Scientist Featured In Movie "Debunking" Warming Says His Work "Completely Misrepresented"

[hatrack]

Gosh, who could possibly have predicted that?

It was the television programme that set out to show that most of the world's climate scientists are misleading us when they say humanity is heating up the Earth by emitting carbon dioxide. And The Great Global Warming Swindle, screened by Channel 4 on Thursday night, convinced many viewers that it is indeed untrue that the gas is to blame for global warming. But now the programme - and the channel - is facing a serious challenge to its own credibility after one of the most distinguished scientists that it featured said his views had been "grossly distorted" by the film, and made it clear that he believed human pollution did warm the climate.

Professor Carl Wunsch, professor of physical oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said he had been "completely misrepresented" by the programme, and "totally misled" on its content. He added that he is considering making a formal complaint. A Channel 4 spokesman said: "The film was a polemic that drew together the well-documented views of a number of respected scientists to reach the same conclusions. This is a controversial film but we feel that it is important that all sides of the debate are aired. If one of the contributors has concerns about his contribution we will look into that." Any complaint would provoke a crisis at Channel 4, now recovering from the Jade Goody Big Brother storm. It had to make a rare public apology after the Independent Television Commission convicted previous programmes on environmental issues by the same film-maker, Martin Durkin, of similar offences - and is already facing questions on why it accepted another programme from him.

The commission found that the editing of interviews with four contributors to a series called Against Nature had "distorted or misrepresented their known views". Professor Wunsch said: "I am angry because they completely misrepresented me. My views were distorted by the context in which they placed them. I was misled as to what it was going to be about. I was told about six months ago that this was to be a programme about how complicated it is to understand what is going on. If they had told me even the title of the programme, I would have absolutely refused to be on it. I am the one who has been swindled."

When told what the commission had found, he said: "That is what happened to me." He said he believes it is "an almost inescapable conclusion" that "if man adds excess CO2 to the atmosphere, the climate will warm". He went on: "The movie was terrible propaganda. It is characteristic of propaganda that you take an area where there is legitimate dispute and you claim straight out that people who disagree with you are swindlers. That is what the film does in any area where some things are subject to argument."

EDIT

http://www.ecoearth.info/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=70678

[Kutjara]

1. Any apology will be broadcast at about 3am...

...and take the form of an incredibly boring recitation of a long legal document, written to be as obscure and incomprehensible as possible. Consequently, large numbers of people will cite the film as evidence of a global warming conspiracy, never knowing that Channel 4 was forced to own up to the lies.

[diane in sf]

2. Maybe he can sue the bastards. eom

[JohnWxy]

15. He should sue - for EQUAL TIME - to present his undistorted view of the issue on their network.

dont' sue for money. sue for time to present your view without editing distortions!

[whistle]

3. What about solar storm activity, sun spot cycles and solar rays

....that bombards the earth with numerous additional solar energy which accounts for a significant amount of the earth's warming. It's like turning up the thermostat in your house. It seems to me there is as much academic fraud out there pushing global warming by green house gases as there is scientists who want to cover up pollution and fossil fuel depletion.

I'm beginning to doubt if any scientists have integrity and those who do are too frightened to take a stand. These people are just as likely to sell out for the all might dollar then risk being attacked by the fascist right under Senator Joseph Lieberman and Lynne Cheney's American Council of Trustees and Alumni report 2002 which attacked and suppressed academic freedom and descent. Our economy has been operating under a dark cloud which demands innovation without science, which is to say that real science is closely held by a privileged few, that being large wealthy corporations while the rest of the world is mislead by superstition and myth.

[Kagemusha]

5. Yeah but either way, throwing out "hoax" and "fraud" and "swindle" is bad

because to pull a hoax and fraud and swindle on the public, you have to know FOR SURE that your own words and publicly stated scientific views, are wrong with scientific certainty. It's like the old religious argument that the Roman and Greek pagans knew their gods were false at the time they worshipped the pagan gods. That's ridiculous. There's a vast difference between pushing an unproven hypothesis and pushing a certifiably false theory knowing with certainty it cannot be true. Vast difference. And to allege it is to say you not only know your side with 100% certainty, but you know the other guy's side with 100% certainty, and you know HE knows both your side and his side with 100% certainty, and deliberately chooses to be wrong! That's a lot of certainty to go around.

[whistle]

6. It certainly is

[pscot]

13. If you elicit someones participation

in a project by misrepresenting the nature of the project you've perpetrated a fraud. If you then distort that persons views to make a point you know they disagree with you compound the fraud. Even if you believe with absolute moral certainty that your views represent the truth, you still have no right to distort and misrepresent someone elses ideas to "prove" your point. You can't lie about somebody elses work to make your case.

[Kagemusha]

16. I was speaking re: global warming, not re: the program. Point taken.

If it is the deception claimed, which would not surprise me given the director's history, the director and the channel that foolishly supported him a second time deserve all the scorn they will receive.

[rman]

11. What about it?

"solar storm activity, sun spot cycles and solar rays" are not exactly new phenomena, are they?

You tell me: what about it?
Do you have any scientific theory about how those would be causing global warming during the past 100 years or so (but not during the thousands of years that went before), or are you merely trying to create doubt?

[Nederland]

21. I have to admit

...that part of the documentary was puzzling. They showed graphs of temperature superimposed on solar activity and graphs of temperature superimposed on carbon dioxide levels. It was clear that the graphs of solar activity correlated much better than the graphs of carbon dioxide. Now I'm completely convinced given what else has come out about the documentary that the program may have simply outright lied. However, it seems like it would be such an easy thing to disprove that they wouldn't try to get away with it. So far I haven't seen any debunking of the graphs presented, but I'm sure it will be forth coming.

[NJCher]

4. where?

Where does Martin Durkin get his funding?



Cher

[alittlelark]

7. This thraed will help you to understand WHY it was done....

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=125x148513

If the link does not work go to the Sept.11 Dungeon.

Bush1 and Dick Cheney started privatizing the US military back in 1991. That privatization of logistics has led to tragedies like the USS Cole bombing, the gouging for basic needs for our soldiers, the loss of billions of our tax dollars in Iraq, and the breakdown of services at Walter Reed.


Now we hear that Halliburton is moving their HQ from Houston to Dubai. Once there, the global fascism will take hold firmer and stronger than at any other point we have witnessed in the past.

And the US will be left bankrupt and broken in too many areas to get it fixed in any expedient way.

No financial problems for the incredibly FLUSH global corporations who have been lining their pockets at our expense for the last twenty years, though.

Want to bet that Halliburton and Bechtel will have Blackwater and other private armies at their disposal while our military struggles to recoup?

We have GOT to stop Halliburton's move of all their documents and paperwork.

Contact Waxman and Congress about Halliburton. http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

We cannot let them get away with BANKRUPTING America while BANKROLLING New World Order.

Even the RW and the Freepers will have to notice this.

[NobleCynic]

8. I think you replied to the wrong thread accidentally

[alittlelark]

10. No, I did not. I linked the thread to some I saw as relevant

to the subject matter. Take a few leaps of logic.

[pscot]

14. To a man whose only tool is a pitchfork

everything looks like a pile of shit.

[seasat]

9. Carl Wunsch has a letter in reply #109 on realclimate.org link

(LINK to thread on real climate site)

He talks about how he went there to address media exaggerations regarding climate change but he is not a skeptic and how they took segments of his interview out of context. It's also interesting that the major person behind the piece is a leader of a communist group that is strongly anti-environmentalist. Some of the posters in the replies to the blog on it present the background on this group.

[jpak]

12. You do not want to mess with Professor Wunsch - he does not suffer fools

seriously....

[seasat]

19. He has had another letter posted on Real Climate.

If someone did to me what they did to him, I'd be pissed too. Here's an exerpt. (LINK)

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.

Many of us feel an obligation to talk to the media---it's part of our role as scientists, citizens, and educators. The subjects are complicated, and it is easy to be misquoted or quoted out context. My experience in the past is that these things do happen, but usually inadvertently --- most reporters really do want to get it right.

Channel 4 now says they were making a film in a series of "polemics". There is nothing in the communication we had (much of it on the telephone or with the film crew on the day they were in Boston) that suggested they were making a film that was one-sided, anti-educational, and misleading. I took them at face value---clearly a great error. I knew I had no control over the actual content, but it never occurred to me that I was dealing with people who already had a reputation for distortion and exaggeration.

[muriel_volestrangler]

17. Independent: The real global warming swindle

A Channel 4 documentary claimed that climate change was a conspiratorial lie. But an analysis of the evidence it used shows the film was riddled with distortions and errors

However, further inquiries revealed that the C4 graph was based on a diagram in another paper produced as part of a "petition project" by the same group of climate sceptics. This diagram was itself based on long out-of-date information on terrestrial temperatures compiled by Nasa scientists.

However, crucially, the axis along the bottom of the graph has been distorted in the C4 version of the graph, which made it look like the information was up-to-date when in fact the data ended in the early 1980s.

Mr Durkin admitted that his graphics team had extended the time axis along the bottom of the graph to the year 2000. "There was a fluff there," he said.

If Mr Durkin had gone directly to the Nasa website he could have got the most up-to-date data. This would have demonstrated that the amount of global warming since 1975, as monitored by terrestrial weather stations around the world, has been greater than that between 1900 and 1940 - although that would have undermined his argument.

"The original Nasa data was very wiggly-lined and we wanted the simplest line we could find," Mr Durkin said.

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2355956.ece

More out-of-date graphs debunked at the link - sunspot cycle graphs that omit the last 20 years of data (which disprove the sunspot theory), and an out-of-date graph of medieval temperature (we now know we're warmer than that time). There was also a graph claiming the 'Holocene Maximum' about 7000 years ago was a lot warmer than today - but it's thought we're now hitting that temperature:

A new study by NASA scientists finds that the world's temperature is reaching a level that has not been seen in thousands of years.

The study, led by James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, N.Y., along with scientists from other organizations concludes that, because of a rapid warming trend over the past 30 years, the Earth is now reaching and passing through the warmest levels in the current interglacial period, which has lasted nearly 12,000 years. An "interglacial period" is a time in the Earth's history when the area of Earth covered by glaciers was similar or smaller than at the present time. Recent warming is forcing species of plants and animals to move toward the north and south poles.
...
One of the findings from this collaboration is that the Western Equatorial Pacific and Indian Oceans are now as warm as, or warmer than, at any prior time in the Holocene. The Holocene is the relatively warm period that has existed for almost 12,000 years, since the end of the last major ice age. The Western Pacific and Indian Oceans are important because, as these researchers show, temperature change there is indicative of global temperature change. Therefore, by inference, the world as a whole is now as warm as, or warmer than, at any time in the Holocene.

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20060925/

[Nihil]

18. A beautiful quote from a true Bush "scientist":

> "The original Nasa data was very wiggly-lined and we wanted the
> simplest line we could find," Mr Durkin said.

:rofl:

[Shoelace]

20. thanks for your post - will use it on other climate forums

wow, you rock!:bounce:

There are a few forums that are inundated with false data including the phony solar stuff, etc. Thank God I found this site - saved my sanity! Thank God for folks like you who dig up all the right info for us to peruse on other sites to dispel the skeptic myth-makers!!! We"ve got to spread the love~

:grouphug: