Margaret Thatcher causes Global Warming
The real global warming swindle
You'd have thought that the arguments about global warming were more or less over. After all, even the Bush administration is appearing to go along with prevalent scientific opinion in accepting that CO2 emissions are a problem and we have to cut back significantly (as long, he might say, as everyone can still drive their cars and his big-business cronies aren't affected).
Well, it would appear that there are still some last-ditch efforts to persuade us that it just ain't so and in fact it's all a conspiracy. Martin Durkin's WAG TV film for Channel 4, The Great Global Warming Swindle, (aired Thurs, 8 March 2007) goes farther than most, claiming that in fact it's all the fault of the Sun (the local star, not Murdoch's rag) and that global temperatures track solar activity much more closely than they track CO2 emissions. And he goes further than that, to claim that global warming is a deep, dirty deed hatched by, of all people, Margaret Thatcher and aided by her long-time allies, the far Left and their environmentalist friends (who are all former Marxists displaced by the fall of Communism).
You what? Yes, Durkin claims that Margaret Thatcher funded climate research to link warming with CO2 emissions because she trusted neither oil nor coal (the latter in the form of the British miners) and therefore wanted an excuse for expanding nuclear power - you know, that source of electricity so beloved of almost all environmentalists. I can see them happily marching together now.
Durkin has targeted the environmental movement and climate change before, in a 1997 documentary (though that is perhaps too strong a word), also for Channel 4, entitled Against Nature. The programme was so full of gross errors and so distorted, with interviewees taken out of context and misled as to the nature of the interview, that C4 was hauled over the coals by the ITC and had to issue an apology. "Comparison of the unedited and edited transcripts confirmed that the editing of the interviews with [the environmentalists who contributed] had indeed distorted or misrepresented their known views," said the ITC report. "It was also found that the production company had misled them... as to the format, subject matter and purpose of these programmes."
So when you are publicly humiliated over a largely non-factual piece of "factual" programming, what's a good broadcaster like Channel 4 - well known for its sensible judgement on controversial issues - to do? Well, commission the man to make another programme, of course!
The next time it was Modified Truth: The Rise and Fall of GM, aired in March 2000 as part of the Equinox thread. This "covered" - again, not quite the right word - genetically modified foods and claimed they were absolutely fine. Only two scientists with opposing views were interviewed and they later complained that they were misled about the content of the programme and not allowed to answer attacks upon them. Another Equinox show had Durkin claiming that breast implants for women were not only perfectly safe, but actually more healthy than not having them. The BBC had already turned it down for Horizon because it "ignored a powerful body of evidence contradicting [Durkin's] claims". A researcher on the show - a former research biochemist - resigned because her research was being ignored. But Equinox went ahead - its commissioning editor, Charles Furneaux, does not have a science background, so how would he know? There seems to be a pattern here.
Durkin was also alleged to be part of a far-Right libertarian political group pretending to be Marxists - or possibly the other way around - whose agenda was squarely in line with the programme (see "More on Durkin and LM magazine"). In other words, it was political propaganda.
Durkin's Swindle returns to the scene of the crime in tackling global warming and the environmental movement. This time, no dissenting voices were permitted.
Anthropogenic climate change is, says the programme, "a lie? the biggest scam of modern times. The truth is that global warming is a multi-billion 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."
The idea is that warming is caused when there are fewer clouds, clouds are formed as a result of cosmic rays entering the atmosphere, increased solar radiation blows cosmic rays away in the solar wind, resulting in the formation of fewer clouds: so when there is increased solar activity the temperature rises, which is what is happening now. QED. Well, sounds good... except neutrino monitoring does not suggest any long-term trend in cosmic ray activity, and that means that whatever link there might or might not be between cosmic rays and climate, this isn't it.
Also at the heart of the "evidence" to back up this claim is the idea that the famous "hockey-stick" curve that shows dramatic rises in temperature was a statistical error - despite the fact that the same graph has by now been replicated by other researchers with quite different methods and the paper revealing the 'mistake' has been convincingly debunked. In addition, temperatures last century - which Durkin shows rising until 1940 and then falling before rising again after 1975, in a rather curiously-massaged graph - are now generally regarded as anomalous, the decline in average temperatueres during that period resulting at least partially from industrially-generated sulphate aerosols in the atmosphere after WWII until their reduction with the introduction of anti-pollution legislation from the mid-70s - an effect also related to 'Global Dimming'.
There are also some gross errors in the film, such as claiming that the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes far exceeds that created by human activity. In fact, volcanoes account for only 1% of the amount emitted by humans. Then there was the claim (backed up once again with an unfamiliar-shaped graph) that it was so warm in the Mediaeval period in the UK (due to natural causes, of course - there were lots of sunspots) that vineyards were much more widespread than they are today. Wrong. If English vineyard prevalence is an indicator of global temperatures (I would be careful of this if I were you: it might just be due to trade regulationsor import taxation), then remember that there are more vineyards in the UK today than ever before.
The thing to bear in mind is that while you can unearth the odd study that supports Durkin's thesis if you look hard enough and don't mind avoiding looking at who's funding the research (you'll often find that anthropogenic climate change nay-sayers are funded by the fossil fuel industry, directly or indirectly, and several of them previously worked for Big Tobacco to "prove" that smoking was harmless), a few carefully selected papers are not enough to overturn the vast majority of scientific evidence - which all points to the fact that we are causing the changes in climate that we are experiencing, and the cause is our emissions of greenhouse gases, notably CO2.
For a detailed rebuttal of the programme, read Swindled!, check out this link and read this deconstruction. And if you have any complaints about the programme yourself, here's the Channel Four contact form.
