar activity and global temperature fits better than the correlation between global temperature and atmospheric CO2.

The FACT that it does should be enough to put the brakes on the CO2 bandwagon by itself. Unfortunately there is no room for that particular inconvenient truth.

Instead of concentrating on the facts people seem to be trying to discredit who discovered them, not really a logical arguement IMHO.
But, is it a 'FACT'? Or, is it a bunch of ARSE? I think we should be told.
 
rynner said:
On the main Global Warming thread
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewt ... 009#699009
I posted this story
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/ ... 91,00.html
which rubbished the documentary and its makers.

Interestingly if you go on to read the messages posted at the end of the article, nearly all of them rubbish the article and it's author.

It's a confusing business and I don't know what to think but the programme showed me some interesting alternate views which I have yet (there is still time) seen anyone convincingly argue against.
 
JurekB said:
rynner said:
On the main Global Warming thread
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewt ... 009#699009
I posted this story
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/ ... 91,00.html
which rubbished the documentary and its makers.

Interestingly if you go on to read the messages posted at the end of the article, nearly all of them rubbish the article and it's author.

...
That's true. I read one, checked a little further afield than the BBC website as mentioned in one early çomment' and:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Philip_Stott

Philip Stott
From SourceWatch

Philip Stott is a professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London, and he was Editor-in Chief of the international 'Journal of Biogeography' (Blackwell Publications, Oxford) (he retired in 2004 after 18 years).

Since his retirement from academia, he has become a commentator and media pundit on the subject of environmentalism. He publishes a blogsite - EnviroSpin Watch - to monitor UK media coverage of environmental issues and science. "The aim is to assess whether a subject is being fairly covered by press, radio, and television. … It will also bring to public notice good science that is being ignored because it may be politically inconvenient," the site states.[1]

He also has a new web site (April, 2005) based on Bruno Latour's 'A Parliament of Things'. [2].

NOTE: Professor Stott himself has commented on this SourceWatch article.

Stott's dominant theme is that environmentalism is a "hegemonic myth" promulgated in the media by reporters who are subconsiously controlled by the dominant language ("words of magic"). For example, he says, "forests are never 'developed' or simply 'used'; they can only be 'exploited'". [3]

Stott uses his "linguistic analysis" approach to promote an "environmental" agenda similar to that promoted by Bjorn Lomborg. He stresses the possible benefits of genetic engineering; questions attempts to curtail greenhouse gas emissions; and argues that the 'tropical rain forest', as signified in popular parlance, is a socially-constructed myth. He has also criticised recycling as "ideological rubbish". [4]

EnviroSpin Watch supersedes his earlier AntiEcohype website (see above for new website), which is subtitled "a cure for ecochondria". "This is not a straight 'science' site", the introductory page of his 'AntiEcohype' website states, "but rather one aiming to deconstruct environmentalist constructions of knowledge". Stott's 'AntiEcohype' operated from a web address that leaves no room for doubt on his view on genetic engineering - http://www.probiotech.fsnet.co.uk/. (While superseded the 'AntiEcohype' remains on the web, although it is not updated. This is now closed.).

Stott also has his work published in the British and US mainstream media (The Times, The Guardian and BBC in the UK and The Wall Street Journal in the US) as well as conservative websites such as Tech Central Station and Spiked Online. In a posting to SourceWatch, Stott stated he no longer writes for Tech Central Station as he regards it as "too Republican for his output". He is a Labour supporter in the UK. (Pers comm to SW)

In a New Statesman article Stott was bluntly labelled as "Britain's leading climate-change denier and has built a career on criticising environmentalists. Professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London, he has no climate-science qualifications". [5]

In a letter to the editor in response, Stott disputed that he was a "climate-change denier". "I am nothing of the sort. I believe passionately in climate change. Climate change is the norm, not the exception; if climate were not changing, that would be really newsworthy,"
he wrote advocating adaptation.

The article also mentioned that he was on the advisory board of the Scientific Alliance. (In October 2005 Stott stated that he had not "been a member for some time now" in order "to maintain complete independence.") The Scientific Alliance is either (using Stott's own "words of magic") "an organisation that promotes concern about the environment through rational science; while accepting climate change as a reality, the Alliance is critical of current methods proposed to manage climate change and energy production" or (using the New Statesmans "words of magic"), "an anti-environmentalist campaign group that denies climate change; opposes organic agriculture and promotes genetically modified foods and nuclear power"

On the subject of the policy agenda of the Scientific Alliance, Stott wrote to the New Statesman, "I am pragmatic about nuclear energy and I just love organic yoghurt. And I am passionately anti-tobacco." In a subsequent posting to SourceWatch, Stott wrote his criticism is directed at environmentalism "but as little as possible 'environmentalists'" except "in gentle and kindly jest".

While Stott disputes the consensus of the worlds leading climate scientists, he notably avoided responding to the challenge that he had no climate science qualifications.[6] In response, Stott commented to SourceWatch that "he does not challenge the consensus that climate is changing (and partly under human influence); what he challenges is our understanding of the complexity of this change, the historic significance of the change, and the way humans might respond best to change, all of which has been at the heart of his professional work as a biogeographer for the last 30 years. He is thus entirely confident of his credentials to comment on climate change sensu lato."

Like Bjorn Lomborg - whose work he supports - Stott describes himself as a left of centre environmental sceptic. "I am a mildly left-wing global warming sceptic," he wrote in an article in New Statesman. [7]

In his comments to the SourceWatch, Stott points out that he is "passionately anti-tobacco, and I have stated this recently on British television (The Politics Show, BBC 1). The science on this, in my opinion, has been clear for a long time ... I believe the export of cigarettes to the developing world to be an evil process." He also stated, "I have always voted Labour (except when I foolishly voted Liberal on a couple of occasions)."

Stott's primary area of research, according to the website of the University of London, is "the construction of environmental knowledge over the last 30 years, especially in relation to the following metanarratives: biodiversity, biotechnology, climate change (global warming), organic agriculture, and tropical rain forests (see edited book: Political ecology: science, myth and power). He is especially concerned to unravel the power relations within and between these narratives." ...
Professor Stott, as featured in controversial Channel4 documentary, serving up badly digested and regurgitated post modernism instead of science, could that be true?

Oh! What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.
 
Some good and persuasive research and debunking by Rynner and Pietro that also explains a few misgivings about a whole load of "science" progs on C4, especially the one about silicone breast implants.

The thing is, it is undeniable that Co2 among other gasses is what we call a green house gas, that is a FACT, if the sun is heating up, a position I agree with based upon astronomical observations, not my own :) our vast increase in the amount of Co2 in the atmosphere at just the wrong time isn't gonna help is it. My biggest worry is that a solar cycle coupled with a man made atmospheric changes could heat the shallow coastal seas by the few degrees necessary to melt the Methane gas hydrates which would cause the runaway global warming that supposedly brought about the Permian extinctions.
 
Once again all I'm seeing is attacks on the messenger, not the message.

Is it FACT that a rise in CO2 has preceded a rise in global temperature in the past, or it it a bunch of ARSE? I think we should be told.
 
Well, there are different reports out which shows climate graphs. Compare those to graphs showing atmospheric composition.
 
Xanatico said:
Well, there are different reports out which shows climate graphs. Compare those to graphs showing atmospheric composition.

And don't forget to correlate these with solar activity, a cold sun and high Co2 may not produce a temperature rise just as a hot sun and low Co2 may not but both together and we may yet see the ocean burn. :twisted:
 
Scunnerlugzz said:
Once again all I'm seeing is attacks on the messenger, not the message.

Is it FACT that a rise in CO2 has preceded a rise in global temperature in the past, or it it a bunch of ARSE? I think we should be told.
But, in this case, so much fun it is, to attack the messenger, yes.
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2347526.ece

Climate change: An inconvenient truth... for C4

This expert in oceanography quoted in last week's debunking of the Gore green theory says he was 'seriously misrepresented'

The Independent. By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor. Published: 11 March 2007

It was the television programme that set out to show that most of the world's climate scientists are misleading us when they say humanity is heating up the Earth by emitting carbon dioxide. And The Great Global Warming Swindle, screened by Channel 4 on Thursday night, convinced many viewers that it is indeed untrue that the gas is to blame for global warming.

But now the programme - and the channel - is facing a serious challenge to its own credibility after one of the most distinguished scientists that it featured said his views had been "grossly distorted" by the film, and made it clear that he believed human pollution did warm the climate.

Professor Carl Wunsch, professor of physical oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said he had been "completely misrepresented" by the programme, and "totally misled" on its content. He added that he is considering making a formal complaint.

A Channel 4 spokesman said: "The film was a polemic that drew together the well-documented views of a number of respected scientists to reach the same conclusions. This is a controversial film but we feel that it is important that all sides of the debate are aired. If one of the contributors has concerns about his contribution we will look into that."

Any complaint would provoke a crisis at Channel 4, now recovering from the Jade Goody Big Brother storm. It had to make a rare public apology after the Independent Television Commission convicted previous programmes on environmental issues by the same film-maker, Martin Durkin, of similar offences - and is already facing questions on why it accepted another programme from him.

The commission found that the editing of interviews with four contributors to a series called Against Nature had "distorted or misrepresented their known views".

Professor Wunsch said: "I am angry because they completely misrepresented me. My views were distorted by the context in which they placed them. I was misled as to what it was going to be about. I was told about six months ago that this was to be a programme about how complicated it is to understand what is going on. If they had told me even the title of the programme, I would have absolutely refused to be on it. I am the one who has been swindled."

When told what the commission had found, he said: "That is what happened to me." He said he believes it is "an almost inescapable conclusion" that "if man adds excess CO2 to the atmosphere, the climate will warm".

He went on: "The movie was terrible propaganda. It is characteristic of propaganda that you take an area where there is legitimate dispute and you claim straight out that people who disagree with you are swindlers. That is what the film does in any area where some things are subject to argument."


Mr Durkin last night said that Professor Wunsch was "most certainly not duped into appearing into the programme" and that it "had not in any way misrepresented what he said".

Before the programme was shown, the IoS asked Channel 4 why it had commissioned another film from Mr Durkin and, further, whether it was making any special checks on its accuracy.

A spokesman said the programme made by Mr Durkin for which it had had to apologise was a decade old, adding: "We treat Martin as any other film-maker."

...
 
Quite.

Let's not allow one dodgy TV programme to erase the recent work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:

'The really chilling thing about the IPCC report is that it is the work of several thousand climate experts who have widely differing views about how greenhouse gases will have their effect. Some think they will have a major impact, others a lesser role. Each paragraph of this report was therefore argued over and scrutinised intensely. Only points that were considered indisputable survived this process. This is a very conservative document - that's what makes it so scary,' said one senior UK climate expert.

Discussion of the IPCC report begins here:
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewt ... 026#688026
 
A Leading US climate scientist is considering legal action after he says he was duped into appearing in a Channel 4 documentary that claimed man-made global warming is a myth. Carl Wunsch, professor of physical oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the film, The Great Global Warming Swindle, was 'grossly distorted' and 'as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two'.

He says his comments in the film were taken out of context and that he would not have agreed to take part if he had known it would argue that man-made global warming was not a serious threat. 'I thought they were trying to educate the public about the complexities of climate change,' he said. 'This seems like a deliberate attempt to exploit someone who is on the other side of the issue.' He is considering a complaint to Ofcom, the broadcast regulator.

Source

They're not happy about it! Could well be interesting.
 
Excellent news ! I hope this actually goes to court.
 
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