Conspiracies abound. Now comes the latest: Channel 4 screened last week 'The Great Global Warming Swindle', a documentary which claims that it is 'a lie' that carbon emissions are causing global warming and that attempts to debate the subject are being suppressed.I hadn't wanted to spend time on this issue again (see comment re 'deniers' on my blog on 18th 2006) - but as several people have asked for comment I've cobbled together this answer from my own thoughts and others. There are indeed many reasons to dismiss this Channel 4 programme, but some important points do emerge and we should not make the mistake of ignoring them.
Last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - which brings together almost all the world's leading scientists in the field and all its governments - published its latest huge "assessment report", concluding that it was 90 per cent certain that human activities are heating up the planet. The conclusion was all the more authoritative as the IPCC is a cautious body that acts by consensus; all governments, including the US, have to agree its conclusions.
It is true some scientists still disagree - that is the nature of science - but their numbers are diminishing, and few are leaders in their fields. A recent survey of 928 published scientific papers found not one that dissented over the reality of global warming. All the main political parties accept climate change and the need for action. Even Bush admitted in January's State of the Union speech that the climate change presented "a major challenge".
Many who thought that there was now full agreement about climate change and that they could now get on with making the changes we need, will have to think again. This film and attacks on Gores' own CO2 emissions (see my blog 7th March 2007) are indications that the battle is still not won.
The programme...
Martin Durkin first achieved notoriety when his previous series on the environment for the channel, called 'Against Nature', was condemned by the Independent Television Commission for misleading contributors on the purpose of the programmes, and for editing four interviewees in a way that "distorted or mispresented their known views". Channel 4 was forced to issue an apology, but despite this they have not sought checks of this current programme.
Indeed already Carl Wunsch, from the programme states: "the context was not at all what we had agreed on....As I began to see ads for the program, I realized I'd been duped." See here.
On the programme Martin Durkin interviewed various well known climate-change deniers including Phillip Stott, Piers Corbyn, Nigel Lawson and Nigel Calder. Each of these sceptics have a point, but fail to give the whole picture and so draw the wrong conclusions.
Lord Lawson, for example agrees much with environmentalists saying there is "little doubt that the 20th century ended warmer than it began" and that "there is no doubt that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide increased greatly" during it. He even agrees that it is "highly likely that carbon dioxide emissions" have played a significant part" in heating up the Earth.
Indeed he could not do otherwise: the basic science on this has been established and unchallenged for 180 years. Where dispute lies is in the contribution to warming that pollution has made, whether it will continue and what to do about it. Here I'll look briefly at the key arguments and show how they have been discredited.
Is the Sun to blame?
Michael Crichtons' novel 'State of Fear' started the ball rolling although it was some years before that I was given Nigel Calder’s “Manic Sun” - this controversial book claimed an alternative theory to global warming. The book was based on work by three Danish scientists who discovered correlations between quite complicated solar cycles and past weather patterns. The scientists claim this is a more accurate reflection than anything to do with carbon dioxide. Work with data from satellites showed the Sun to be in an energetic state, the most invisible radiations from it intercept cosmic rays that are always impinging on the Earth. The cosmic rays are important in initiating cloud formation, and clouds make a lot of difference to the weather, and cumulatively to climate.
However while the book and subsequent articles and further books make some useful contributions it is clear they are a long way from demonstrating an influence of cosmic rays on the real world climate. Variations in solar activity may have been responsible for past warm periods, though it's hard to be sure because we have been taking good measurements of it only since 1978. Certainly recent solar increases are too small to have produced the present warming, and have been much less important than greenhouse gases since about 1850. See here.
Questions about temperature?
The programme shows how studies of gases in bubbles of air in polar ice sheets reveal that in prehistoric hot periods temperatures began rising before C02 levels. So it is argued that increasing concentrations of the gas are the result, not the cause of global warming.
Temperature and C02 are indeed bound together: as one goes up, the other follows. Historically temperatures often started rising 800 years before levels of the gas, but this is irrelevant to what is happening now, because for the first time ever enormous amounts of extra C02 are being released.
The programme emphasises that temperatures in Britain and other parts of Europe were warmer in the Middle Ages than they are now. That may or may not be true - since no accurate measurements were taken it is hard to be certain. But, if so, it was only a regional effect: measurements of ice from the poles on which the sceptics place great reliance for other arguments show it did not happen worldwide.
Arctic ice shrink is exaggerated?
Skeptics claim that ice caps ebb and flow in size and their current shrinking is exaggerated. In contrast Al Gore suggests the Arctic is a "canary in the coal mine". He shows how since the 1970s the extent of the Arctics' ice cap has "diminished precipitously". If we continue as we are, it will disappear for part of the year and profoundly change the climate. Certainly part of the Arctics' shrinking is probably due to natural ebb and flows, but this has been increased by global warming caused by rising levels of greenhouse gases - and these continue to go up. The Arctic is likely to be free of ice by 2050, for the first time in millions of years.
Solutions to climate change will hurt the world's poorest?
This is the claim but infact renewable sources of energy should be the poor's salvation. They are abundant in the Third World and don't need costly distribution networks to get them to village.
Climate change hijacked?
Heres a view..."Petrol-guzzling 4x4s must be taxed, foreign holidays discouraged, TVs unplugged and lavatories left unflushed. After decades of waiting, the green movement has found the cause of its dreams: a crisis that gives them carte blanche to rule our lives?"
Myles Allen, of Oxford's climate dynamics group says: "That is the striking thing about global warming. It is a Christmas tree on which each of us can hang virtually everything we want."
Everyone of us can now use global warming as an excuse to tell us how to live. Some of this advice is sound - indeed much of it is good but some is clearly not. Mixed and confusing messages abound. Does carbon off-setting work? (see my blog on this for 23rd February 2007) What about road-pricing? (see my blog for 13th February 2007)
Critically in all this the lead must come from government. So far it hasn't.
One of the key ways forward that gets away from all the negative arguments about banning this or that is Personal Tradeable Carbon Allowances - my blog on 17th February goes into this in some detail.
But what if the sceptics are right?
Even if the sceptics are right and the bulk of the world's scientists wrong there is still a compelling reason for cutting carbon dioxide emissions. For rising levels of the gas - in an entirely separate process - are killing the world's oceans by turning them acid.
Plus oil and gas are running out - world discovery of oil peaked in 1964 and has been declining ever since, despite considerable improvements in technology, and there is no prospect of any significant large discoveries. We are currently consuming more than six barrels of oil for every one we discover. There is growing consensus that we are now approaching, or are even at, the world oil peak. We have longer for gas but which ever way we look at it we must move away from them.
The truth is that the real swindle is that such a one-sided programme can be presented as fact when the vast majority of scientists disagree with the conclusions. Such a move is dangerous when we are only just developing the momentum to find the solutions to this massive problem.
More info:
There are various responses to this Channel 4 show like science blog, 'Stoat' here, The Royal Society put out a news release here and The Independent also published a fair response which I have used to put this case above: 'Global warming: An inconvenient truth or hot air?'
Also see George Monbiot writing in The Guardian: "The science might be bunkum, the research discredited. But all that counts for Channel 4 is generating controversy." See here. And for more general stuff see Realclimate that covers many of the issues raised in the programme.
16/03/07: Just found this on MediaLens: a good look at the whole programme - look for 13th March 2007 entry here. See Ecologist here with Met Office comment here. Lots more info and letters to Channel 4 here. See also Royal Society rebuttal here.
11 comments:
"Renewable energy is the poor's salvation"
Sorry but ill rather take the word of villagers struggling in the film with their malfunctioning solar panels
thanks.
The ch4 prog was a load of tosh - re the last comment:
Third World problems cannot be solved until the rich countries stop taking most of the world’s resource wealth; as Gandhi said long ago, “The rich must live more simply so that the poor may simply live.”
That is not possible in a society committed to affluence and growth. Thus considerations of sustainability and of justice both lead to the conclusion that the problems cannot be solved without huge and radical systemic change.
Solar panels are not the only form of renewable energy and as the film shows need back up - but then so do fossil fuels - in many countries electrcity is not delivered effectively or consistantly either. Communities need mostly small, highly self-sufficient local economies....economic systems under social control and not driven by market forces or the profit motive.
It was disgraceful the programme followed through the derogatory and painful discussion about Africa and development. Solar panels are known to be expensive. There are other, low cost and low emissions technologies to make electricity from the power of the Sun. The film makers clearly do not know this, or chose to ignore it.
Thanks for making the effort Philip. I was dismayed by how many people were duped by this programme. But of course ignoring the problem or accepting distorted views that tell you you don't have to worry is so much easier that dealing with it.
A good blog, Philip. I didn't watch the programme and nor do I understand entirely waht point they were trying to make about Africa. Having spent a few months in various countries in Africa recently, it became clear to me that we in the West have to start thinking more about living the way they do with fewer material possessions, a much greater degree of recycling and living more in harmony with the earth, than thinking of ways that Africa can 'catch up' with the West in its materialsism and consumerism
With all due respect, a very weak rebuttal.
To the last comment I suggest you follow up the links noted above - there is really no justification for the arguments made in the film.
See:
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7748
There is climate change censorship - and it's the deniers who dish it out
Global warming scientists are under intense pressure to water down findings, and are then accused of silencing their critics
George Monbiot
Tuesday April 10, 2007
The Guardian
The drafting of reports by the world's pre-eminent group of climate scientists is an odd process. For months scientists contributing to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tussle over the evidence. Nothing gets published unless it achieves consensus. This means that the panel's reports are conservative - even timid. It also means that they are as trustworthy as a scientific document can be.
Then, when all is settled among the scientists, the politicians sweep in and seek to excise from the summaries anything that threatens their interests.
The scientists fight back, but they always have to make concessions. The report released on Friday, for example, was shorn of the warning that "North America is expected to experience locally severe economic damage, plus substantial ecosystem, social and cultural disruption from climate change related events".
This is the opposite of the story endlessly repeated in the rightwing press: that the IPCC, in collusion with governments, is conspiring to exaggerate the science. No one explains why governments should seek to amplify their own failures. In the wacky world of the climate conspiracists no explanations are required. The world's most conservative scientific body has somehow been transformed into a conspiracy of screaming demagogues.
This is just one aspect of a story that is endlessly told the wrong way round. In the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Mail, in columns by Dominic Lawson, Tom Utley and Janet Daley, the allegation is repeated that climate scientists and environmentalists are trying to "shut down debate". Those who say that man-made global warming is not taking place, they claim, are being censored.
Something is missing from their accusations: a single valid example. The closest any of them have been able to get is two letters sent - by the Royal Society and by the US senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe - to that delicate flower ExxonMobil, asking that it cease funding lobbyists who deliberately distort climate science. These correspondents had no power to enforce their wishes. They were merely urging Exxon to change its practices. If everyone who urges is a censor, then the comment pages of the newspapers must be closed in the name of free speech.
In a recent interview, Martin Durkin, who made Channel 4's film The Great Global Warming Swindle, claimed he was subject to "invisible censorship". He seems to have forgotten that he had 90 minutes of prime-time television to expound his theory that climate change is a green conspiracy. What did this censorship amount to? Complaints about one of his programmes had been upheld by the Independent Television Commission. It 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". This, apparently, makes him a martyr.
If you want to know what real censorship looks like, let me show you what has been happening on the other side of the fence. Scientists whose research demonstrates that climate change is taking place have been repeatedly threatened and silenced and their findings edited or suppressed.
The Union of Concerned Scientists found that 58% of the 279 climate scientists working at federal agencies in the US who responded to its survey reported that they had experienced one of the following constraints: 1. Pressure to eliminate the words "climate change", "global warming", or other similar terms from their communications; 2. Editing of scientific reports by their superiors that "changed the meaning of scientific findings"; 3. Statements by officials at their agencies that misrepresented their findings; 4. The disappearance or unusual delay of websites, reports, or other science-based materials relating to climate; 5. New or unusual administrative requirements that impair climate-related work; 6. Situations in which scientists have actively objected to, resigned from, or removed themselves from a project because of pressure to change scientific findings. They reported 435 incidents of political interference over the past five years.
In 2003, the White House gutted the climate-change section of a report by the Environmental Protection Agency. It deleted references to studies showing that global warming is caused by manmade emissions. It added a reference to a study, partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute, that suggested that temperatures are not rising. Eventually the agency decided to drop the section altogether.
After Thomas Knutson at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published a paper in 2004 linking rising emissions with more intense tropical cyclones, he was blocked by his superiors from speaking to the media. He agreed to one request to appear on MSNBC, but a public affairs officer at NOAA rang the station and said that Knutson was "too tired" to conduct the interview. The official explained to him that the "White House said no". All media inquiries were to be routed instead to a scientist who believed there was no connection between global warming and hurricanes.
Last year Nasa's top climate scientist, James Hansen, reported that his bosses were trying to censor his lectures, papers and web postings. He was told by Nasa's PR officials that there would be "dire consequences" if he continued to call for rapid reductions in greenhouse gases.
Last month, the Alaskan branch of the US fish and wildlife service told its scientists that anyone travelling to the Arctic must understand "the administration's position on climate change, polar bears, and sea ice and will not be speaking on or responding to these issues".
At hearings in the US Congress three weeks ago, Philip Cooney, a former White House aide who had previously worked at the American Petroleum Institute, admitted he had made hundreds of changes to government reports about climate change on behalf of the Bush administration. Though not a scientist, he had struck out evidence that glaciers were retreating and inserted phrases suggesting that there was serious scientific doubt about global warming.
The guardians of free speech in Britain aren't above attempting a little suppression, either. The Guardian and I have now received several letters from the climate sceptic Viscount Monckton threatening us with libel proceedings after I challenged his claims about climate science. On two of these occasions he has demanded that articles are removed from the internet. Monckton is the man who wrote to Senators Rockefeller and Snowe, claiming that their letter to ExxonMobil offends the corporation's "right of free speech".
After Martin Durkin's film was broadcast, one of the scientists it featured, Professor Carl Wunsch, complained that his views on climate change had been misrepresented. He says he has received a legal letter from Durkin's production company, Wag TV, threatening to sue him for defamation unless he agrees to make a public statement that he was neither misrepresented nor misled.
Would it be terribly impolite to suggest that when such people complain of censorship, a certain amount of projection is taking place?
Monbiot.com
This article below was published on www.climatedenial.org.
Why was The Great Global Warming Swindle so persuasive?
Why is our belief in climate change still so fragile that many well meaning people have written to this blog claiming that a polemic propaganda film has changed their view of climate change? Surely this requires some explanation.
The fans of the film would argue that it has been effective because it is true. But truth is not, of itself, persuasive. When we receive new information on a topic we have no idea whether it is true or not. We base our conclusions on how it was presented to us, whether it concurs with what we already know about that topic, how far we trust the person telling us, and how well that information fits inside our world view. We then seek to match our initial conclusions against the conclusions of our peers.
So, although we think we seek truth, the process by which we reach opinions is equally capable of leading us in the wrong direction. It turns out that Swindle was a collection of rather crude distortions in an elegant package. We now know that the data was misrepresented, the charts re-arranged, and the interviews edited in ways that were designed to mislead.
To cite just one example: the graph that purported to show that global temperatures had fallen between 1940 and 1975. Although it bore the label “NASA” it bore no resemblance to any NASA map of 20th century temperatures. The likely source was a graph in a climate skeptic publication which was then further distorted: the axis at the bottom of the graph was extended to make it look up to date, and all the inconvenient wobbles were ironed out. The producer of the programme, Martin Durkin explained that “the original data was very wiggly-lined and we wanted the simplest line we could find.” So the programme took a graph from a propoganda magazine, redrew it to tell the story it wanted and then credited it to a reputable scientific institution”. More…
But I don’t want to go any further into the specific claims of the programme. I want to ask a much more interesting question: why were people persuaded by a programme that they knew contradicted the vast body of reputable scientific opinion. Here are some explanations.
1. It followed a trusted format
Fifty years of public service broadcasting has created a standard science documentary format. Interviews with scientists and animated graphics are intercut with general footage of an issue, sometimes a little montage. The whole thing is held together by the modulated authoritative voice-over of a professional male actor.
We trust this familiar and dull format because we assume that broadcasters and science documentaries do not knowingly lie. Yes we know that they may twist and simplify things a little to tell a good yarn, but we do not expect them to ignore all opposing views or redraw and mislabel graphs. Years of responsible public service broadcasting has giving documentaries a credibility that we would never permit to newspapers columnists, chat shows, or politicians.
One way we assess plausibility is through familiarity so Durkin cleverly mimicked all the ingredients of the classic science documentary format. When we saw that Swindle looked and sounded like the respectable and worthy BBC2 science documentaries we assumed, based on past experience, that it would be carefully researched and the facts checked.
Durkin’s greatest deception was the absence of a visible narrator. According to the conventions of broadcasting, the narrator can be invisible only when the case he is putting is uncontroversial and unpolitical. When a position is politicized the convention requires that we see the person presenting it so that we can understand that it is their point of view and open to challenge. When there is a serious difference of opinion we should see people presenting an opposing point of view.
A typical exercise of these conventions was the Dispatches programme on climate change presented on Channel Four the week before Swindle. The presenter George Monbiot introduced himself at the outset– so we knew that this would be a personal argument. Anyone he challenged was allowed a space to issue a formal refutation. Indeed the programme looked as though it had been edited by lawyers.
Channel Four gave Swindle a free reign hoping to milk the resulting controversy (and knowing that the IPCC would not sue). In so doing it exploited the professionalism of everyone who has created and adhered to the conventions that made Swindle its credibility.
2. It wheeled out experts
We respect the expertise of people with academic titles and positions in leading universities assuming, with good reason, that they know what they are talking about and are bound by a set of principles. That trust has been built through long established precedent and strict professional ethics.
Swindle exploited that trust. It interviewed an array of experts, many with impressive qualification and positions in reputable scientific institutions. But the labels were often deceptive, giving people positions that they had not held for years. Patrick Michaels was described as “Former Director of the US National Weather Service” when he has never held this position.
The programme exploited the codes of science communication. Professional scientists are usually extremely cautious, prefacing their statements with dithering caveats such as “it is still too early to draw a firm conclusion but the data suggests that…”. By this measure when professional scientists are highly confident and assertive we assume that what they say is beyond contest.
And the programme avoided any unfortunate confrontations with real scientists and allowing them no space on the programme.
3. It used tried and tested denial arguments
Swindle was the product of a public relations campaign that has been carefully honing its arguments for nearly two decades. During this time many arguments have been tried and discarded. The contrarians (including the old hands like Singer and Michaels who appeared on the programme) used to argue that increased carbon dioxide would be great for the environment. Then they argued that there was no conclusive evidence that temperatures were rising. By 2005 this argument became hard to maintain in the face of a string of record temperatures.
Strangely it is the argument that carbon dioxide does not cause climate change that has survived and prospered. In scientific terms this is a far greater deceit that previous arguments because it denies the basic physics behind the greenhouse effect. It clearly begs the question: what is preventing carbon dioxide, a known greenhouse gas, from retaining heat in the atmosphere? But this is no longer about valid or rational arguments- it is about the arguments that sell.
Even though these arguments have their own evolutionary history, the real inspiration behind Swindle is Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth. Durkin has openly declared his interest in ‘putting the record right’ and producing a mass market film to counters Gore’s arguments. But this is not just Durkin’s interest.
In July 2006 Ross Gelbspan (see last posting) published a leaked internal memo by Stanley Lewandowski, General Manager of the Intermountain Rural Electric Association – a Colorado based electricity generator to the heads of 50 other power utilities. Link….
Lewandowski expressed concern over the success of Gore’s film and stated the IREA’s commitment to “support the scientific community that is willing to stand up against the alarmists and bring a balance to the discussion”. He praises Dr Patrick Michaels, Fred SInger and Richard Lindzen, the key stars of Swindle, and says that the “IREA has decided to contribute $100,000 to Dr Michaels”. In Swindle Michaels aggressively states that he has never received a penny in funding from industry interests. Clearly this is a man whose word can be trusted.
The memo goes on to say that “Koch industries is working with other large corporations, including AEP and the Southern Company, on possibly financing a film that would counteract an Inconvenient Truth”.
Swindle fits neatly into this US strategy to counter Gore’s success. Last month Fred Singer wrote a widely distributed article stating that “Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, has met its match”. Now I cannot claim that Swindle received funding from any US source, but I would be certain that it received substantial advice and support from the US denial networks. I am absolutely confident that they will adopt this film as a core material and will pull out all the stops to ensure that it is shown on US television.
And lo and behold, look at the IREA website and there is a big plug for Swindle saying that it shows that “if the planet is heating up, it isn’t your fault and there’s nothing you can do about it”.
4. The main reason- people want to believe it
It is remarkable that people’s belief in climate change is still so fragile that the firm consensus of the world’s scientific bodies can be challenged by a polemic documentary produced, let us remind ourselves, by the same channel that put out Celebrity Big Brother.
This requires some explanation. It would be entirely possible, assuming that Channel Four has no residual principles at all, to put together a similar documentary on just about any offensive theory: the lack of gas chambers at Auschwitz; the lack of connection between HIV and AIDs; the lower IQ of black people or the disproof of evolution.
It would be easy to find enough ‘proof’, graphs, and attention-seeking academics to fill any documentary. But I don’t think it would persuade anyone. In all these cases we accept the existing opinion even though, in truth, we rarely know enough to be able to defend it.
So ultimately the success of any lie does not depend on how well it is packaged or how many experts are wheeled out but whether people want to believe it, whether it reinforces or validates their world view, or whether it makes them feel better. White supremacists want to believe that other races are less intelligent. Muslim extremists want to believe in an international Jewish conspiracy- which is why every Islamic bookshop in the middle east has copies of the odious 100 year old forgery “the Protocols of the Elders of Zion”.
And many many intelligent people want to believe that climate change is a myth. Maybe they find it too threatening to their world view. Maybe they are scared by the predictions. Maybe they find the solutions too challenging to the lifestyle they believe they have earned.
There is no doubt in my mind that the key reason why Swindle worked was because it spoke to a very powerful hope that climate change doesn’t actually exist. This is a perilous time for belief- after years of ignoring climate change and hoping it will go away British society is on the end of edge of actually taking it seriously.
Among the lies it peddled was the notion that environmentalists and scientists have a vested interest in promoting this problem. In fact we would love it if we were wrong. I know several scientists and green campaigners, myself amongst them, who felt an initial wave of hope watching Swindle that there might really still be some doubt about their work. The first thing that we said to each other the next morning in my office was “please tell me that there was some truth in there”.
Such is the power of our denial. Such is our desire to turn away. The real skeptics are not the ones on the tv screen but the ones in our heads and we will grasp at any lie, however transparent, to keep them alive.
-- George Marshall, Climate Outreach Information Network,
Last bastion of climate sceptics topples. Date: 11/07/2007
Today, Martin Durkin and Channel 4 must hang their heads in shame.
In March, the controversial documentary maker released a film entitled, ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’, which argued that global warming was a fantasy of environmentalists to advance their own interests, and that rises in temperature were actually due to solar activity instead of rising carbon dioxide emissions.
Now, an authoritative new study by scientists at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire has demonstrated that although increases in the intensity of the sun’s magnetic field have in the past led to climatic changes, the past twenty years have seen a decrease in solar activity, and yet an increase in global temperature.
‘The temperature record is simply not consistent with any study of the solar forcings that people are talking about,’ Professor Mike Lookwood, lead author of the research, told the Guardian. ‘They [records of solar activity] changed direction in 1985, but the climate [temperature] did not.’
Describing climate change sceptic arguments based on solar activity as ‘half-baked’, Professor Lockwood said that his study was ‘another nail in the coffin’ for proponents of the theory.
Durkin’s documentary was widely condemned at the time as misleading and false, and two scientists featured in the film said that they had been misrepresented.
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