(now being rebranded as ‘climate change’ it seems), Gmail’s keyword advertising suggested this website, The Great Global Warming Swindle, promoting a DVD of:
…an expanded and improved version of the film [of the same name] broadcast in the UK on Channel 4. More interview material has been added, covering a broader range of subjects than was possible in the broadcast film.
The producers note:
It would be nice to claim that the explosion of interest was due to the film itself, but the fuss started even before the film was broadcast. The reason, we suspect, is that the coverage of ‘global warming’, on TV, radio and in the press, has been so one-sided and uncritical. In Britain, hours and hours of programmes have been broadcast by the BBC on the subject, much of it scientifically absurd. The very fact that a science documentary dared to challenge the orthodoxy was itself news.
Why? Why have journalists been so craven or biased? How has a theory which demonstrably lacks really solid supporting evidence become an indisputable fact? What of the impressive, much talked about scientific ‘consensus’ which is used to forestall any awkward questions about the evidence?
The film made a humble stab at suggesting some possible answers, but there was limited space for these bigger questions. The whole global warming alarm, we believe, raises serious issues about the way science functions in the real world, about the political bias of scientists, about censorship within the scientific community itself, 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 which directly contradicts it, about the elevation of speculation (models) to the level of solid data, and much else besides.
(emphasis added).
The site is fairly minimalist just now, but contains some interesting material. The site, and the expanded version of the film, will be worth keeping an eye on – especially for all you Beeboids out there needing a demonstration of how to produce inquiring and challenging documentaries, rather than your current one-sided propaganda, described by Jeremy Paxman as having “abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago” (see side bar).
Andrew writes: “Apropos of recent posts here about the BBC’s coverage of global warming (now being rebranded as ‘climate change’ it seems),”.
No, Andrew. It is being rebranded as “MAN MADE climate change”. Do try to keep up with Al Bore. This tobacco farmer’s entire bid for the White House is based on this fantasy. MAN MADE. Plus, of course, he is making major bucks not just out of OXY, but his new trading company which deals in ofsetting “carbon footprints”. I know. I fell down on the floor laughing and had to haul myself up to finish typing this post.
I wonder if Al can sell me an offset of my keyboard carbon fingerprints? But don’t laugh. He was a has-been and he came up with carbon footprints (and $10m or so to have his book written and publicised) and now he is a player in the US elections again.
Come election time, it’ll be carbon hanging chads.
The link to the GGWS is extremely informative and well-linked itself. Whilst perusing, I found:
Click to access McKitrick-hockeystick.pdf
which not only explains how the hockey-stick theory was debunked but also how ‘scientists’ perverted the science. If scientists can do that, just imagine what ignorant journos would do – sorry, are doing: see BBC.
Any “deviant” report is attacked as having been funded by Big Oil.
Eureferendum highlights this about the BBC favourite impartial experts, the Friends of the Earth –
Friends of the Earth Europe, the group pre-eminent in lobbying the EU for tighter controls to combat global warming, received €635,000 in funding from the EU commission last year.
That, with additional funds from German, Austrian and Dutch ministries of environment, plus contributions from the United Nations Environment Programme, accounted for over fifty percent of the group’s income, making it primarily a taxpayer-funded organisation.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2007/07/eu-pays-to-be-lobbied-on-global-warming.html
I note that it was a Channel 4 programme “Dispatches” which dealt with the problematical (and, some would say, crooked) question of carbon “footprint” trading etc. The BBC doesn’t consider any doubt of its worth – let alone its “scientific” underpinning – worthy of comment.
Recent data released by NASA (sorry, no link) show that global average temperature readings appear to have reached a plateau and the heat-sink effect of the oceans will be lessening within a decade. I think that there may be a complete collapse in the credibility and employability of many of the great and good very soon.
The study found that global warming since 1985 has been caused neither by an increase in solar radiation nor by a decrease in the flux of galactic cosmic rays. Some researchers had also suggested that the latter might influence global warming because the rays trigger cloud formation. I am find a blog which give some useful information on Global Warming.
You know, I really like this blog and I agree with 95% of what I read here. I’m conservative, anti-big government and libertarian-inclined. I strongly dislike the prevailing culture at the BBC.
What I just don’t get is the hostility among otherwise right-thinking people towards the notion of climate change as the result of human activity.
There’s no absolute proof outside of mathematics. I can prove that the square of the hypotenuse of a right-handed triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. But nobody will ever finally prove that, say, the moon controls the tides or gravity will still work this time next Tuesday.
So the human causes of climate change hypothesis can never be proved, in the same way we can’t “prove” that the planes fly because of the physics of aerodynamics and pressure rather than because they’re pulled along by invisible fairies. In both cases it’s simply the case that because the balance of probability is in favour of one hypothesis it makes sense to behave as if that hypothesis is true.
Scientists – including the one I’m married to, who goes on constantly about this – are always prepared to drop a hypothesis if a stronger one comes along. That’s how science works. At the moment, the balance of probabilities seems to suggest that the rise in global temperatures we’re experiencing is the result of human activity.
Even if that hypothesis were much shakier than it is – if, say the scientific community were split 50/50 on the issue, which it isn’t – then it makes sense to take it seriously and be cautious about greenhouse emissions, simply because the stakes are so high.
I have no axe to grind. I’ve just looked at the evidence available and come to a rational conclusion.
Does that make me a thick, gullible, authoritarian leftie?
Please keep it civil in here. Abusive comments will be deleted.
Bill H
There are many reasons why Righties go on about GW/CC, one is that the solutions offered are dictated by the left and involve the usual state solutions so beloved by them. This is why the left detests Lomborg, he accepts that it is happening but sees different solutions.
On a more pertinent point to this blog, there is an endless stream of propoganda, where every odd weather effect is blamed on GW/CC by unqualified presenters, and much of it originates from the BBC. Counter-arguments are rarely presented and are normally followed by ad-hominen attacks.
Peregrine:
Agreed absolutely. I’ve already heard intelligent people blaming this month’s bad weather on “global warming”, and I think that sort of thinking is directly inspired by the kind of propaganda that the BBC pumps out.
I think part of the problem is the cultural divide between the arts and sciences in education. There are more arts grads than science grads at the BBC, and among arts grads wilful misunderstanding and simplification of science is seen as almost cool. I’m not a scientist banging and anti-arts drum here (my degree is in English Lit), but I think the “two cultures” problem lies at the root of the kind of the simplistic propaganda the BBC produces.
I think part of the problem is that individuals of a statist inclination see GW as an ideal vehicle for their other ideas. I think most Beeb liberals aren’t motivated by the science – they just use it as a tool to bash the SUV-owning rich.
What keeps me awake at night is that I accept the science and I don’t know how to address human-originated GW without state intervention. On the balance of probabilities I outlined in my original post, I think it’s a problem that MUST be addressed. But how do we do it without waking up Leviathan?
Bill
It is not only an arts/science clash but a social science/hard science clash. Most of the reports that create news reports in the mornings on the BBC are from social scientists (and to an extent I include epidemiologists in this). Hard science is hard to understand and breakthroughs are limited, also when they are claimed, such as for cold-fusion, too often further research shows them to be limited (or in the case of cold-fusion non-existent). It simply does not make easy and quick to make news, therefore it is mostly ignored.
Peregrine:
what’s your take on the various comments/links here concerning suppression of “inconvenient” (to MMGW supporters) data?
Most of the scientists I know – who, admittedly, are on the hard side of things – tend to consider social sciences a bastardised branch of the arts anyway. I’ve never felt qualified to judge, but there are certainly some strong feelings at work.
Like amimissingsomething, I’d be interested in your thoughts on the inconvenient data.
Bill Hilton, what on earth makes you – or the scientist you are married to – think that the science is on the side of the AGW alarmists ?
fFreddy:
Bearing in mind that “think” in this context doesn’t mean “convinced”, it means “consider to be true on the balance of probabilities”:
She says…(here goes..)
“…it’s something to do with the thousands of peer-reviewed papers from specialists who know the science far better than I do (I’m a physical oceanographer by training, so related to the field of climate, but not directly so), and the fact that among those specialists the consensus is very strongly in favour of the hypothesis that global warming has its roots in human activity.
“It’s sloppy thinking to talk about ‘the science’ as if it’s a monolithic set of facts. The weight of scientific opinion supports man-made GW, but there are dissenting voices. We should act to curb the sources of global warming because if the majority of specialists in the field are right (as seems likely) we stand to be in a lot of trouble if we do nothing. If we act and the majority opinion turns out to be wrong, it has cost money and hassle, but the loss we would suffer is orders of magnitude less than if we did nothing and the majority opinion turned out to be right.”
I suppose I (a non-scientists) could argue that the scientists are blinding us with their science, and that we can’t really trust them because they’re hiding behind the authority of their white coats. I just don’t see what interest so many of them would have in misleading us. Cui bono? They can’t all be in the pay of the people who make B&Q solar panels.
There is plenty of evidence that humans do things to ruin the environment locally, and there is even evidence that human activity, such as shopping mall and tarmac sprawl, can have a minimal affect on local weather patterns. But the key word with all this evidence is “local”. For example, there was a time when heavily congested industry and a densely packed population had an adverse affect on London – all the soot in the air. However, the climate of the rest of the world was not affected. Same goes for the rise in humidity in central Arizona due to all the man-made bodies of water, lawns, and non-indigenous trees. No effect on the weather in the rest of the US.
Honest science does not really support that anything humans do has a real affect on the big picture. The other, more serious problem with all this, is that many of the angriest agitators behind the religion of MMGW (aside from the wealthy celebrity poseurs) are nothing less than neo-Marxists. Behind the facade of all the green posturing is the desire to bring society back to a pre-industrial, agrarian level. That’s the real danger of letting this religion spread unchallenged.
Aside from all this, if one tenth the energy spent on the evangelizing of the MMGW religion was spent wrangling with local solutions, you’d get a lot more actually accomplished.
But the BBC and the evangelists aren’t interested in that. They’re all about bashing anyone that doesn’t toe the line. Just like in this little article on some local efforts in California.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6288172.stm
The Leftoids are quoted unchallenged, and community pledges and estimates are taken as done deals.
Nobody is asked what might happen to the environment when vast amounts of land are cleared to grow the crops that will be used to make all that biofuel everyone will want. It seems that Burger King and the like will produce enough second-hand oil for all of us.
There is, naturally, the obligatory Bush bashing, by nature if not by name. When repeating hearsay about the customer demographics of an all-female cooperative selling bio-diesel, the BBC reporter tells us:
“Many are strongly opposed to the war in Iraq and want to sever any link with a conflict they believe is motivated by desire for oil, and with a government they say is closely tied to the oil industry.”
With this, the BBC’s Sam Wilson has killed two birds with one article, no?
Physical oceanography should mean that Mrs Hilton is a real scientist. So I am disappointed that she seems to be happy to take the word of a bunch of perceived specialists, rather than looking into it herself.
A few years ago, I heard dear little Moira Stewart read out one of these propaganda pieces declaring that “the debate is over, at least for rational people”. (From some twit at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, as I recall.) This struck me as such a blatantly unscientific thing to say that I started looking into the subject and the scientific papers, and found absolutely nothing that I found really persuasive, and an awful lot whose only link with GW was a statement somewhere that “this is consistent with AGW”. It was also consistent with Martians heating us up with interplanetary heat rays. This is not science.
Look also at the number of these papers that are based on shockingly misapplied statistics. You do remember the assertion we used to hear ad nauseam about “the 1990s were likely the warmest decade of the second millenium, and 1998 likely the warmest year” ? Have you noticed that you haven’t heard that for the last year or so ? That is because it was entirely based on a couple of peer-reviewed papers that used novel statistical techniques that were totally bogus, on a dataset that was totally bogus. The authors spent several years refusing to show their data and workings – a common problem in climatology – when other people started saying there is something wrong with it. Last summer, Congress asked the chairman of t he ~American Association for the Advancement of Science’s chairman of the committee on applied and theoretical statistics (a guy called Edward Wegman) to review the papers and the criticisms. He came down firmly with the critics, which is why you no longer hear about the “warmest decade, blah…”
I feel a long rant coming on, but there is probably no point: I am just some guy on a blog, and there is no reason you should believe me. I urge you to look into this stuff yourself.
Some starting points, if you like :
http://www.surfacestations.org
http://www.climateaudit.org
http://climatesci.colorado.edu/
http://www.oism.org/oism/lecture/viewer/lectureplayer.htm
While I don’t blame you, as an Eng Lit guy, for relying on your significant other, as a science guyette, for scientific opinions, I must respectfully suggest that she should use her scientific training to go and look at the source data and come to her own opinion. If she is just relying on BBC News reading out press releases from Friends of the Earth, then her opinion is no more scientific than yours.
Bill Hilton,
Thanks for your contributions to his discussion.
I am from a science background (MSc in engineering). I note that real science is concerned with absolute truths. These exist independently from human investigations – we have discovered some of them, are on the way to discovering some more, and are looking in the wrong places for others. There is no guarantee we will ever find them all.
Note that nowhere does the idea of a “majority” enter into this search.
Knowing zero about the budding science of climate study, but lots about the scientific appproach, I view a lot of stuff with scepticism. Al Gore for example is not a scientist – he is a has-been politician.
I note that most of this rubbish is coming from the left – its just another attempt to impose top-down policies and tax the hell out of us in support of some kind of “greater good”.
Even if you agree with the hypothesis that we have man-made climate change, there are still several big assumptions:
(1) We broke it so we can fix it.
(2) The current lefty ideas are the only solution and we should stop loooking for other ideas.
Jack:
I would – respectfully, given your training – suggest that perhaps a better way of putting that might be to say that science is concerned with the *search* for absolute truths. As I understand it, any scientific theory can only, in epistimological (sp?) terms, be considered provisional -a better explanation may come along. So, for example, Newtonian physics seemed pretty sound until Einstein rolled up.
Again, you probably know far more about that than I do.
fFreddy:
She’s studying her hydrodynamics in the bath with Jane Austen at the moment, but I’ll certainly point her in the direction of those links. I doubt you’ll change her mind – she has read a lot of the literature, I think – but she’d be the first to agree with you that claims that the debate is “over for rational people” are ridiculous.
In general, one of the things that bothers me is that among the arguments of rightwing commentators – and I should stress that the right is my natural political home – there seems to be some sort of category error at work: “I dislike lefties, lefties believe in MMGW, therefore MMGW is fallacious.”
Equally, as I noted earlier, on the left I think there’s an opposite strain of thinking that sees MMGW as a great way to bash the rich.
Clearly you guys are a long way above that class of thought. But I find it very hard to separate the arguments from the politics on both sides.
Pleasure debating with you, by the way 🙂
fFreddy:
I should also say, I’ll have a look at them myself! Only right now, after four cans of Stella, is probably not the right time to be absorbing information.
~B
Bill H:
“Peer Review” see Prof. Brignell’s comments referenced in Greenie Watch http://antigreen.blogspot.com/ (scroll down to Friday). Much else there besides.
I used to be a MMGW believer a few years ago until I found a site called numberwatch.co.uk where I read how statistics worked – or didn’t in the case of the modern media.
The true mathematical engineering type understands that it doesn’t matter how many people tell you you are wrong, its the proof that matters. Yours young arty type only works with opinions and are proud not to be able to use a calculator!
Considering that the media is full of people who talk about themselves and think critical thinking is a bad review is it any wonder that a lobby group looking for funding is able to manipulate the whole debate so easily?!
Bill Hilton: First, thank you for your thoughtful and civil comment, and follow-up comments.
In that spirit, let me suggest you read this disclaimer that I add to all my posts on global warming. Since I wrote it, I have seen three things that strengthen the mixed message in that disclaimer.
1. It is not clear how good our surface measurements of temperature are:
2. Climate change is chaotic; that is, it is inherently unpredictable, according to the IPCC.
3. Freeman Dyson, a pretty good scientist, says the climate models are inadequate to predict future climates.
(I’ve discussed all of these points on my web site.)
Finally, let me repeat something I said in that disclaimer: The actions of those who claim to fear global warming are often inconsistent with that claim. For example, former vice president Al Gore has yet to favor a switch to nuclear power. (Though President Bush has, and justified it because of fears of global warming.)
Jim:
Thanks for the link: interesting and compelling stuff.
Part of my rationale for accepting, as a layman, the probably truth of MMGW theories is a kind of Pascal’s God argument: i.e., we might as well believe in it, because if we don’t and we’re wrong the consequences don’t bear thinking about. (I should say, I don’t believe in God on the basis on Pascal’s – joking – logic, but it’s a different category of argument).
So the notion that any global warming that happens not necessarily being a bad thing is an interesting one. What was the situation in the Middle Ages with sea levels? Did the ice caps retreat and levels rise, or was the warming confined to certain areas rather than being truly global?
The “America as net consumer of CO2” argument is also interesting. I thought – and I could be wrong – that the problem with carbon sinks, whether they’re forests or farms, is that they only tie up the CO2 for a relatively short period of time. When the carbon is underground, in oil and coal, it’s stored permanently. When we burn fossil fuels we may then capture the carbon again, but only in a temporary loop as plants grow and are harvested or die. So as we burn more fossil fuels, is it the case that the net amount of carbon within that atmosphere–>carbon sink loop gets steadily greater, meaning we have to create more carbon sinkage to deal with it?
Like I said, I could be wrong – so I’d be very interested to hear your further views.
~B
Bill,
If your wife’s an oceanographer, she should be aware that, contrary to what many environmentalists have been claiming for a few decades, sea levels are not rising.
> it’s something to do with the thousands of peer-reviewed papers from specialists who know the science far better than I do
Trouble is, we keep hearing of cases of what happens to proper scientists, such as Lomborg, who try to have their paper peer-reviewed and published. There are scientists whose demands that their names be removed from the IPCC report are refused by the IPCC. Scientists have received death threats merely for speaking their opinions on a documentary. We know that, in the case of climatology, some of the mechanisms which can make a scientific consensus trustworthy are badly broken.
> among the arguments of rightwing commentators … there seems to be some sort of category error at work: “I dislike lefties, lefties believe in MMGW, therefore MMGW is fallacious.”
No, that’s not it: it’s not that left-wingers happen to believe in AGW, but that they use AGW to push left-wing policies. Which implies the answer to:
> I just don’t see what interest so many of them would have in misleading us. Cui bono?
Anyone who wants to see certain types of government intervention made more powerful. There are a lot of such people.
For the record, my problem with AGW is purely academic: I’m a computer programmer with a degree in maths, logic, and philosophy of science, and so I am very aware of the limitations of mathematical models — that’s not just contingent limitations of the current computer models, but fundamental theoretical limitations of all models. I agree with Richard Feynman that using models to generate data — a practice that has become rife in climatology — is simply wrong.
But as for the politics, well, let’s, for the sake of argument, say that it’s all true. What should we do to avert disaster? Well, handily enough, a huge experiment has already been done for us. What the researchers did was they split the whole of Europe in two and tried Capitalism on one side and Communism on the other for fifty years. Then they tested air samples and water samples and other indicators from both sides. The results were not even slightly ambiguous: state control utterly wrecks the environment while freedom and capitalism, with the odd hiccup, don’t. This modern idea that the way to protect the environment is to force massive state control on people’s behaviour is exactly contrary to the available evidence.
> If we act and the majority opinion turns out to be wrong, it has cost money and hassle, but the loss we would suffer is orders of magnitude less than if we did nothing and the majority opinion turned out to be right.
I don’t think your wife has fully considered the implications of things costing us money and hassle. In Europe and the US, it’s easy to be blase about these things. For most of the world, though, that cost in money and hassle can also be measured in death.
> we might as well believe in it, because if we don’t and we’re wrong the consequences don’t bear thinking about.
You might consider that the Precautionary Principle, properly understood, is self-denying.
I’ve been meaning to do a big blog-post about the long-term scope of purely statistical predictions of physical systems for ages now. Must get round to it. The short version is: it can’t be done for complex systems.
Bill and Pascal’s God
You’re talking about the precautionary principle. Trouble is, what about my theory that a dragon is going to fly out of the sun and kill us all in 2013 if by then we haven’t all converted to the cult of squirrel worship?
New Scientist are already talking about releasing huge quantities of sulphur dioxide into the air to counteract supposed global warming.
Bill
You ask what was the situation in the middle ages I suggest you look at http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/Index.jsp
there are many scientific papers that show that the warm period was world wide, both the medieval and Roman warm periods were times when man did much better than during ice age periods. This is why I call myself a warming optimist rather than a sceptic.
Most of the predictions that the MMGW people put out is incredibly pessimistic, but we don’t even know what the optimum temperature of the world is!
With regard to the Carbon sink, Henry’s Law says that there will be 50 times more carbon dioxide in the ocean than in the air.
Imagine a coke bottle, there is 50 times more Carbon dioxide in the liquid than in the air gap at 25 degrees C, if you warm the liquid, more goes into the air gap and if you cool the liquid, more goes back into the liquid which is why most people like their coke or beer cold. The ocean is the same which is why some scientists say that the currant solar warming of the ocean is causing more carbon dioxide in the air rather than the comparatively small amount that man is releasing. Man only releases about 3% of the natural carbon cycle of 216 gigatonnes every year.
The Carbon dioxide in the ocean combines with the calcium in some plankton and forms Calcium Carbonate or Chalk and limestone, hence the white cliffs of Dover and most of southern England from when sea levels were much above today.
If as quite a few Solar scientists think that the sun is going back into a quieter period, the oceans will gradually cool again and more Carbon Dioxide will be sequestered back into the ocean lowering air concentrations, without us doing anything.
Well, I’ve been educated – thanks very much.
I’m going to have to look into some of the links here before I make my mind up one way or the other. One of the problems of climate change is that it’s hard work having an opinion when you’re a non-scientist. There’s a debate in itself – as a non-scientist, do I have a right to an opinion?
Jonathan: I have to pick you up on one thing. Pascal had prima facie evidence for the existence of God – an apparently (to his eyes) designed universe. There is, at least, a prima facie case for MMGW.
I’d love to see your prima facie case for squirrel worship.
Though as soon as it stops raining I’m going to go out and leave some nuts under the trees for my furry masters. Just in case.
Bill Hilton – Thanks for your kind words. Here are a couple of links to remarks by Freeman Dyson on this subject that you might find of interest:
TCS daily interview
UM commencement address
And I should repeat, for those who did not look at my disclaimer, that I am genuinely uncertain on this question.
Knowing a BBC producer I can say that about ten years ago the BBC decided to change its approach to science as new management took over the Newsgathering operation and sacked one excellent science journalist David Whitehouse who went to BBC Online and retired the other James Wilkinson.
I watched with interest the sceptical Whitehouse at News Online follow a sensible course about global warming being the only person in the BBC to publish articles against the ‘mainstream’ But alas I have been told that he was made redundant in the recent cuts. So was silenced a voice of science within the biased beeb.