No Chance IPCC Will End Skeptics' Bleats - 90-Minute "Documentary" To Say It's All A Hoax

[hatrack]

EDIT

But at least, or so we are told, the argument over whether or not manmade climate change is happening is now over. On Friday the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change publishes the first installment of its vast report, which collates the findings of the world's climate scientists. Though conservative in its assumptions, it shows that if you persist in believing that there is no cause for concern, you must have buried your head till only your toes are showing. If even Bush now grudgingly acknowledges that there's a problem, surely we've seen the last of the cranks and charlatans who had managed to grab so much attention with their claims that global warming wasn't happening?

Some chance. A company called Wag TV is currently completing a 90-minute documentary for Channel 4 called The Great Global Warming Swindle. Manmade climate change, the channel tells us, is "a lie ... the biggest scam of modern times. The truth is that global warming is a multibillion-dollar worldwide industry: created by fanatically anti-industrial environmentalists; supported by scientists peddling scare stories to chase funding; and propped up by complicit politicians and the media ... The fact is that CO2 has no proven link to global temperatures ... solar activity is far more likely to be the culprit."

So it's the same old conspiracy theory we've been hearing from the denial industry for 10 years, and it carries as much scientific weight as the contention that the twin towers were brought down by missiles. The programme's thesis revolves around the deniers' favourite canard: that the "hockey-stick graph" showing rising global temperatures is based on a statistical mistake made in a paper by the scientists Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes. What it will not be showing is that their results have been repeated several times by other scientists using different statistical methods; that the paper claiming to have exposed the mistake has been comprehensively debunked; and that the lines of evidence used by Mann, Bradley and Hughes are just a few among hundreds demonstrating that 20th-century temperatures were anomalous.

The decision to commission this programme seems even odder when you discover who is making it. In 1997 the director, Martin Durkin, produced a similar series for Channel 4 called Against Nature, which also maintained that global warming was a scam dreamed up by environmentalists. It was riddled with hilarious scientific howlers. More damagingly, the only way in which Durkin could sustain his thesis was to deceive the people he interviewed and edit their answers to change their meaning. After complaints by his interviewees, the Independent Television Commission found that "the views of the four complainants, as made clear to the interviewer, had been distorted by selective editing" and that they had been "misled as to the content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part". Channel 4 was obliged to broadcast one of the most humiliating primetime apologies it has made. Are institutional memories really so short?

EDIT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2001694,00.html

[Jackpine Radical]

1. A fascinating study in projection.

The corporate shills are so evil and bereft of conscience that they assume everyone else is similarly motivated. They know why they're saying what they do, so they assume everyone else is as venal as they are.

[YankeyMCC]

2. Un-Effing-believable

:banghead:

[phantom power]

3. No doubt they'll interview Michael Crichton.

[redqueen]

4. I disagree.

Surely it won't end any paid skeptics' bleats... and sure many with their heads up their asses will applaud this BS (that 30% that still just loooooves the pretzeldent comes to mind)... but I have seen people around here that have been firmly in the "it's not real" camp change their tune in the last couple years... and I'm talking formerly hard-core bushista types.

I would expect that more and more people will realize that the danger is real as events unfold.

[Nihil]

5. Depends on the focus

As you say, it wouldn't end any paid skeptics' bleats but it may well sort out
some of the flock following them ... things like Inconvenient Truth may not convert people
in the first instance but it will at least get them to question or review some of the
previous assumptions given to them by the pro-petrol lobby.

I think a lot more people are starting to realise that the world is not in quite
as healthy a shape as it was when they grew up ... and gradually accepting that their
actions are influencing this change at a rate that will affect their children (if not
themselves).

[hatrack]

6. I think you're probably right

I should have added quotation marks, or said "corpo-climate whores", or something like that.