Chuck
Firstly, get your facts right. The documentary you mention was not
broadcast by the BBC but the UK Channel 4. The latter does everything to
appeal to public to the lowest public taste and has often been slated by
Ofcom, the UK regulatory TV authority. You can consider it as the UK TV
"National Enquirer". You may have heard of the last scandal, a few weeks
ago, on a so-called reality show where one of the contestants was deemed
racist. Martin Durkin himself has already been slated over previous
"scientific" documentaries (he has no scientific background):
"However the Commission also concluded that Durkin had misled his
interviewees about the nature and purpose of the documentary, and that
he had misrepresented and distorted their views by editing the interview
footage in a misleading way [2]. For these reasons, Channel 4 later
issued a public apology on prime time TV"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Durkin_%28television_director%29)
I invite you to read
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2032575,00.html the
last paragraph of which states:
"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."
I understand that, since this was written, Carl Wunsch has made a formal
complaint about misrepresentation.
As for my views, I watched this film on 11 March and then wrote the
following, based entirely what I saw and I state categorically that, at
the time of writing, I was unaware of the furore that this controversy
was about to release nor had I even heard of Durkin prior to watching this:
"There is nothing new in the arguments or the argumenters. It is amazing
how cleverly they use out-of-context facts to argue their lies. For
example, if you take the top graph in Fig SPM-3 of the IPCC report, this
shows the global temp from 1850 to 2005, they extracted a stretch from
1930 to 1980 to show the dip during and after the 39-45 war, without
offering any explanation. Then they pretend the temperature today is
lower than the 1940 peak, but that's because their graph stops at 1980.
In fact, it is KNOWN that the dip was due mostly from natural causes
and, to a very small extent, from the fact that fuel consumption was
greatly reduced during and after the war, at least in Europe. You are
too young to know the privations we went through from 1940 to as late as
1956 but I remember cold E. Scottish winters with little house heating,
little hot water (we were allowed to have a family bath with 5" of
lukewarm water in it once a week), no private cars on the road etc.
"Then the qualifications of some of the interlocutors? A financial
politician, an astrophysicist specialising in meteorites, a Greenpeace
activist, an economist, a journalist writing for a popular
pseudo-scientific magazine etc. Pleeeeze! And most of the quotations are
single sentences obviously taken out of context from a longer interview.
Clever editing will tell you anything. If you compare that with Al
Gore's film (and I'm no fan of his), at least he, on the main, follows a
consistent theme sequence, not hopping about from idea to idea.
"You are right, I, as a scientist, was not impressed by the journalistic
essay, any more than I'm impressed by a lot of political or journalistic
printed matter, either for or against the anthropogenic effects of
climate change (including An Inconvenient Truth, for the most part)."
I suggest, therefore, that you treat this film in the same way as
Gore's, with a very large pinch of sodium chloride. Both are designed
for entertainment, pure and simple and both are misrepresentative.
Incidentally, a large part of the Durkin film suggests that natural
solar phenomena are the cause for the rise in average global
temperatures. The inconvenient truth is that the IPCC have already taken
this well into account (see the last bullet on p. 3 of the IPCC SFP
report) with a radiative forcing of +0.12 W/m² (between +0.06 and +0.30
W/m²), compared to +2.30 W/m² (+2.07 to +2.53 W/m²) for combined CO2,
CH4 and NOx changes. IOW, it contributes to ~5% of the observed
temperature change. Of course, these figures will be fully referenced in
the full report, due out next month.
Hope that this info will help you find the truth. Have you read the IPCC
SFP report?
Brian
Charles Dolci wrote:
> All:
> I am surprised that no one has mentioned (did I miss something???) the recent documentary broadcast on BBC last week, called "The Great Global Warming Swindle" . If you didn't have access to BBC TV you can watch the documentary on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XttV2C6B8pU
>
> I watched it and thought it was pretty impressive.
>
> BTW, let me clear up some misinformation that the media and the GW crowd have been spreading. A month or so ago many newspapers were spreading a "story" that first appeared in the Guardian. The headline read "Scientists Offered Cash to Dispute Climate Study." According to the Guardian, scientists and economists "have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world�s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report."
>
> LIke so much about GW the story was misleading (basically a lie). The so-called "lobbyist" was the American Enterprise Institute. The AEI is a think tank, not a lobbyist group. The AEI, like many think tanks, gets contributions from many sources. Oil companies contribute less than 1% to AEI's total budget. The oil companies' contributions are general in nature and do not fund specific activities. The thing that triggered this latest outburst of false outrage was that the AEI had planned a roundtable discussion of global warming, to be attended by people with differing views on the subject. As is very common among all think tanks they would compensate those who wrote scholarly articles to be presentted at the roundtable.
> The reality is that no on, oil companies or otherwise, was paying scientists to create papers or do research to challenge the GW boogeyman. See http://www.aei.org/doclib/20070209_demuthreply.pdf and http://www.nowpublic.com/scenes_from_the_climate_inquisition
>
> If the GW crowd is so convinced of the righteousness of its cause why does it constantly have to rely on lies and halftruths?
>
>
> Chuck Dolci
>
>
>
> "Davy, Gordon" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Brian,
>
> I have looked over your email exchange with Steve Gregory and from your comments you give the impression that you believe in truth by the numbers. Whichever position has the predominant number of adherents is the truth. We have discussed this before. That is not the way science is done, and you know it.
> ***
> Gordon Davy
>
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