Why he made the TV documentary, "The
Great Global Warming Swindle" which created an uproar after screening on
Australian's ABC network. Hostages to a hoax
* So you think I'm defying the scientific facts on
climate change? Well, think again, says Martin Durkin The Australian, July 07, 2007
I COULD not have upset the soft-left, soft-green middle classes more if I had
crept in their kitchens and snuck genetically modified tomatoes in their
paninis. Why did I make the film The Great Global Warming Swindle? The head of
science programs at Britain's Channel 4, Hamish Mykura (who has a PhD in environmental
science), asked me to. He suspected the global warming alarm was not based on
solid science. So did his predecessor, Sara Ramsden, who was also eager to make
a film in this area. I was an experienced science documentary producer used to
handling complex subjects.
So what was our conclusion, after months of research that involved talking to
hundreds of scientists and wading through mountains of science papers? It's all
codswallop. The notion of man-made global warming started life as a wild,
eccentric theory and, despite throwing billions of dollars at it, scientists
have failed to stand it up. Man-made global warming is unmitigated nonsense.
This is not the first time scientists have talked rubbish. Absurd theories come
and go in science all the time. A few years ago an ostensible consensus of
scientists said one-third of the British population were about to pop their
clogs because they had eaten dodgy hamburgers (the mad cow disease scare). Many
scientists build whole careers talking out of their hats. But usually it goes
unnoticed. There is no real harm done.
But global warming theory is different. It cannot be ignored. It is intruding
into our lives to an extraordinary extent, shaping domestic and international
policy in profound ways.
I urge readers to look at the evidence themselves. (We have assembled many
relevant papers on a dedicated website, www.greatglobalwarmingswindle.com The
global warmers try to discourage a close examination of the data. They say the time
for debate is over, that there's a consensus of scientists who say it's
definitely true. But this is rubbish. Check out www.oism.org and find an
extraordinary petition carrying the names of 17,000 scientists who disagree.
The basic facts are as follows. There is nothing unusual about the present
climate. The Earth has been far, far warmer than today and far, far colder. Our
present interglacial (the mild bit between ice ages) is not nearly as warm as
previous interglacials. Nor are we in a particularly warm part of the
interglacial.
The recent warming, such as it is, represents a mild, welcome recovery from an exceptionally
cold period in Earth's recent climate history, known to climatologists as the
Little Ice Age. How mild is the recent warming? During the past 150 years
global temperature has increased by a little more than 0.5C. But most of this
rise occurred before 1940, when carbon dioxide emissions were relatively
insignificant. After 1940, during the post-war economic boom, when human
emissions of CO2 took off, the temperature fell, causing (you may remember) in
the mid-1970s a consensus among scientists that we were about to enter another
ice age.
As Lowell Ponte warned in 1976: "This cooling has already killed hundreds
of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will
cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about
before the year 2000."
Cripes. After that temperatures rose again (though not as steeply or as much as
before) and peaked in 1998. Since then they have declined slightly.
Why do we suppose that CO2 is responsible for any of this? CO2 occupies a tiny
proportion of the gases in the atmosphere. It is only a secondary greenhouse
gas - water vapour is the main one - and greenhouse gases themselves form only
one small part of the Earth's climate system.
CO2 has demonstrably never driven climate in the past. (Examine the ice core
data at www.CO2science.org.)
If greenhouse gases were causing the temperature to rise, according to classic
greenhouse theory, the rate of warming should be higher in the Earth's
troposphere (at least 10km up) than at the surface.
But the opposite is true. All our satellite and balloon data tells us that the
rate of warming was higher at the surface. In other words, observational data
tells us, beyond any reasonable doubt, that greenhouse gas did not cause the
recent warming.
But the present alarm is not based on observational data. It is based on
models. These models attempt to forecast what will happen in the future, based
on a set of assumptions. If your assumptions are wrong, so is your forecast.
If you assume that CO2 is driving the Earth's climate and that CO2 will
increase, then you will, as sure as eggs is eggs, produce a forecast that the
temperature will rise. But this falls well short of sound science. So why are
certain scientists so passionately attached to this theory?
Scientists are not above the prejudices of their age. Global warming is a
political theory. It's rarely stated, but we all know it. People on the Left
tend to believe it. People on the Right tend not to.
The media and academe (as those of us on the inside know very well) are, in the
main, soft left and soft green. We like things that are natural, we think the
market is cruel, and we recycle not because it's logical but because it feels
right. In these circles global warming has become part of social etiquette. It
is as unacceptable to question it as it is to say that you admire George W.
Bush or think organic food is a con.
This is the real strength of global warming theory. It taps into the
middle-class aesthetic revulsion of consumer, industrial society.
The whole global warming alarm, I believe, raises serious issues about the way
science functions in the real world, about the political bias of scientists,
about censorship and intimidation within the scientific community, about the
routine practice of scientists drawing false or inflated conclusions from
ambiguous or uncertain data, about the manifest failure of the peer review
process, about the extraordinary unwillingness of scientists who have invested
time and reputation in a particular theory to consider evidence that directly
contradicts it and about the elevation of speculation (models) to the level of
solid data.
Who should you believe? There is nothing for it but to be grown up about it and
look at the evidence yourself.
Here's some to get you going: the two graph, published in Geophysical Research
Letters Volume 32, 2005 by a leading astrophysicist from HarvardUniversity.
One compares temperature change in the Arctic during the 20th century with levels of CO2.
The other compares the same temperature record to variations in solar activity
as recorded, independently, by scientists from NASA and the US National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration.
Note: these two graphs can be found in this same story at this link (scroll
down):
http://antigreen.blogspot.com/2007/07/greenland-ice-sheet-surprisingly-stable.html
The question posed by the astrophysicist is a simple one. What is driving the
Earth's climate? Is it CO2 or is it the sun?
Martin Durkin is a British television producer and director.
