The Swindle Behind ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’
Mar 14th, 2007 by Donagh
An addendum of sorts to the post below on The Great Global Warming Swindle, which continues to generate a huge amount of posts across da Net. Some of these are very incisive and informative and continue to show just how bad the documentary is, while many others are mere reactionary twaddle, allowing nut jobs to jump on a bandwagon with one wheel missing.
In my post, however, I referred to a scientist who spoke on Newsnight after they showed a clip from the documentary. I didn’t name him, but now I know that its Professor Paul Reiter, of the Institut Pasteur in Paris. He’s a very credible scientist, whose specialty is not global warming but the transmission of tropical diseases. He has a big bone to pick with the IPCC, who produced the UN report, because he feels that one of their findings, that ‘mosquito-borne diseases are moving to new latitudes and altitudes because of “global warming”’ isn’t correct and that those who were tasked with coming to this conclusion were not qualified to do so.
He appeared in the controversial Channel 4 documentary too. Via Steven Poole’s Unspeak again I find now that ‘Melanie Phillips’ has another post on the documentary and has ‘proof’ that the science behind global warming is bogus. In her post she quotes Paul Reiter’s testimony to the House of Lords select committee considering the economics of climate change - she probably just cut and pasted it from the Internet. She uses his questioning of the veracity of the scientists involved in the IPCC as proof that the institute and the science behind global warming is a sham.
I was curious about Reiter, who I had no doubt was making his objections in the interests of science. Indeed, in an article he explains his motives why he is reacting against what he sees as an agenda which is being driven by activists rather than scientists.
“There is an urgent need to correct this situation by promoting the participation of professional scientists in public debate.”
So after a little digging I found out that Reiter is a member of The Cooler Heads Coalition, an organisation funded by Consumer Alert, a US consumer advocacy group who, according to Sourcewatch “fought mandatory air bags on the grounds that their expense is a burden to the consumers they claim to represent”. Oh, and they’re funded by Chevron(Texaco) and the US Tobacco giant Philip Morris.
Cedars has some stuff on the documentary too.
Nice post. Thanks for the link.
Piece of work, this mockumentary is, huh?
Your just following a well trodden green path, if you can’t attack the science attack the scientists. Nothing new for the Green Movement to dig up and tenuous link a scientist has with some big company.
Of course the fact what he said in the film being true doesn’t mean a thing now does it?
Thanks Reasic. You’re doing sterling work there. The ‘whatever it is’ seems like a last ditch attempt. I just don’t understand Durkin’s motivation. Surely now he’s up there with Holocaust deniers. But maybe that suggestion screams ‘censorship’. If so, whatever.
Matt, I was wrong, he isn’t a member of The Cooler Heads Coalition but he was a speaker at their 2004 conference “The Impacts of Global Warming: Why the Alarmist View is Wrong” held at Capitol Hill. In fact, he’s spoken for them several times and written for other organizations that are fronts for the Oil industry. Complaining about non-scientist ‘activists’ taking over the Green agenda smacks of hypocrisy when he uses his credibility and authority so politically to aid organizations who are trying to counteract the move towards cutting greenhouse gases because its bad for their business.
Well done, Donagh. It is frightening to see how many people still take that piece of garbage seriously. Most of “Swindle” was fact-free innuendo, and the bit where they try to provide a scientific basis for their polemic has been thoroughly discredited in every detail.
It’s all bloody lies innit?
I’m a tv editor by trade andknow just how easy it is to misrepresent statements presented as fact and turn ‘em into fiction. A mere snip here or there - you really don’t actually have to remove anything at all, just change the emphasis by rhythm.
So I’m in two minds about the documentary. On the one hand, I know the tricks of the trade and realise that much of the representations could’ve started off life with a different sentiment. On the other hand, I have a solid scientific backround and can grasp some of the data bith for and against the arguments.
I guess the bottom line is that one of my kids has come to me crying saying that our house will be under water in fifty years. That means more a lot more to me than any of the dogma that I’ve read so far.
Thanks for the comment Hugh. It seems that John Lanchester agrees with you. Writing in the latest issue of the London Review of Books he says:
“I don’t think I can be the only person who finds in myself a strong degree of psychological resistance to the whole subject of climate change. I just don’t want to think about it. This isn’t an entirely unfamiliar sensation: someone my age is likely to have spent a couple of formative decades trying not to think too much about nuclear war, a subject which offered the same combination of individual impotence and prospective planetary catastrophe. Global warming is even harder to ignore, not so much because it is increasingly omnipresent in the media but because the evidence for it is starting to be manifest in daily life.”
It’s a pity the issue has got so muddled.
So I noticed that you mentioned that the movie was backed by Chevron. I recall finding similar information. Do you possibly still have the link to this information?