You may have seen, you may have believed, you may be confused.. alot of people I've spoken to are! As far as I'm concerned it is all kingsize pants and the compass network that I'm part of ran this piece which is taken from the climate denial site. So hold onto your own thoughts of repsonsibilies and values as opposed to the lapdog to commercialism that Channel 4 seem to be.
And at the end of the day even if it is all part of a global re-occuring system so what, we've become throw away hooligans of mass plastic, super CO2 guzzling mass miles and non-recycling. It's getting better and we should all be responsible for our own patch and beyond. And love your world... I bloody do:) Matt
THE GREAT CHANNEL FOUR SWINDLE
George Marshall
http://climatedenial.org/
Last night Channel Four kindly gave an hour and half and a large budget to the international network of professional climate change deniers. ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ was a propaganda gift to the various vested interests who seek to undermine the fragile political and social will to take action on this global action.
And it was sometimes very convincing, as strongly worded opinions often are when they are not subject to any verification or external challenge. For example, there are excellent rebuttals against the contention that global warming is correlated to cosmic rays.
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”. (For more…)
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.
The writer and presenter of the programme was Martin Durkin. Although it was written in a highly personal and opinionated style- speaking freely of “lies”, and the “shrill frenzy” of “scare stories” – we never saw Durkin or discovered his personal credentials. As George Monbiot has revealed Durkin is closely affiliated with the Revolutionary Communist Party which has a strong ideological opposition to environmental science (more on Durkin and the RCP.
In 1997 Channel Four was forced to issue a humiliating public apology over a previous series of anti-environment programmes directed by Durkin called “Against Nature”. 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.”
For this programme Durkin drew up a dream team of scientists who have built personal careers as media pundits debunking the peer-reviewed work of their colleagues. There are few of them, but they are well supported by the Washington lobbies and kept very busy with media debates, documentaries and opinion pieces. (I have personally debated with five of them in media debates).
Is it any surprise then, that they 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 we all want 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.
It would be entirely possible to put together a similar programme, with a string of credible former academics, to argue that smoking does no cause cancer, that HIV does not cause AIDS, or that black people are less intelligent. However, Channel Four would not dare broadcast the programme and we would not believe them if they did. Is it not a reflection of the deep public ambivalence about climate change that these dissenters are given such a prominent and uncritical showcase and that we are so keen to listen to them?
Make up your own minds from their track records. Here is a little more information on some of the people who appeared on the programme:
Fred Singer. Despite the caption on the programme, Singer has retired from the University of Virginia and has not had a single article accepted for any peer-reviewed scientific journal for 20 years. His main work has been as a hired gun for business interests to undermine scientific research on environmental and health matters. Before turning to climate change denial he has argued that CFCs do not cause ozone depletion and second hand smoke does not cause cancer (more… ). In 1990 he founded “The Science and Environment Policy Project”, which aggressively contradicts climate science and has received direct funding from Exxon, Shell, Unocal and ARCO. Exxon is also among the funders ($20,000 in 1998 and 2000)
Patrick Michaels is the most prominent US climate change denier. In the programme he claimed “I’ve never been paid a nickel by the old and gas companies” which is a curious claim. According to the US journalist Ross Gebspan Michaels has received direct funding from, among others German Coal Mining Association ($49,000), Edison Electric Institute ($15,000), and the Western Fuels Association ($63,000) an association of US coal producing interests (more…). The WFA is one of the most powerful forces in the US actively denying the basic science of climate change, funding, amongs other things, the Greening Earth Society which is directed by Patrick Michaels. Tom Wigley, one of the leading IPCC scientists, describes Michaels work as “a catalog of misrepresentation and misinterpretation”.
Philip Stott was captioned as a Professor at the University of London although he is retired and is therefore free of any academic accountability. Stott is a geographer by training and has no qualifications in climate science. Since retiring Stott has aimed to become Britain’s leading anti-green pundit dedicating himself to wittily criticizing rainforest campaigns (with Patrick Moore), advocating genetic engineering and claiming that “global warming is the new fundamentalist religion.”
Patrick Moore is Stott’s Canadian equivalent. Since a very personal and painful falling out with Greenpeace in 1986 Moore has put his considerable campaigning energies into undermining environmentalists, especially his former friends and colleagues. Typical of his rhetoric was his claim in the programme that environmentalists were “anti-human” and “treat humans as scum”. Throughout the 1990s Moore worked as lead consultant for the British Columbian Timber Products Association undermining Greenpeace’s international campaign to protect old growth forest there. Whenever he has the chance he also makes strong public statements in favour of genetic engineering, nuclear power, logging the Amazon, and industrial fishing- all, strangely, lead campaigns for Greenpeace
Piers Corbyn has no academic status and his role in such programmes is to promote his own weather prediction business. He has steadfastly refused to ever subject his climatological theories to any form of external review or scrutiny.
Richard Lindzen. As a Professor of Meteorology at the credible Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lindzen is by far the most reputable academic among the US climate deniers and, for this reason, he is heavily cited by sympathetic journalists such as Melanie Phillips and Michael Crichton. His arguments though are identical to the other deniers – for example an article in the Wall Street Journal (June 11 2001) he claims that “there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends or what causes them”.
He is strongly associated with the other people on the programme though co-authored reports, articles, conference appearances and co-signed statements.
Tim Ball was captioned as the University of Winnipeg. In fact he left in 1996 since when he has run political campaigns through two organisations he helped found: the Natural Resources Stewardship Project and the Friends of Science which, according to their websites aim to run “a proactive grassroots campaign to counter the Kyoto Protocol”; and “encourage and assist the Canadian Federal Government to re-evaluate the Kyoto Protocol”. Ian Clark is also on the board of the NRSP.
