Swindled!
Filed under: Climate Science Paleoclimate Sun-earth connections Reporting on climate— group @ 5:36 pm
By William and Gavin
On Thursday the 8th, the UK TV Channel 4 aired a programme titled "The Great Global Warming Swindle". We were hoping for important revelations and final proof that we have all been hornswoggled by the climate Illuminati, but it just repeated the usual specious claims we hear all the time. We feel swindled. Indeed we are not the only ones: Carl Wunsch (who was a surprise addition to the cast) was apparently misled into thinking this was going to be a balanced look at the issues (the producers have a history of doing this), but who found himself put into a very different context indeed.
So what did they have to say for themselves?
CO2 doesn't match the temperature record over the 20th C. True but not relevant, because it isn't supposed to. The programme spent a long time agonising over what they presented as a sharp temperature fall for 4 decades from 1940 to 1980 (incidentally their graph looks rather odd and may have been carefully selected; on a more usual (and sourced!) plot the "4 decades of cooling" is rather less evident). They presented this as a major flaw in the theory, which is deeply deceptive, because as they and their interviewees must know, the 40-70 cooling type period is readily explained, in that the GCMs are quite happy to reproduce it, as largely caused by sulphate aerosols. See this for a wiki-pic, for example; or (all together now) the IPCC TAR SPM fig 4; or more up-to-date AR4 fig 4. So... they are lying to us by omission.
The troposphere should warm faster than the sfc, say the models and basic theory. As indeed it does - unless you're wedded to the multiply-corrected Spencer+Christy version of the MSU series. Christy (naturally enough) features in this section, though he seems to have forgotten the US CCSP report, and the executive summary which he authored says Previously reported discrepancies between the amount of warming near the surface and higher in the atmosphere have been used to challenge the reliability of climate models and the reality of human induced global warming. Specifically, surface data showed substantial global-average warming, while early versions of satellite and radiosonde data showed little or no warming above the surface. This significant discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been identified and corrected. New data sets have also been developed that do not show such discrepancies. See-also previous RC posts.
Temperature leads CO2 by 800 years in the ice cores. Not quite as true as they said, but basically correct; however they misinterpret it. The way they said this you would have thought that T and CO2 are anti-correlated; but if you overlay the full 400/800 kyr of ice core record, you can't even see the lag because its so small. The correct interpretation of this is well known: that there is a T-CO2 feedback: see RC again for more.
All the previous parts of the programme were leading up to "so if it isn't CO2, what is it?" to which their answer is "solar". The section was curiously weak, and largely lead by pictures of people on beaches. It was somewhat surprising that they didn't feature Svensmark at all; other stuff we've commented on before. Note that the graph they used as "proof" of the excellent solar-T connection turns out to have some problems: see figure 1c of Damon and Laut.
Along the way the programme ticked off most of the other obligatory skeptic talking points: even down to Medieval English vineyards and that old favourite, volcanoes emitting more CO2 than humans.
It ended with politics, with a segment blaming the lack of African development on the environmental movement. We don't want to get into the politics, but should point out what the programme didn't: that Kyoto exempts developing nations.
[Also: other discussion at InTheGreen, Stoat and The Guardian.]
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Distortions are hardly suprising. This programme was not a scientific documentary in any normal sense: it was a piece of political polemic.
The writer and presenter of the programme was Martin Durkin who is closely affiliated with the Revolutionary Communist Party which has a strong ideological opposition to environmental science. In 1997 Channel Four was forced to issue its first ever broadcast apology over extreme editing distortions in a similar series knocking environmentalism. It is a great shame that Carl Wunsch and the other legitimate scientists in the programme did not do a quick web search on Durkin before agreeing to contribute
There was only one scientific advisor on the programme, Martin Livermore, whose sole scientific qualification is that he is the Director of a web-based think tank, The Scientific Alliance. The Alliance was set up by in 2001 by Robert Durward, the fiercely anti-green director of the British Aggregates Association, and Foresight Communications, a Westminster public relations and lobbying company, to "counter scare-mongering by the so-called green lobby". The Scientific Alliance has no affiliation with any recognised scientific body but, like most of the contributors to the programme, it does have very strong links with the US public relations and lobbying organisations that have been so effective in setting the Bush agenda on climate change.
Many of the people who appeared on the programme were captioned to institutions and universities that they left years ago in order to pursue their political campaigning work: Fred Singer, Patrick Michaels, Philip Stott and Tim Ball are among them. Richard Lindzen is a practising scientist, but a highly politicised and criticised one. All of them have close associations with the Washington public relations and lobby groups that front for the fossil fuel companies and the libertarian right (whose ideology is often strangely indistinguishable from the Revolutionary Communists. Strange things happen at the political extremes).
Is it any surprise then, that these "scientists" were so persuasive. Most of the people on the programme are professional communicators who are more familiar with the chat show than the lab. Of course they give good interviews - it is what they do for a living.
And let us not forget that they are effective because they have a very willing audience. We would all like to believe them. Wouldn't it be wonderful to believe that the science is unsettled, that all that carbon dioxide that we are pumping into the atmosphere really has no effect, and that we do not have to worry about the future.
I believe it is crucial that Wunsch, other distorted contributors and the scientific community as a whole puts in a formal complaint to the Channel Four and the Independent Television Commission. Please don't leave it to the NGOs to stand up for your science.
This is an except from a longer analysis of the track record and associations of the contributors to this programme on www.climatedenial.org Please visit the site and contribute to the growing discussion.
Comment by George Marshall — 10 Mar 2007 @ 3:01 am
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