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Increases in atmospheric carbon don’t cause
global warming, global warming causes increases in atmospheric carbon.
So what is heating up the Earth? The sun.
So why are the vast majority of climate
scientists claiming it’s carbon, not the sun?
Because they’re on a $4bn gravy train of
funding and they aim to ride that sucker
until the end of the line, even though
their phoney Carbon Crusade is killing the poor little children in the
Third World who are not allowed to have electricity like the rest of us.
This, in case you missed it, was the argument behind ‘The Great
Global Warming Swindle’ broadcast on UK’s Channel 4 on March 8. An
impressive array of paleoclimatologists, oceanographers and other
assorted professors was wheeled on to assure us that everything we
thought we knew about
global warming was upside down and back to front, and that the present
warming phenomenon was entirely natural, and no different from previous
warm spells in Earth’s history. What was really going on was a gigantic
conspiracy to pervert science, distort the facts and condemn developing
countries to perpetual misery by creating an entirely bogus panic about
atmospheric carbon. They gave us the figures, they showed us the charts,
they answered the questions, and it was all utterly convincing .
And nonsense, unfortunately, as a stroll through various online
blogs and articles soon revealed. The experts on the programme, with
one exception, turn out not to be quite the scions of honesty they
appear to be, but rather well-known Denial Monkeys who have agendas of
their own and whose
theories have already been falsified repeatedly. The exception,
oceanographer Carl Wunsch, after seeing the show, sent an apoplectic
letter to C4 saying he’d been conned into appearing, thinking he was
taking part in a balanced and critical analysis.
This is almost certainly true, and he wouldn’t be the only one.
The producer, Martin Durkin, has a history of making contentious
programmes accusing environmentalists of being ‘proto-nazis’, and from
which his researchers have walked out in disgust and his interviewees
have wailed afterwards that they’ve been had. In Durkin’s experience,
when the BBC reject his
programme synopses as junk science, he can always rely on Channel 4 to
produce them instead.
Just why Channel 4 thinks bad science makes good TV is a total
mystery. Pathfinders does not often stoop to sending whingeing letters,
but the memory of C4’s disgraceful championing of the charlatan Graham
Hancock is still raw and rancid, so a quick blister to the C4
complaints department
seemed appropriate for once, to whit: “I appreciate that C4’s brief is
in part to be ‘controversial’ but to extend this brief to making
programmes that are based on deliberate and easily verifiable lies is
not only immoral and indecent,
I’m surprised it’s not illegal as well. I just don’t see how you
can justify the
dissemination of nonsense in any programme but especially one in which
the issues at stake - the future of the planet - could hardly be more
important.
Judging from the resulting blog discussions there are any number
of gullible people who are now completely convinced by your programme
that global
warming is not a problem, and who will never see any rebuttal unless
another channel takes responsibility. There are people out there who
claim (with lots of evidence, naturally) that Jews cause AIDS, that
blacks are racially inferior, that rape and violence are
genetically-based, and that the CIA is putting
nanoscale monitoring devices in our drinking water. No doubt these
people would do anything for the oxygen of a Channel 4 publicity hype,
so I’m bound to wonder just how far your lust for controversy takes you
and where you draw the line.”
A pre-transmission statement from Channel 4 gives you some idea
of their probable response to this: “It is essentially a polemic and we
are expecting it to cause trouble, but this is the controversial
programming that Channel 4 is renowned for.” (http://www.lse.
co.uk/UKNews.asp, March 4)
They will doubtless not be worried, even though in the past they
have had to broadcast an unreserved apology for one of Durkin’s other
documentaries.
And what of the programme-makers themselves? Several of the
interviewees are known to have right-wing free-market sympathies with
links to the anti-environmentalist Foresight Institute, and their
attack on human-derived global warming is seen by many to be a response
to their fear that political
action to prevent climate change will entail greater government
intervention in the capitalist marketplace. So, a free-marketeer plot
to loosen the grip of state governments and let the corporations take
control? But wait, the plot thickens. The producer, Durkin, and some of
his colleagues, are associated
with the Revolutionary Communist Party, aka Living Marxism, aka the
Institute of Ideas, aka Spiked Online, aka Sense About Science. So, a
left-wing plot by a sect of multiple identity, mediacuddly Bolsheviks?
Are the right and left-wings of capitalism now climbing into bed
together to breed Son of Denial Monkey?
What for? According to SwindleWatch.org, the RCP’s master plan
could be to foment total environmental complacency in an effort to
bring capitalism to early disaster, thus inciting a revolt by the
proletariat, if any of us are still left alive to revolt, that is.
Either that, or they are just plain bonkers. Nobody knows.
In the wake of the Stern report, Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth,
and the recent International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report,
it’s easy to see that the small minority who deny human responsibility
for global warming are feeling somewhat ganged up on. It’s just not
like the good old days, when natural scientific caution by researchers
allowed gainsayers all sorts of loopholes
to exploit. Even with the reservations among scientists about the IPCC
pulling its punches (New Scientist, March 0), their report is damning
enough to be conclusive as far as most policy-makers are concerned.
Whether this programme has damaged the climate debate or merely
Channel 4’s already shaky reputation on factual reporting remains to be
seen. What is worrying is that there is an extraordinary enthusiasm on
the part of many people to believe that the world of science is as
corrupt and dishonest as
the world of politics, and that the ‘brave’ heroes who stand up against
it are to be admired and believed implicitly. It’s not just those who
inhabit the twilight world of paranoia who believe this.
Even realists can succumb to cynicism. This is a world, after
all, where money doesn’t just talk, it smooth-talks, and nobody can
really trust anything anybody says when there’s a dollar behind every
answer. Are people wrong to distrust the scientific community, and
therefore believe every nut-job with a theory
that same community has loudly disowned? Generally yes, but when it is
well known that science chases the money whereas the money never chases
the science it doesn’t like, it is not hard to see how these conspiracy
theories get started.
Interestingly, the only real attack on the global warming lobby
which has had any real merit is the report (BBC Online, Feb 7), that
the Oscar-winning Al Gore has a 20-room house and swimming pool which
uses twenty times the national energy average. Gore’s spokesperson
shamefacedly admitted this, and responded rather lamely that the family
were looking at low-wattage light-bulbs and solar panels to reduce
their consumption. Hooray for the press. Nobody likes a smart-alec.
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