The Great Global Warming Swindle

[queenmandy85]

It's odd nobody posted this before now.

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007 ... solar.html

Okay, so they did.

[styky]

Global warming zealots are stifling scientific debate
Ian Plimer
July 12, 2007



TONIGHT'S airing of The Great Global Warming Swindle and the associated discussion on ABC TV should be a hoot. The ABC has structured the panel to try to get their preferred political position aired. The panel composition will minimise scientific discussion. It contains journalists, political pressure groups and those who will make a quid out of frightening us witless.

Three scientists with a more rational view to the doomsday hype were invited to appear on the panel and have now been uninvited as they do not dance to the drumbeat of disaster. There is a VIP section of the audience with loopy-left greens and social commentators. We have the Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (BAMOS), which was in such a hurry to publish a critique of The Great Global Warming Swindle that it contains schoolboy howlers and a lack of logic intertwined with politics.

What makes it even more amusing is that BAMOS did not criticise Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. If this Hollywood fiction film claims to be supported by science, then why did it perpetuate a well-documented scientific fraud?

There is no panel discussion when the ABC TV religiously promotes the popular political view on global warming. Why is there a panel for an alternative view?

Science is married to evidence, scepticism and dissent. This evidence is from experiment, measurement, observation and calculation. Scientists hotly debate the methods of acquisition of evidence. Once the evidence is validated, a scientific theory is offered as an explanation. This theory must be in accord with all previous validated data and can be changed with new data. Science has no consensus, science is anarchistic as it submits to no authority, and the latest scientific view is only transitory. Science is apolitical, and when it has submitted to political pressure in the past, it has been at great human cost. Noise, political pressure or numbers of converts does not validate a scientific concept. When the president of the Royal Society says the science on human-induced global warming is settled, one is reminded of a previous president who said it was impossible for heavier-than-air machines to fly!

Since the beginning of time, climate has always changed. It has warmed and cooled faster than any contemporary change. Nothing happening at present is unusual. The atmospheric carbon dioxide content in the past has been hundreds to thousands of times the current figure and the world did not end. Quite the contrary — life thrived. Computer models are models, albeit primitive. They are not predictions, they are not scenarios. They don't do clouds. They don't do turbulence. They don't do unseen submarine emissions of greenhouse gases. They deal only with greenhouse gas emissions from volcanos in times of little volcanic activity. They don't do starbursts, which have probably given us the greatest climate changes on Earth. They don't do variations in cosmic ray fluxes, which produce clouds in the lower atmosphere. They don't do mountain building, plate tectonics and closing or opening of seaways, which have profound effects on climate.

If the conclusion that humans are changing climate by carbon dioxide emissions requires the omission of validated astronomical, palaeontologic and geological evidence, then the popular view of humans causing climate change is not science. We are seeing a revival of a form of zealous Western politics intertwined with poor theology, poor economics and poor logic.

If humans have contributed to the slight warming in the 20th century, then all theories of past climate changes need to be evaluated and discarded. This has not happened. Why is it that previous global warmings have been faster and greater than the warming that started after the Little Ice Age? Is it no surprise that the planet has become warmer after the Little Ice Age? Is it no surprise that the driver of climate has been, is and will be that great ball of heat in the centre of our solar system? If evidence from the past is used, then one can only conclude that the slight warmings and cooling in the 20th century cannot be due to carbon dioxide.

Groups like BAMOS and the IPCC deny, minimise or ignore significant recent climate changes that gave us the Roman Warming, the Dark Ages, the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age. Both history and archaeology show that in previous warmings, temperatures were far higher than at present. Populations and the economy thrived. Previous coolings led to famine, depopulation and social disruption. History shows that it is dangerous to ignore history.

The Renaissance gave us a system where criticism, logic, scepticism and an alternative view based on evidence were valued.

It was in this environment that democracy thrived. We are now reaping the rewards of dumbing down the education system and live at a time when it is a politically correct duty to suppress alternative views. The best way to understand climate is to critically and sceptically evaluate the evidence presented to us over a very long period of time by the heavens and the Earth beneath our feet.

Ian Plimer is emeritus professor of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne and professor of mining geology at the University of Adelaide.

If the conclusion that humans are changing climate by carbon dioxide emissions requires the omission of validated astronomical, palaeontologic and geological evidence, then the popular view of humans causing climate change is not science. We are seeing a revival of a form of zealous Western politics intertwined with poor theology, poor economics and poor logic.

If humans have contributed to the slight warming in the 20th century, then all theories of past climate changes need to be evaluated and discarded. This has not happened. Why is it that previous global warmings have been faster and greater than the warming that started after the Little Ice Age? Is it no surprise that the planet has become warmer after the Little Ice Age? Is it no surprise that the driver of climate has been, is and will be that great ball of heat in the centre of our solar system? If evidence from the past is used, then one can only conclude that the slight warmings and cooling in the 20th century cannot be due to carbon dioxide.

Groups like BAMOS and the IPCC deny, minimise or ignore significant recent climate changes that gave us the Roman Warming, the Dark Ages, the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age. Both history and archaeology show that in previous warmings, temperatures were far higher than at present. Populations and the economy thrived. Previous coolings led to famine, depopulation and social disruption. History shows that it is dangerous to ignore history.

The Renaissance gave us a system where criticism, logic, scepticism and an alternative view based on evidence were valued.

It was in this environment that democracy thrived. We are now reaping the rewards of dumbing down the education system and live at a time when it is a politically correct duty to suppress alternative views. The best way to understand climate is to critically and sceptically evaluate the evidence presented to us over a very long period of time by the heavens and the Earth beneath our feet.

Ian Plimer is emeritus professor of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne and professor of mining geology at the University of Adelaide.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/g ... tml?page=2

[styky]

GOOGLE VIDEO: <a href=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6393326099470628258>The Great Global Warming Swindle - Supplementary Material </a>-- 59 min 17 sec

[Angleland]

One should question why the desperation to get Kyot passed. Even if one accepts the argu,emt of MMGW, Kyoto will contribute further to it in that it involves the massive transfer of funds to high polluting dictaroships like Russia and China. So we become pooer, the dictatorships are stregthened with our money, the dictatorships then pollute more as they are Kyoto exempt. If MMGW exists, Kyoto would contribute to it. If it does nto exist, we ae being swindled.

Who is the Mo behind that curtain?. No, don't look at the Mo behind that curtain!

[styky]

One should question why the desperation to get Kyot passed. Even if one accepts the argu,emt of MMGW, Kyoto will contribute further to it in that it involves the massive transfer of funds to high polluting dictaroships like Russia and China. So we become pooer, the dictatorships are stregthened with our money, the dictatorships then pollute more as they are Kyoto exempt. If MMGW exists, Kyoto would contribute to it. If it does nto exist, we ae being swindled.

Who is the Mo behind that curtain?. No, don't look at the Mo behind that curtain!

Amusing you should use OZ. The Castle was after all green the colour of money

I prbably posted it here somewhere before but I'll post it again. Fox news did an article in February that is worth reading again.

<a href=http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,251458,00.html>On Global Warming: Follow the Money Indeed!</a>

[Darski]

GOOGLE VIDEO: <a href=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6393326099470628258>The Great Global Warming Swindle - Supplementary Material </a>-- 59 min 17 sec

Google (the evil) said that "that video is not available". is there another place to find it?

[styky]

GOOGLE VIDEO: <a href=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6393326099470628258>The Great Global Warming Swindle - Supplementary Material </a>-- 59 min 17 sec

Google (the evil) said that "that video is not available". is there another place to find it?

This link will take you to it. http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/03/great ... indle.html

[Darski]

GOOGLE VIDEO: <a href=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6393326099470628258>The Great Global Warming Swindle - Supplementary Material </a>-- 59 min 17 sec

Google (the evil) said that "that video is not available". is there another place to find it?

This link will take you to it. http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/03/great ... indle.html

Thank you

[Rohan01]

I just finished watching the entire documentary. The entire House of Commons should be forced to sit, gagged and with their eyes pried open, to watch this show in its entirety. And Stephen Harper should be made to explain why he suddenly reversed years of contempt for Kyoto on the basis of a couple of opinion polls, instead of defending the truth and bringing forward scientists who could refute the UN sponsored fraud. If the CPC was half as clever as the guys who put together this documentary, they could have put together a compelling ad campaign which would have turned this issue around in the eyes of the voters. But that would have taken too much work. How much easier to just waste billions of tax dollars pretending you have suddenly become enlightened. If any MP dares to challenge the accepted widom on the GW crowd, Harper will have him or her kneecapped for daring to state the truth. This is what has become of conservatism in Canada.

You are so right! I think we should all e-mail the link along with a letter to our MP's. If they don't watch it their staff certainly can.

I sent it to Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach. Haven't heard back from him regarding it. It's interesting because I heard back from other Alberta cabinet ministers regarding other things like unsafe drivers and Tom Brodbeck's columns from early July '06 dealing with health care.

[Darski]

~~~~~~~~

Remember to tell your kids every night when you tuck them into bed that every time Al Gore flies somewhere in a $50 million Gulfstream IV jet, another polar bear dies.

I love this line. How do we get this out on the 'net'?

[Beacon Hill]

The Great Global Warming Swindle has been completely discredited. The filmmaker is unethical: he distorts facts, omits data and has a history of being sued for completely misrepresenting the views of those he interviews. Channel 4 has had to make public apologies for his work.

Look in a scientific journal for evidence that global warming does not exist. That is credible. To use this sham of a documentary as evidence makes you look foolish.

The article below is one of many that you can find that completely dismisses the ideas put forward in the Great Global Warming Swindle.

Don't let truth stand in the way of a red-hot debunking of climate change

The science might be bunkum, the research discredited. But all that counts for Channel 4 is generating controversy

George Monbiot
Tuesday March 13, 2007
The Guardian

Were it not for dissent, science, like politics, would have stayed in the dark ages. All the great heroes of the discipline - Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein - took tremendous risks in confronting mainstream opinion. Today's crank has often proved to be tomorrow's visionary.

But the syllogism does not apply. Being a crank does not automatically make you a visionary. There is little prospect, for example, that Dr Mantombazana Tshabalala-Msimang, the South African health minister who has claimed Aids can be treated with garlic, lemon and beetroot, will be hailed as a genius. But the point is often confused. Professor David Bellamy, for example, while making the incorrect claim that wind farms do not have "any measurable effect" on total emissions of carbon dioxide, has compared himself to Galileo.

The problem with The Great Global Warming Swindle, which caused a sensation when it was broadcast on Channel 4 last week, is that to make its case it relies not on future visionaries, but on people whose findings have already been proved wrong. The implications could not be graver. Just as the government launches its climate change bill and Gordon Brown and David Cameron start jostling to establish their green credentials, thousands have been misled into believing there is no problem to address.

The film's main contention is that the current increase in global temperatures is caused not by rising greenhouse gases, but by changes in the activity of the sun. It is built around the discovery in 1991 by the Danish atmospheric physicist Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen that recent temperature variations on Earth are in "strikingly good agreement" with the length of the cycle of sunspots.

Unfortunately, he found nothing of the kind. A paper published in the journal Eos in 2004 reveals that the "agreement" was the result of "incorrect handling of the physical data". The real data for recent years show the opposite: that the length of the sunspot cycle has declined, while temperatures have risen. When this error was exposed, Friis-Christensen and his co-author published a new paper, purporting to produce similar results. But this too turned out to be an artefact of mistakes - in this case in their arithmetic.

So Friis-Christensen and another author developed yet another means of demonstrating that the sun is responsible, claiming to have discovered a remarkable agreement between cosmic radiation influenced by the sun and global cloud cover. This is the mechanism the film proposes for global warming. But, yet again, the method was exposed as faulty. They had been using satellite data which did not in fact measure global cloud cover. A paper in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics shows that, when the right data are used, a correlation is not found.

So the hypothesis changed again. Without acknowledging that his previous paper was wrong, Friis-Christensen's co-author, Henrik Svensmark, declared there was a correlation - not with total cloud cover but with "low cloud cover". This, too, turned out to be incorrect. Then, last year, Svensmark published a paper purporting to show cosmic rays could form tiny particles in the atmosphere. Accompanying the paper was a press release which went way beyond the findings reported in the paper, claiming it showed that both past and current climate events are the result of cosmic rays.

As Dr Gavin Schmidt of Nasa has shown on www.realclimate.org, five missing steps would have to be taken to justify the wild claims in the press release. "We've often criticised press releases that we felt gave misleading impressions of the underlying work," Schmidt says, "but this example is by far the most blatant extrapolation beyond reasonableness that we have seen." None of this seems to have troubled the programme makers, who report the cosmic ray theory as if it trounces all competing explanations.

The film also maintains that manmade global warming is disproved by conflicting temperature data. Professor John Christy speaks about the discrepancy he discovered between temperatures at the Earth's surface and temperatures in the troposphere (or lower atmosphere). But the programme fails to mention that in 2005 his data were proved wrong, by three papers in Science magazine.

Christy himself admitted last year that he was mistaken. He was one of the authors of a paper which states the opposite of what he says in the film. "Previously reported discrepancies between the amount of warming near the surface and higher in the atmosphere have been used to challenge the reliability of climate models and the reality of human-induced global warming. Specifically, surface data showed substantial global-average warming, while early versions of satellite and radiosonde data showed little or no warming above the surface. This significant discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been identified and corrected."

Until recently, when found to be wrong, scientists went back to their labs to start again. Now, emboldened by the denial industry, some of them, like the film-makers, shriek "censorship!". This is the best example of manufactured victimhood I have come across. If you demonstrate someone is wrong, you are now deemed to be silencing him.

But there is one scientist in the film whose work has not been debunked: the oceanographer Carl Wunsch. He appears to support the idea that increasing carbon dioxide is not responsible for rising global temperatures. Wunsch says he was "completely misrepresented" by the programme, and "totally misled" by the people who made it.

This is a familiar story to those who have followed the career of the director Martin Durkin. In 1998, the Independent Television Commission found that, when making a similar series, he had "misled" his interviewees about "the content and purpose of the programmes". Their views had been "distorted through selective editing". Channel 4 had to make a prime-time apology.

Cherry-pick your results, choose work which is already discredited, and anything and everything becomes true. The twin towers were brought down by controlled explosions; MMR injections cause autism; homeopathy works; black people are less intelligent than white people; species came about through intelligent design. You can find lines of evidence which appear to support all these contentions, and, in most cases, professors who will speak up in their favour. But this does not mean that any of them are correct. You can sustain a belief in these propositions only by ignoring the overwhelming body of contradictory data. To form a balanced, scientific view, you have to consider all the evidence, on both sides of the question.

But for the film's commissioners, all that counts is the sensation. Channel 4 has always had a problem with science. No one in its science unit appears to understand the difference between a peer-reviewed paper and a clipping from the Daily Mail. It keeps commissioning people whose claims have been discredited - such as Durkin. But its failure to understand the scientific process just makes the job of whipping up a storm that much easier. The less true a programme is, the greater the controversy.

[StrictlyRight]

It was a great movie (albeit I far preferred the newer "Not Evil, Just Wrong" which was a more personal approach against Al Gore's research and manipulation of facts.

What's mot unfortunate about "The Great Global Warming Swindle" though is that you can't even buy it in Canada. It's not that it's been blacklisted, but that people are so dead-set in support of something that they've learned about only from politicians and not scientists. I had to order it in from the UK because Amazon and Best Buy didn't carry it.

[styky]

~~~~~~~~

Remember to tell your kids every night when you tuck them into bed that every time Al Gore flies somewhere in a $50 million Gulfstream IV jet, another polar bear dies.

I love this line. How do we get this out on the 'net'?

Here's proof Al Gore has just flown over....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxis7Y1i ... r_embedded

[queenmandy85]

Nobody knows for certain about climate change. The evidence is there for study, but for western Canadian business, who cares if the planet is warming or not. Eliminating greenhouse gases is the business opportunity of the century. As the world switches from oil and coal to nuclear, where are they going to go for fuel. In Canada, fortunes are waiting to be made in rebuilding the rail network and electifying it. A bunch of scam artists on both sides of the climate debate won't stop determined free enterprise.

[styky]

Nobody knows for certain about climate change. The evidence is there for study, but for western Canadian business, who cares if the planet is warming or not. Eliminating greenhouse gases is the business opportunity of the century. As the world switches from oil and coal to nuclear, where are they going to go for fuel. In Canada, fortunes are waiting to be made in rebuilding the rail network and electifying it. A bunch of scam artists on both sides of the climate debate won't stop determined free enterprise.

Switching to cleaner methods is a good thing. Lying about why is their downfall. I'm all for cleaner air and less chemicals just don't to do it. And don't even get me started on the Carbon idiocy