The Great Global Warming Swindle
A month or so ago on Channel 4 in England screened Martin Durkin’s documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. As the title suggests, Durkin attempts to refute global warming, indeed, to suggest a malicious social engineering intent that is hiding the “truth” from people.
I raise this now because this weekend I was confronted by recently converted climate sceptics: my father and the editor of a local weekend paper. Both had seen this documentary, and were as evangelistic as I can be about An Inconvenient Truth. I understand and appreciate the fervour of wanting to share knowledge will seems to have long-term, life-changing consequences.
It’s not good enough to declare this is bullshit. It’s really not. Two courses face us: either global warming is a real crisis that will reshape our planet and our civilisations, or it is the lastest great attempt of the extreme left to seize power/control from liberal democratic capitalism. The new, decidedly hot Cold War, if you like.
So we need to be informed to rebut with both reason and rhetoric. Here are two places to start with the above documentary:
The Real Global Warming Swindle, Independent 15 April 2007 http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2355956.ece
Pure Propoganda – The Great Global Warming Swindle, Medialens 13 March 2007 http://www.medialens.org/alerts/07/0313pure_propaganda_the.php
The essential point to note is that the data is old and used deceptively. All the graphs are based on at least pre-1990 data, but that is never revealed. By way of example, the documentary claims that increased CO2 is actually the result of increasing temperatures, rather than the traditional claim of global warming science to the contrary, based particularly on the drop in global temperatures between 1945-75 while CO2 levels rose in the post-war period. Key to this argument is a graph labelled “World Temp-120 years” from “NASA”.
This is incorrect. The data is from a 1998 article in the Medical Sentinel journal. The authors were funded by Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the George C. Marshall Institute, two right wing thinktanks.
There are no diagrams that correlate to this graph, it is in fact an approxiamation of old NASA data from a third paper referred to in the above paper. The data was pre-1980. Durkin extended the graph and estimated the data to date. Meanwhile, the actual data freely available on the NASA website shows temperature increase post-1975 is dramatically higher than the period focused on in the documentary.
Further, the 1945-75 period has since been explained as caused by industrial emissions of sulphate pollutants, which tend to reflect sunlight. Subsequent clean-air laws have cleared up some of this pollution, revealing the true scale of global warming. Â
This is dangerous stuff. Be informed to respond. I really believe our world depends on it.
Graham
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