Dublin Opinion

Today I wasn’t supposed to talk about Peter Mandelson or Northern Ireland. Instead I was supposed to comment on the Channel 4 documentary the Great Global Warming Swindle and how the controversy it provoked was featured on Newsnight last night.

The claims in the documentary have already generated a lot of negative commentary, but it was interesting the way that Newsnight effectively piggybacked onto the documentary without discussing the specific criticisms.

After showing an excerpt dealing with the claims made by the Danish atmospheric physicist Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen, they provided a short discussion with a French skeptic, who it turns out is an expert not in Climate change, but in Tropical medicine and one of the authors of the UN report on Global Warming. The objection made by the skeptic, whose name was originally included in the report despite the fact that he resigned from the commission in 2001, was that it declared that the debate about climate change is now closed, a position which precluded the need for dissent and continuing discussion. Science doesn’t work like this, he said, a debate is never closed.

This seemed to be a reaction to how the issue of global warming is played out by both the media and by politicians ever since the issue of the environment became the hot potato we know and love today. However, the UN declaration was also an attempt to motivate governments to act and to quell the nonsense still emanating from climate change deniers.

George Monbiot has an excellent article in today’s Guardian taking some well deserved strips out of the program. He also points how scientists who’s claims are discredited through the peer review process don’t go back and examine the evidence again. Instead they help launch a counter attack using the media to do so.

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

Monbiot also attacks Channel 4’s science department for hiring the discredited director of the documentary Martin Durkin.

“Channel 4 has always had a problem with science. No one in its science unit appears to understand the difference between a peer-reviewed scientific paper and a clipping from the Daily Mail.”

It’s curious because Channel 4 aired his documentary Green Wash the previous week. For some reason there is not a link to this program on the Channel 4 website at the moment, but info can be found here.

Finally and brilliantly, Stephen Poole reveals that the Daily Mail’s “Melanie Phillips” is back blogging, and is talking about the Great Global Warming Swindle. His blog provides a quote from ‘Melanie’:

Channel Four’s devastating documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle has blown an enormous hole in every fundamental claim made to support the climate change obsession — including the claim that the argument is over. A procession of eminent scientists — climatologists, meteorologists, oceanographers, geologists, biogeographers, astrophysicists, professors of earth science, plus the former head of Greenpeace, who said that the global warming proponents were ‘anti-human’ — showed on the contrary that the theory bore no relation to science whatsoever. The earth was much warmer during many periods in the past; the ice caps were always expanding and contracting and Greenland was much warmer 1,000 years ago; most of the atmosphere was not warming as much as surface temperatures; volcanoes, animals and vegetation each produced infinitely more carbon dioxide than human activity; carbon dioxide could not possibly be the culprit for climate change since historically the warming of the atmosphere preceded any increases in carbon dioxide, thus showing up a central claim made by Al Gore in his movie to be utter rubbish; and so on.

And then Stephen comments devastatingly:

“Well, never mind that “Melanie” is a scientific and mathematical idiot.[…] The documentary, which I have seen, was mere trash, whose one credited “Scientific Advisor” is a non-scientist from the Scientific Alliance, and whose one unarguable truth came in the introductory voiceover promising: “You are being told lies.” (The programme’s selective massaging of data, misleading of one of its contributors, and manifold outright deceptions are documented here, here and here.)

All good fun.