and when I saw the 'Great Global Warming Swindle' on google video, my beliefs flipped 180 for the most part.
and you were turned 180 degrees by 1 video put out by a guy with a reputation for twisting the facts?
here's just a few points on Martin durkin and his "documentary"...
***George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian that the forthcoming programme's thesis was "the same old conspiracy theory that we’ve been hearing from the denial industry for the past ten years". He discussed the arguments for and against the "hockey-stick graph" used in An Inconvenient Truth, claiming that the criticism of it has been "debunked". He also highlighted Durkin's previous documentary Against Nature, where the Independent Television Commission found that four complainants had been "misled" and their views were "distorted by selective editing
***ON March 9, 2007, Zoe Williams in The Guardian described the program as following an "age-old Fox News formula". She briefly summarised the programme's claims, and ridiculed the idea that environmental journalists would "bully editors into printing stories that aren't true", comparing it to a cancer journalist ripping up the cure for cancer.
***On March 14, 2007, The Independent reported that the programme makers had selectively used data which was sometimes decades old, and introduced other serious errors of their own:
The original, and corrected versions of Temperature data from TGGWS, along with NASA GISS data"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."
***On March 15, 2007, The Times reported that Durkin had seriously fallen out with a scientist who had been considering working with him. Armand Leroi was concerned that Durkin had used data about a correlation between solar activity and global temperatures which had subsequently been found to be flawed. Leroi sent Durkin an e-mail expressing concern about the programme and saying, "To put this bluntly: the data that you showed in your programme were . . . wrong in several different ways". He copied the e-mail to scientific author Simon Singh. Durkin responded to Leroi saying "You’re a big daft cock". Singh sent an email to Durkin urging him to engage in serious debate. Durkin responded stating, "Since 1940 we have had four decades of cooling, three of warming, and the last decade when temperature has been doing nothing", and concluded with, "Go and fuck yourself".
***The Times science editor Mark Henderson listed a number of points where, he said, "Channel 4 got it wrong over climate change".
***Professor Carl Wunsch (professor of physical oceanography at MIT), stated that he was "completely misrepresented" by Durkin in his documentary. Currently considering making a formal complaint, Wunsch claims he was "totally misled" as to the content of the program.
he said this..."In the part of The Great Climate Change Swindle 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."
***Durkin's documentary on genetic modification which was broadcast on Channel 4 on March 20th 2000, also met with complaints.[5] A joint letter signed by a number of scientists from the Third World was issued in protest of Durkin's claims in this documentary. [6] Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, a scientist featured on the program, later said of her participation in the program: "I feel completely betrayed and misled. They did not tell me it was going to be an attack on my position."
***The Great Global Warming Swindle is a documentary film by British television producer Martin Durkin which argues against prominent scientific views on global warming. Its accuracy has been disputed on several points, and it has been criticised for being one-sided.
***Except when making a counter-argument the film does not address the scientific reasons that these scientists say that modern global warming is caused mostly by human activity
***For more on troposphere temperature measurements, see the 2006 U.S. Climate Change Science Program report "Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere:Steps for Understanding and Reconciling Differences". The Executive Summary says, "Specifically, surface data showed substantial global-average warming, while early versions of satellite and radiosonde data showed little or no warming above the surface. This significant discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been identified and corrected." [5] For more on volcanic carbon dioxide emissions, see: [6], where the U.S. Geological Service estimates "Human activities release more than 150 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes".
