A Schneider ve sve knize Science as a Contact sport o filmu The Great Global Warming Swindle
Media mud wrestling continues in the climate change arena. Among the most recent examples are the machinations involved in the production and distribution of the United Kingdom film The Great Global Warming Swindle. Purportedly a balanced documentary that is the antidote to the “distortions” of the IPCC, the film was shown in the United Kingdom by the sensationalist Channel 4 and across Europe—and reportedly had a major effect in weakening public confidence in global warming science. Among its claims is the absurd assertion that since carbon dioxide is only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere it can hardly be expected to have much effect. This was refuted by Australian climatologist Andy Pittman, who noted that an even more minuscule injection of Ebola virus would kill us, and that it is effect, not amount, of a substance that matters.
Another claim of the movie is that warming up until “now” wasn’t unusual in the past 1,000 years—but what was labeled as “now” was a 20-year-old preliminary graph that did not include the radical warming of the past two decades, which, as noted earlier in the discussion of the “hockey stick,” very likely exceeds all known warming over the past 500 years and likely over the past 1,300 years. To call the end of the graph “now” when it was really the 1980s is, frankly, a scientific lie. Similarly, the film claimed the sun could explain all warming and showed a very highly correlated set of graphs from 1500 to “now” linking global temperatures with sunspot cycles. What the movie’s producers forgot to say was that the graphs left off the past two decades in which solar effects suggested cooling and the planetary warming went to unprecedented record levels—refuting their own theory. Even worse, the producers filled in a section of the graph to show a strong correlation several hundred years ago when in fact there was no data on it—they just made it up to look compelling.
The Public Broadcasting System in the United States refused to air the film, although it was shown in Australia at the insistence of the Conservative Howard government then in power—though handily trashed by an independent program that followed the broadcast, revealing its egregious distortions. Tony Jones, an iconic Australian reporter who anchors Lateline nightly, flew to the United Kingdom, interviewed the filmmaker Martin Durkin, and masterfully took him and the film apart step by step. It was one of the most adept pieces of science journalism I have seen, done by a political reporter who did his homework under the guidance of award-winning science producer, Annamaria Talas.14
A group of respected scientists and advocates filed a grievance against the film company and Channel 4 in the United Kingdom. They cited more than a hundred outright errors in the film and the deliberate misleading of some scientists who participated in it, and they claimed that its distorted presentation caused harm and injury to those who viewed it without access to the correct facts. Their suit was perfunctorily acknowledged—and the film company chided for several distortions—but in the end the complaint was denied in July 2008.