'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

[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.