'The Great Global Warming Swindle'

[miriam_e]

The ABC here in Australia is going to be showing 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' soon. What a terrible mistake that will be. It is an awful film that masquerades as a documentary. It falsifies data, misquotes scientists, and re-cuts at least one interview to make it appear the scientist is saying something very different to what he really did. The filmmaker has done this kind of thing before where apologies had to be issued for re-cutting interviews to misrepresent what the people said.

Many of the lies in the film have since been represented by the director to be "mistakes" but continue to stand whenever it is shown, including in the new DVD version -- perniciously misinforming viewers. Clearly the intention is to lie.

• You will be told, for instance, that volcanoes produce 100 times more CO₂ than human activity, but that is simply not true. Volcanoes barely even register on CO₂ graphs, whereas human effect is obvious.
  
• You'll be shown a graph which makes it look like solar activity controls the climate, but the filmaker sneakily altered the time span of the data to make it fit. When the correct curve is used it is clear there is no correlation between solar activity and climate over the time period he suggests.
  
• And you'll be shown another graph showing apparent cooling between 1940s to 1970s which has data altered to fit the filmmaker's wish. There is no tidy graph like that. In actual fact the temperature fluctuates all over the place during that period, sometimes going down, sometimes up.
  
• It will be made to look like climate change drives CO₂ levels by ignoring the effect of the oceanic feedback system, where the ocean releases even more CO₂ as the greenhouse effect warms it -- this cause for more concern, not dismissal.
  
• They also say that the developing world is being held back by being prevented from using their oil, but that just isn't true. The imact of storms and flooding far outweigh petroleum income, which tends not to stay in their countries anyway, but moves offshore to the richest of the rich. Already we are seeing some of the calamitous effects of changing rainfall in the Sudan. Carbon trading can help third world development while still reigning in CO₂ emissions all over the world. Runaway climate change will hit the third world hardest, making much of their land uninhabitable
  
• Global warming will be represented as a possible boon to civilisation, in warming snowbound regions. But if the Atlantic current gets stopped (as seems likely) then the Earth will warm, making equatorial regions hellish places, while possibly plunging Europe into glaciation because they'll be cut off from warming waters.

It is scary that this film is being screened without corrections, and that lies like these will affect public debate.

We always need dissenting voices. That's how knowledge advances, but we don't need promoters of bald-faced lies propagandising and deliberately sabotaging important debate. I wonder how much money the petroleum industry contributed to this nasty little piece of work.

Here are some links with more info:
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/07/0313pure_propaganda_the.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle
http://www.celsias.com/blog/2007/03/11/the-great-global-warming-swindle/
http://inthegreen.typepad.com/blog/2007/03/deconstructing_.html
http://www.jri.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=137&Itemid=83
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/04/22/swindlers-list/ (thanks peaseblossom)

A bit of background on the sociopathic writer/director of the film:
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2000/03/16/modified-truth/

Here is a report released by the Australian Academy of Science rebutting the film:
http://www.science.org.au/reports/12july07.htm

Comments

[peaseblossom03.livejournal.com]

Un. Fucking. Real.

Australia, if I understand correctly, is already starting to feel some of the big-time effects of global warming in the form of severe droughts. And the makers of this steaming pile honestly think the people of Australia are going to swallow what they feed them?

And as to point the third, this blog talks extensively about it (and is followed by quite a lot of discussion on the matter!).

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. They'll swallow it. I never cease to be amazed at how many Australians believe what the media say. No matter how many times lies are uncovered people come back for more. This is not to say people are stupid (they aren't) just that they have few sources of information available to them. Most people here are working so damn hard they don't have the time or energy to trawl through the internet for data. They unwind in front of the TV after a long hard day. Unfortunately the TV is so slanted I am positively scared of it these days and only see it when I visit my parents.

My Dad is a very smart person who is generally critical of right-wing propaganda (even though he's always believed that capitalism is the great solution), so I can easily gauge the effect of the propaganda when I hear him making weird statements regurgitated from the TV. If it affects him like this just imagine how badly other people fare who have far less defences against aggressive deceit.

It is sometimes quite depressing.

The long term is the only thing that gives me some hope. The anti-global warming proagandists will cause a backlash against themselves in proportion to how successful they are. Hopefully the backlash happens while we still have time to affect the problem. I think it will.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

...and thanks for the link to the blog. I've added it to the main post.
I'm very grateful.

[belegdel.livejournal.com]

Gah.
I presume this garbage is being shown under the mantle of being "fair and balanced".

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Probably. [sigh]

Ever since that right-wing nutcake was appointed by the government as head of the ABC it has taken a real nosedive. It used to be a real thorn in the side of all Australian governments (right-wing and left-wing), but now it largely adopts the propaganda line. Very sad.

I guess it is kind of good that we lose faith in the last of the reliable mass media outlets. We should not trust any of them. Much better to go straight to the source of data. The internet allows that.

One good thing that will come out of the greedy studios' attempts to foist digital TV on the population is that audience size will drop dramatically. Digital TV gives very sharp, clear pictures using far less bandwidth, but only under optimal conditions. Anybody living in the shadow of large buildings or hills or trees, or a little outside the best range, or during bad weather, gets crappy, broken, unreliable pictures. My parents have digital TV and it is a piece of shit. Most of the time it is quite unusable.

All the mass media (newspapers, radio, and TV) have been haemorrhaging audience for some time now. TV has been least affected, but I think digital TV will be its nail in the coffin. Good. :)

[belegdel.livejournal.com]

The internet allows that.

It also supports the rampart re-telling of lies and propagation of mistakes. As an information distribution media, it's totally agnostic as to veracity.
Hence the burden of critical thinking remains with exactly the same individuals who are unable to sort crap from fact on the TV.

On whole I think whilst the internet gets the information out more efficently, effective uptake will remain static.
Then again, I've lived with the internet most of my life. Maybe I don't know what it was like without it. Now there's a "the future is here" thought for the day :)

I'm actually heartened to hear the mass media are losing audience. They deserve nothing less.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

As an information distribution media, it's totally agnostic as to veracity.

Yes. That is the really cool thing about it.

Yes, it's about time the mass media finally self-destructed. There was a big conference of commercial radio stations on the Gold Coast about a year ago addressing the "emergency" of loss of advertising as listeners have stopped listening. They were quite panicked. Notice Packer is moving out of newspapers? He sees the writing on the wall. All around the western world people have been giving up reading newspapers -- they are too unreliable and fear-based. TV has been losing audience too, though mostly in news and current affairs programs, for the same reasons newspapers are losing their audience. Hopefully digital TV will break it.

I see a similar thing happening with DVDs. DVDs are so encumbered people become quite impatient with them. I noticed myself watching low resolution pirated videos of a show that I bought on DVD recently. It amused me to realise it. I preferred to watch the blurry one than the crisp encumbered one. Just watch what happens with BluRay and HD-DVD. They are so bogged down in locks that I don't think it will take people long to give up on them.

Locked ebooks have never taken off. It looks like people are finally realising that when you buy a locked ebook you can guarantee that you will, sooner or later, get locked out of it. How many people want to buy a book under those circumstances?

[idealistagain.livejournal.com]

You will be told, for instance, that volcanoes produce 100 times more CO2 than human activity, but that is simply not true. Volcanoes barely even register on CO2 graphs, whereas human effect is obvious.

Oh jeez, are you seriously telling me that that idiotic piece of garbage is still going around???? I first read this in a book by Rush Limbaugh over ten years ago and its been thoroughly debunked since then. *headdesk*

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Wow! It's that old? Clearly the sociopath who wrote/directed Swindle knew what he was doing and it was no simple "mistake".

[idealistagain.livejournal.com]

Yeah, its that old. If you pick up a copy of "The Way Things Ought To Be" by Rush Limbaugh, he makes this claim in his chapter about global warming. It was copyrighted in 1993. He even goes into more ridiculous details. While I can't recall exactly since its been so long since I've read the book, there was something along the lines of him claiming that a volcano in Indonesia released more carbon dioxide in one eruption than the total of all carbon emissions by humans since the start of the Industrial revolution.

I was in high school then and even being that young, I could recognize how utterly absurd this stupidity really was, so I'm not sure why people still fall for it. Actually, in an intellectual sense, I'd be rather interested in finding out where this claim originated, because I highly doubt that Limbaugh is bright enough to have come up with it on his own.

Balancing?

[(Anonymous)]

Do you feel slightly different now that the ABC is slotting in a debate about the documentary afterwards where the producer will (hopefully) be put on the spot - and his critics will be able to speak their piece.

(I suspect this is a response to the harsh criticism the ABC has received for choosing to show this "doco.")

Cheers, MFG

Re: Balancing?

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Not really. :(
There are far too many ways to mislead and confound proper debate in such a forum. All they need do is do the creationists' trick of rapid-fire throwing in many, many questions that can be as dopey and irrelevant as they desire. Anybody who tries to answer them will be led on an unsatisfactory merry-go-round and still leave the audience with the feeling that the irrational questioner must have a point, just simply because of the number of the questions. In the end the anti-climate change people will have their say and there will not be enough time to dispose of their points properly.

Also it depends on the moderator being extremely intelligent and totally impartial. They need to be able to cut short misleading bullshit disguised as debate and they need to avoid leaning one way or the other. The anti-climate changers will represent themselves as underdogs, which has powerful psychological effects. If the moderator then favors the side of climate change the nay-sayers will derive strength from it. If the moderator favors the ani-climate changers then the audience will think there is something to the anti- argument.

The odds are stacked badly before it even begins. And that's without considering the possibility that the rich oil and coal lobbies may fill the audience with their people.

I'm quite pessimistic about the whole thing. The ABC shouldn't be touching it. It's a nasty distraction that can seriously damage genuine debate and polarise opinions without adding information. It will provide plenty of heat but little light.