Forums > Social Discussion > The Great Global Warming Swindle

Was the title of a documentary shown on Channel 4 in the UK last night. It made me very very angry. Here's a brief outline of some of the reasons why...

Statement of technically accurate but irrelevant facts

Examples...

Carbon Dioxide is natural.

The sun affects climate

Climate was changing before humans evolved

Water vapour has a radiative forcing effect greater than carbon dioxide

These statements are all true. However, they none of them in any way disproves, or even contests the IPCC position on Anthropogenic Climate Change.

The IPCC does not think carbon dioxide is unnatural. What the hell is unnatural exactly? The only thing I can think of are those things designated as supernatural. Of which none are as decisively proven to exist as co2.

The sun affects climate. Really? Perhaps the authors of the documentary had failed to read this section of the IPCC's Third Assessment Report (2001)

https://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/244.htm

Its titled solar forcing of climate. Anyone fancy a guess as to what its about?

Climate was changing before humans evolved. Yes. I think Anyone who took science A-levels, or has read anything about chaos theory will be aware of this. The IPCC certainly are. Or as the IPCC put it in 2001

 Written by: IPCC

complex, chaotic, non-linear dynamics are an inherent aspect of the climate system

https://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/504.htm

Water Vapour has a greater radiative forcing effect than co2. Yes. This an integral part of the IPCC's position. How exactly is this supposed to dispute things?

 Written by: IPCC

Water vapour feedback continues to be the most consistently important feedback accounting for the large warming predicted by general circulation models in response to a doubling of CO2. Water vapour feedback acting alone approximately doubles the warming from what it would be for fixed water vapour (Cess et al., 1990; Hall and Manabe, 1999; Schneider et al., 1999; Held and Soden, 2000). Furthermore, water vapour feedback acts to amplify other feedbacks in models, such as cloud feedback and ice albedo feedback. If cloud feedback is strongly positive, the water vapour feedback can lead to 3.5 times as much warming as would be the case if water vapour concentration were held fixed (Hall and Manabe, 1999).

https://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/268.htm

What we can determine then, is that the documentary either deliberately misrepresents the IPCC position or hasn't read it.

As far as techniques go, its a methodologically interesting one. They facts they call upon are true (obviously so) however the consequences they draw from these facts are untrue. What this suggests, is that to present an accurate picture, one must not simply lay down the facts - suggesting that there are a limited and definitive series of facts, but distinguish from the multitude of true facts, which ones are relevant to the issue at hand. In the case of the documentary, the facts are entirely irrelevant to the argument.

use of discredited data

One of the central scientific claims of the documentary was that evidence from globally respected scientists has proved that the troposphere - which should according to ACC be warming - is in fact cooling, casting a major doubt over the adequacy of the IPCC's claims. This claim is based on a paper by globally respected atmospheric scientists John Christy and Roy Spencer published in 1992.

What the documentary failed to include however, was the minor series of details, that in 2005, three seperate studies,

https://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/309/5740/1548

https://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/ab...631abf93113a577

https://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/309/5740/1556

all suggest that the 1992 data was massively flawed - as the troposphere is warming in line with ACC models.

Leading Christy to admit that is figures were incorrect in August 2005

https://environment.newscientist.com/chan...-climbdown.html

In this case the documentary appears to have deliberately deceptive - why use a 15 year old paper which has subsequently been dismissed by its own author as a central argument? Possibly because there wasn't much of an srgument to make.

statement of outright lies

Such as your body is made of co2

The environmental movement is the biggest threat to African development

The IPCC is driven towards sensationalist conclusions in order to make headlines and retain funding

The first statement is just stupid.

The second is misleading. If president Bush's preconditions for a US cut in fossil fuel use (a global cut - ie everyone else has the same cut, so they don't get an 'unfair' economic advantage over the US) was the position of the environmental movement this would be fair. However Bush is rarely regarded as an environmentalist. Instead, the proposal of most 1st world environmentalists, such as George Monbiot, is a global per capita carbon cap - with an emission trading scheme so that heavily polluting industrial nations can buy credits from less developed countries. The implementation of this scheme would see a massive redistribution of wealth as we in the 1st world started paying hundreds of billions of pounds to many of the world's poorest countries.

The third statement is directly contradicted by the predictions of the IPCC and the empirical observations which have been made since. In 2001 the IPCC predicted the global temperature change and sea level rise by the publication of the 2007 report. Both predictions were wrong. Both temperature and sea level had risen by more than the IPCC's predicted maximum. This would appear to be in line with comments such as Prof Bob Spicer's comment that the IPCC is 'necessarily conservative' due to the fact that it works by consensus. Indeed the program gave the Gulf Stream and it's potential disappearance as an example - this is something the 2007 report has suggested is extremely unlikely to happen.

Reliability of sources

A good place to start when analysing a documentary is ist maker...

 Written by: George Monbiot

In 1997, the director, Martin Durkin, produced a very similar series for Channel 4 called “Against Nature”, which also maintained that global warming was a scam dreamt up by environmentalists. It was riddled with hilarious scientific howlers. More damagingly, the only way in which Durkin could sustain his thesis was to deceive the people he interviewed and to edit their answers to change their meaning. Following complaints by his interviewees, the Independent Television Commission found that “the views of the four complainants, as made clear to the interviewer, had been distorted by selective editing” and that they had been “misled as to the content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part.”(14) Channel 4 was obliged to broadcast one of the most humiliating primetime apologies it has ever made

https://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/01/30/another-species-of-denial/

Not exactly a good start... And what about his scientific sources?

A number of them, such as Fred Singer and Richard Lindzen are the same fossil fuel funded cronies that get brought out time and again...

(for a For a good assessment of Lindzen's scientific claims click here

Singer is one that I find particulary amusing... Especially as seems to crop up so often. In a September 24, 1993, sworn affidavit, Dr. Singer admitted to doing climate change research on behalf of oil companies, such as Exxon, Texaco, Arco, Shell and the American Gas Association. [9]

Singer's deposition

However, on February 12, 2001, Singer wrote a letter to The Washington Post in which he denied receiving any oil company money in the previous 20 years.

That someone is paid a shedload of cash by companies who have a vested interest in deceiving the public on a certain issue does not prove them wrong, but will arise suspicion. That someone attempts to deceive the public by lying about the existence of this funding hardly allays these suspicions.

It is also worth noting that Singer has in the past ben paid by the tobacco industry - and unsurprisingly was one of the foremost scientific experts heading the campaign which claimed that the link between smoking and cancer was 'junk science.'


There's more... Much more to rip into about this program. As you can possibly tell I'm still seething about it.

There may be some doubt over the IPCC's claims, and there will always by an element of uncertainty about the effects we're having on the climate (a hitherto unknown negative feedback may kick in tomorrow - but there's no evidence that it will, and resultantly its insane to factor this in to contemporary discussion about ACC), however, the positions presented by 'The Global Warming Swindle,' were complete garbage.

It's a fantastic argument for why broadcast media sucks - a programme like that which has a lot of money poured into it, claims to be based on scientific evidence would probably present a fairly compelling argument to someone with little knowledge about the subject bar a few daily mail headlines...

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

Nietzsche

 Written by: NYC


CO2 fire extinguishers? You're serious.

Oh my god.

Other secret CO2 sources that the government refuses to get rid of:
Soda, Kittens, Welding Torches, Bunnies, Black People, and your mother.

Scale dude, we're talking about scale.

A couple of balls short of a full cascade... or maybe a few cards short of a deck... we'll see how this all fans out.

 Written by: Mynci

 Written by: NYC


CO2 fire extinguishers? You're serious.

Oh my god.

Other secret CO2 sources that the government refuses to get rid of:
Soda, Kittens, Welding Torches, Bunnies, Black People, and your mother.

Scale dude, we're talking about scale.

I wonder how much CO2 is actually "locked up" in carbonated drinks... is this a reason NOT to shake your drink swallow the bubbles and prevent the CO2 escaping.

According to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle of Quantum Dynamics, we may already be making love right now...

An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind

Give a man a fish and he'll eat 4 a day hit a man with a brick and you can have all his fish and his wife

"Will's to pretty for prison" - Simian

There's too many home fires burning and not enough trees

 Written by: OWD

You seem to know what you're talking about and have dealt with several of the documentaries claims- however, they're not really the ones that I personally found troubling.

I wonder if you could address a couple of the ones that did seem, to me, to be troubling

1. the claim that, historically, global warming follows, pretty exactly, recorded sunspot activity.

 Written by:

The terms “Little Ice Age” and “Medieval Warm Period” have been used to describe two past climate epochs in Europe and neighbouring regions during roughly the 17th to 19th and 11th to 14th centuries, respectively. The timing, however, of these cold and warm periods has recently been demonstrated to vary geographically over the globe in a considerable way (Bradley and Jones, 1993; Hughes and Diaz, 1994; Crowley and Lowery, 2000). Evidence from mountain glaciers does suggest increased glaciation in a number of widely spread regions outside Europe prior to the 20th century, including Alaska, New Zealand and Patagonia (Grove and Switsur, 1994). However, the timing of maximum glacial advances in these regions differs considerably, suggesting that they may represent largely independent regional climate changes, not a globally-synchronous increased glaciation (see Bradley, 1999). Thus current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this timeframe, and the conventional terms of “Little Ice Age” and “Medieval Warm Period” appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries. With the more widespread proxy data and multi-proxy reconstructions of temperature change now available, the spatial and temporal character of these putative climate epochs can be reassessed.

 Written by:

The old London Bridge constricted flow through its multiple piers and restricted the tide with a weir. After the Bridge was replaced in the 1830s the tide came further upstream and freezes no longer occurred, despite a number of exceptionally cold winters. Winter 1962/3, for example, was the third coldest winter recorded in instrumental records extending back to 1659, yet the river only froze upstream of the present tidal limit.

 Written by: OWD

2. that, historically, rises in co2 levels follow global temp increase, rather than precede it.

Which the documentary claimed cast doubt on current theories that co2 (from uman activivites)caused global warming.

 Written by:

From model estimates, CO2 (along with other greenhouse gases CH4 and N2O) causes about half of the full glacial-to-interglacial warming.

So, in summary, the lag of CO2 behind temperature doesn't tell us much about global warming. [But it may give us a very interesting clue about why CO2 rises at the ends of ice ages. The 800-year lag is about the amount of time required to flush out the deep ocean through natural ocean currents. So CO2 might be stored in the deep ocean during ice ages, and then get released when the climate warms.]

 Written by: Jeff

The 2007 icpp report states that a significant human contribution to global warming is about 90% to 94% likely. At the risk of using evil reductionistic dualism logic (oh noes!), that means that the ipcc thinks there is at least a 6% chance of human effects not being significant.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

Nietzsche

Hoppers are angels who lift us to our feet when our wings have trouble remembering how to fly.

There's too many home fires burning and not enough trees

 Written by: dream




Non-Https Image Link

Well, shall we go?
Yes, let's go.
[They do not move.]

i would have changed ***** to phallus, and claire to petey Petey

Rougie: but that's what I'm doing here
Arnwyn: what letting me adjust myself in your room?..don't you dare quote that on HoP...

 Written by: dream

 Written by: Jeff

The 2007 icpp report states that a significant human contribution to global warming is about 90% to 94% likely. At the risk of using evil reductionistic dualism logic (oh noes!), that means that the ipcc thinks there is at least a 6% chance of human effects not being significant.

Have you confused reductionism with subtraction??? What dualism??? Do you mean dualistic logic (binary logic or
Manichaean logic would also have made grammatical sense)??? I looked 'noes' up in the dictionary and it wasn't there... What exactly were you trying to say???

According to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle of Quantum Dynamics, we may already be making love right now...

A couple of balls short of a full cascade... or maybe a few cards short of a deck... we'll see how this all fans out.

There's too many home fires burning and not enough trees

 Written by: wikipedia


Trees sequester carbon through photosynthesis, converting carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and plant matter. Hence, forests that grow in area or density will reduce atmospheric CO2 levels. (Carbon is released if a tree or its lumber burns, but as long as the forest is able to grow back, the net result is carbon neutral.) In their 2001 assessment, the IPCC estimated the potential of biological mitigation options (mainly tree planting) is on the order of 100 Gigatonnes of Carbon (cumulative) by 2050, equivalent to about 10% to 20% of projected fossil fuel emissions during that period.[3].

However, the global cooling effect of forests from sequestration is not the only factor to be considered. For example, the planting of new forests may initially release some of the terrain's existing carbon stores into the atmosphere. Specifically, the conversion of peat bogs into oil palm plantations has allegedly made Indonesia the world's third largest producer of greenhouse gases.[4].

There's too many home fires burning and not enough trees

 Written by: Sym

Jeff: You seem to have reduced a joke to the point where it contains no humour! That is the mark of a true reductionist

I would call 5% a insignificant chance at the best of times, but even if it were significant, that does not mean that any of the arguments have any more truth to them. What it does mean is that some other reason that has not already been cast aside (including solar heating) might be the MAIN cause.

According to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle of Quantum Dynamics, we may already be making love right now...

 Written by: jeff(fake)

the documentary did raise a few legitimate points of contention, although I have already mentioned I disagreed with their interpratation.

There's too many home fires burning and not enough trees

 Written by: Sym

 Written by: jeff(fake)

the documentary did raise a few legitimate points of contention, although I have already mentioned I disagreed with their interpratation.

Did it? I must have blinked. Please could you list the legitimate points that relate to the 5% chance that we are not the main cause of climate change?

 Written by:



No dude, surely the important point is that some hack made a documentary which deliberately took a respected climate scientist's comments completely out of context and twisted his words around to support an argument which said climate scientist didn't support. Surely?

According to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle of Quantum Dynamics, we may already be making love right now...

There's too many home fires burning and not enough trees

 Written by: Sym


Yes, I know Thanks.

Now what points were valid?

According to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle of Quantum Dynamics, we may already be making love right now...

 Written by: Stout

I don't know about you guys, but I secretly want global warming to be identified as a natural phenomenon because I just don't see our society actually taking anything more than baby steps to curb our burning of fossil fuels. Myself included.

There's too many home fires burning and not enough trees

 Written by: 87wt2gxq7


Sure they're truncated. The point of putting the two graphs together is to show the correlation, to do that you have to lay one on top of the other, and to do that you have to choose where to start the Y-axes to get them to fit on the same bit of 'paper' (okay, screen). It's not a distortion to line up the axes arbitrarily because they don't share a common zero point.

Well, shall we go?
Yes, let's go.
[They do not move.]

Well, shall we go?
Yes, let's go.
[They do not move.]

 Written by: 87wt2gxq7


at the risk of

 Written by: NYC

I never said that the axis' were distorted. They're truncated without reference to the truncation which automatically gets an F in graphing.

okay okay, so they don't have squiggly lines indicating a shifted axis. Big motherloving deal.

 Written by:

 Written by: NYC

Had they both been done using the same numbering system

Um... how would that be possible? Zee units, zey are different! Like I said, temperature in degrees C, concentration in parts per million.

 Written by:

 Written by: NYC

I can pick ANY line and easily line it up with that graph.

um, no you couldn't. Not, for example, a flat line, and definitely not any curve.

 Written by:


Like I said in reply to Rouge, correlation does not imply causation and sure, you can draw a graph to "show" that any two sets of statistics are correlated but to demonstrate a causal link you need a physical model to explain the causality.

But what you appear to be asserting is the notion "you can't ever show graphically that two things are correlated because a rearrangement of axes would show that they're not correlated."
In which case, oh no! for causation!

Well, shall we go?
Yes, let's go.
[They do not move.]

 Written by: whoever

The environmental movement is the biggest threat to African development

the best smiles are the ones you lead to

the best smiles are the ones you lead to

Holistic Spinner (I hope)

 Written by: Sym



Personally, I really hope we ARE causing it - because then we have a very small chance of stopping it. If it was nature then we would be 100% committed to the disasters resulting from climate change. As it stands there is a tiny chance of us avoiding a lot of the problems - not enough of them to save large parts of the 3rd world, but that is a result of the inequality in this world.

A couple of balls short of a full cascade... or maybe a few cards short of a deck... we'll see how this all fans out.

 Written by: Mynci

 Written by: Sym



Personally, I really hope we ARE causing it - because then we have a very small chance of stopping it. If it was nature then we would be 100% committed to the disasters resulting from climate change. As it stands there is a tiny chance of us avoiding a lot of the problems - not enough of them to save large parts of the 3rd world, but that is a result of the inequality in this world.

I don't think we are so much causing it as kick starting an event that recurrs naturally, and as to stopping it, what could be the long term damage if the Earth doesn't have it's global warming phase? I'm sure the warming phase of the earth acts to increase sea levels and balance it'self out reduce land space and limit populations, has anyone thought of what could happen if we DO try and stop something the Earth wants to do? I find it the height of human conceit that we should even try, fair enough try and cut our input but stop it, that would be as wrong as starting it.

According to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle of Quantum Dynamics, we may already be making love right now...

Holistic Spinner (I hope)