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The Anti-Gore

Brit filmmaker to Gore: “Bollocks!” 

Britain’s Channel 4, the people who brought you the assassination of George Bush, are batting from the other side of the plate now with a documentary debunking the greenhouse effect:  

‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ - backed by eminent scientists - is set to rock the accepted consensus that climate change is being driven by humans.

The programme, to be screened on Channel 4 on Thursday March 8, will see a series of respected scientists attack the “propaganda” that they claim is killing the world’s poor.

… Controversial director Martin Durkin said: ” … I think this is a turning point and in five years the idea that the greenhouse effect is the main reason behind global warming will be seen as total bollocks.

“Al Gore might have won an Oscar for ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, but the film is very misleading and he has got the relationship between CO2 and climate change the wrong way round.”

One major piece of evidence of CO2 causing global warming are ice core samples from Antarctica, which show that for hundreds of years, global warming has been accompanied by higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

In ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ Al Gore is shown claiming this proves the theory, but palaeontologist Professor Ian Clark claims in the documentary that it actually shows the opposite.

… Prof Clark believes increased levels of CO2 are because the Earth is heating up and not the cause. He says most CO2 in the atmosphere comes from the oceans, which dissolve the gas.

When the temperature increases, more gas is released into the atmosphere and when global temperatures cool, more CO2 is taken in. Because of the immense size of the oceans, he said they take time to catch up with climate trends, and this ‘memory effect’ is responsible for the lag.

Scientists in the programme also raise another discrepancy with the official line, showing that most of the recent global warming occurred before 1940, when global temperatures then fell for four decades.

It was only in the late 1970s that the current trend of rising temperatures began.

This, claim the sceptics, is a flaw in the CO2 theory, because the post-war economic boom produced more CO2 and should, according to the consensus, have meant a rise in global temperatures.

… Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London , who also features in the film warned the issue was too complex to be down to one single factor, whether CO2 or clouds.

He said: “The greenhouse effect theory worried me from the start because you can’t say that just one factor can have this effect. The system is too complex to say exactly what the effect of cutting back on CO2 production would be, or indeed of continuing to produce CO2. It’s ridiculous to see politicians arguing over whether they will allow the global temperature to rise by 2C or 3C.”

Mr Stott said the film could mark the point where scientists advocating the greenhouse effect theory, began to lose the argument. ”It is a brave programme at the moment to give excluded voices their say, and maybe it is just the beginning. At the moment, there is almost a McCarthyism movement in science where the greenhouse effect is like a puritanical religion and this is dangerous.”

Topics: warmalism

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:40 pm on Sunday, March 4, 2007

10 Responses to “The Anti-Gore”

1. davidp Says:
   March 5th, 2007 at 1:17 am

   I am disappointed to see you publicizing anti-IPCC propaganda. I hope you will consider the issue of the reality of CO2 induced global climate change on its scientific merits, without being influenced by objections to most of the proposed responses.

   This film just a product of the small coterie of ’skeptics’, mostly not experts in global climate. It is not “set to rock the accepted consensus…” because it’s saying nothing which has not repeatedly been claimed and widely publicized.
   These people are keen to claim the suppressed martyr/outcast label. I look in the Australian media and I see the ’skeptics’ far more than their numbers or scientific rigor justify. I suspect that’s true in the US as well.

   Prof Clark’s claim “most CO2 in the atmosphere comes from the oceans, which dissolve the gas” is misleading. Does he think the majority of climatologists have ignored the oceans? They know the temperature and CO2 absorption effects of the ocean and take them into account. CO2 goes into and out of the oceans. At present the ocean is a net CO2 absorber.

   The claim that “most of the recent global warming occurred before 1940, when global temperatures then fell for four decades” is incorrect. The 5 year mean warming prior to 1940 was 0.3 degrees over 30 years. The warming from 1970 was 0.5 degrees over 35 years, which is significantly more. The 5 year mean cooling from the mid 40’s was 0.15 degrees. during the ‘cool’ period, sulfur and other aerosol emissions from industry increased cloud cover, cooling the surface. This effect has also been taken into account by the majority of climatologists.

   Prof Stott “warned the issue was too complex to be down to one single factor, whether CO2 or clouds.” It’s too hard for the professor emeritus, but people have been working hard at the problem and analysis of the different impacts for 20 years. That’s why the IPCC has given a more confident assessment now than 5 years ago. Prof Stott’s position is that we can’t be certain of the effects of what we do, so do nothing. This would be OK if we weren’t already doing quite a lot to climate by burning rapidly increasing amounts of fossil carbon.

   From the linked article, “Gary Calder, a former editor of New Scientist, is featured in the program, and has just released a book claiming that clouds are the real reason behind climate change. ” Clouds are carefully considered by the IPCC. Gary Calder’s book is about cosmic ray induced clouds. Of the neccessary chain of effects for this to be significant, only the first link has yet got any evidence - cosmic rays can cause very small condensation nuclei, in a region where there are lots of condensation nuclei anyway. A group of scientists are doing some fine physics about cosmic rays. Calder and Svensmark are hyping that into the “true cause of global warming”. (Incidentally they seem to directly contradict Stott’s “it’s to complex to be down to one single factor”)

   As described by the article, this program will be about as responsible and high-quality as “Death of a President”

2. Bill's Bites Says:
   March 5th, 2007 at 1:37 am

   The Inconvenient Truth About A Snake Oil Salesman

   UK Documentary: The Great Global Warming Swindle Kim Priestap A documentary set to air in the UK on Thursday, March 8th will say that man made global warming is nothing but a bunch of lies. Accepted theories about man causing

3. Old War Dogs Says:
   March 5th, 2007 at 1:40 am

   Bill’s Nibbles // Open Post — 2007.03.04

   Some Bill’s Bites posts, some things I excerpted and linked but I’m sending you to the original post. I may rearrange the order of the items within this post as I add new things that I think belong above the

4. saltydog Says:
   March 5th, 2007 at 5:47 am

   Oh dear. We have a believer. Pass the plate.

   And for the record: I believe that those looking for a piece of the funding pie will ignore any particular aspect of the climate, be it the oceans, the sun, the dynamism of the earth’s atmosphere–as opposed to the static “greenhouse” used in modeling–and any number of other factors I’ve seen them leave out.

   If you follow the viros money train, it is easy to see exactly what the consensus is, and why.

   And no, I’m not interested in one more useless debate here on Crittenden’s superior blog. Waste of bandwidth. The facts are the facts, but the interpretation and use of the information is being used for a political agenda that has nothing to do with science. Truth is not determined by consensus.

5. The_Real_JeffS Says:
   March 5th, 2007 at 10:42 am

   This film just a product of the small coterie of ’skeptics’, mostly not experts in global climate.

   That’s cool, the IPCC was prepared by bureaucrats, not any “experts in global climate”.

   BTW, nice touch with the quotes around “skeptic”…….it makes me think that you tried to avoid that highly negative term “denialist”. Musta hurt to do that, eh?

6. S. Weasel Says:
   March 5th, 2007 at 10:56 am

   The Professor Stott mentioned has a very interesting blog Envirospin Watch. The Australian Greenie Watch is good, too.

7. S. Weasel Says:
   March 5th, 2007 at 2:13 pm

   Oh, dear. I put links in my post, so I guess the spam filter et it. In case it doesn’t come back, I was advocating Professor Stott’s blog, which you can damn well google for because I don’t want to go back in the lint trap: Envirospin Watch.

8. saltydog Says:
   March 5th, 2007 at 2:38 pm

   JunkScience.com is also a superior site, and not just about environmental frauds.

9. wf Says:
   March 5th, 2007 at 2:57 pm

   saltydog, don´t believe the hype! There IS no waste of bandwidth - it´s a renewable resource. When we run out of it, we just buy more! Just what you would expect, after all the internets were invented by The Reverend Al Gore.

10. davidp Says:
    March 12th, 2007 at 7:19 pm

    Carl Wunsch, professor of physical oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shown in the film now says:

    The Great Global Warming Swindle, was ‘grossly distorted’ and ‘as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two’.

    In the part of the “Swindle” film where I am describing the fact that the ocean tends to expel carbon dioxide where it is warm, and to absorb it where it is cold, my intent was to explain that warming the ocean could be dangerous—because it is such a gigantic reservoir of carbon. By its placement in the film, it appears that I am saying that since carbon dioxide exists in the ocean in such large quantities, human influence must not be very important — diametrically opposite to the point I was making — which is that global warming is both real and threatening in many different ways, some unexpected.

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