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The Great Global Warming Documentary Film Swindle!

Monday, June 2, 2008
Posted in Editorial Global Warming | Tagged Editorial, Global Warming

I was planning to write an in-depth analysis of the documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle” which screened on the Prime channel here in New Zealand recently with a debate from experts after it, but after having watched the documentary and seen the debate on it held afterwards I can’t help but feel that it is me who has been swindled out of 2 hours of my time which could have been better spent doing something else.

The central argument of the documentary is that the climate is not driven by carbon dioxide levels and the sun and sunspots are the biggest determinant of climate temperatures.  As the expert Professor Martin Manning (School of Government Climate Change Research Institute) in the debate after the documentary put it: “The straw man argument put up by the film was somehow the only thing that causes climate change is carbon dioxide, so carbon dioxide always has to always lead to a temperature change. If carbon dioxide is going up and temperature increases are not happening then the theory is wrong. Well that’s not what the science has ever argued, we know that there are a whole lot of things that cause climate change and for the modern period most of them are caused by human activities.”

Dr. David Wratt of NIWA stated that the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has looked into the sun spot theory put forward in the documentary as the main cause in temperature variation over time and has found that from the analysis by the IPCC scientists the increase in recent temperature cannot be explained by this cyclical sun spot activity. It is true that there are natural variations in surface temperature as a result of sun spot activity, but what matters is the long term trend where even the downswings show signs of being warmer than could have been expected on a natural basis.

It was pointed out that the science around human made activities being the main driver for global warming is put clearly in the IPCC reports with 99% of the scientific research being conducted into this area coming to the conclusion that supports the hypothesis that it is human activity that is driving global warming on an overall long term basis. As Professor Manning puts it: “There are so many things where we have very clear simple explanations for what is happening and the film does not go near them. The film is a swindle.”

This is not to say that there are not climate scientists who believe that their research contradicts the conclusion of the IPCC. However, the overwhelming consensus from the vast majority of scientists who work in the climate research field supports and leads to the conclusions put forward by the IPCC on human induced climate change. One of the charges put forward in the documentary is that global warming has become a religion based on faith and not reason. Unfortunately, it is all too obvious that the scientific facts support the human induced global warming hypothesis when they are dealt with free from the dis-information propounded in this documentary. I think what the naysayers are really saying is that they are losing the argument on a rational scientific basis so they are going to smear their opponents with emotional drivel to divert attention from the real facts, because whenever the facts are put forward and take centre stage their arguments do not stack up. In other words they are sore losers.

At the end of the day I do not believe that this documentary or panel discussion afterwards has contributed anything positive as all it has done is give credibility to the idea that there is a real debate on differing ideas of equal validity and that is not the case. This film is a scientific swindle and the supporters of it are the dinosaurs of our modern age holding on to a belief system that is on the road to extinction. The real swindle was that what we really need in the media is a focus on debating how we as individuals and as a society have to do to stop the worst effects of global warming coming to fruition. This is where our energies should be going as a society and not flogging a dead horse debate for the purposes of TV ratings.

By Adam Smith

Editor – Prism Webcast News

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