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The Great Global Warming Swindle
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PlateOfFood
PlateOfFood
141 posts

Edited Mar 11, 2007, 21:16
Re: The Great Global Warming Swindle
Mar 11, 2007, 17:52
Well, one of the participants is considering legal action, claiming that they have been grossly misrepresented:

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2031457,00.html

Which is not a huge shock considering the filmmaker's track record:

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2000/03/16/modified-truth/


Yet - as much as I'm surprised at myself for saying this - having tracked down the film on bittorrent and watched it, the film does need a better response than just dismissing it because of those involved. DarkMagus is right, in that it did put forward pretty clear arguments and in all the debate about the film I have not heard these arguments adequately addressed. Instead, you get articles like this in the Guardian,

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2026125,00.html

Which just states that the programme was wrong without saying why.
Which isn't good enough, because the amount of people praising the documentary in online discussions is huge - check the BBC's 'Have Your Say' forums, for example. It's like the IPCC never happened. David Adam at the Guardian wrote an online blog dismissing the programme (which he hadn't seen) that was particulaly poor, as it attacked what he thought the programme would be, not what it was:

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/david_adam/2007/03/envirocon.html

[EDIT - link found by DarkMagus below, it hadn't been pulled, just wasn't showing up under seaches for David Adam or Martin Durkin]

Basically, the documentary has done a lot of damage and, while its not going to undermine the weight of global scientific opinion, it could generate enough doubt to weaken political resolve, so it needs to be seen by environmentalists, and engaged with.

To boil it down, three points in particular need to be addressed. Maybe some here will be able to point to good places that address these? They are:

- The 800 year lag in the ice core record between temperatures increasing and CO2 levels increasing, which implies that temperature rise is the cause of CO2 rise, not vice versa (as claimed in 'Inconvienient Truth', for example). When DarkMagus kept asking if anyone could explain this I googled around and found one explanation (which annoyingly I've since lost), but if I'm honest it was not a convincing argument. I'm sure there are better responses out there somewhere - I'm just waiting to see them.

- The argument that the current warming is not concentrated in the troposphere, as would be expected from global warming theory, but is closer to the surface, as would be expected from the sunspots theory (below). I haven't researched this subject yet so there may be a ready explanation easily found.

- The Sunspot theory of climate change (wherein water vapour form water droplets (and hence clouds) around particles from cosmic rays. Explosions on the sun's surface deflect these cosmic waves away so less clouds are formed, hence more sunlight reaches the surface.) The programme showed the correlations between global temperature and sunspot activity going back 400 years or so, and it must be said that they correlation was extremely striking. Now, there may well have been some cherry picking of data going on here, if so this should be easily shown.

--

Any pointers on those would be much appreciated! Ta!
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