Hi Jen,
It looks as though ABC TV will be showing the UK Channel 4's antidote to Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, The Great Global Warming Swindle in July:
http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/story/0,23663,21779177-10388,00.html .
Channel 4 defended the film, as has ABC director of television Kim Dalton, on the basis that all sides of the hotly contested global warming debate deserved to be represented.
"Currently the issue of global warming is being debated around the world," Mr Dalton said.
"This documentary presents a controversial side to that debate."
Expert commentators supporting the film's claims include Patrick Moore, a founding member of Greenpeace who has spent the past 21 years as a critic of the environmentalist organisation, and oceanography professor Carl Wunsch, who was interviewed but later claimed his views had been misrepresented.
The ABC bought the rights to the international version of the hour-long program which had previously been passed on by the Nine Network.
"There are people who still question the link between human activity and global warming. I believe it's important that these views are heard and debated," Mr Dalton said.
In the UK, the documentary attracted an audience of 2.5 million viewers and 246 complaints were made to the television regulator, Ofcom.
Channel 4 said, however, supporters outweighed the critics six to one.
Since we last discussed this on Jennifer's blog, TGGWS has been under almost constant attack from the global warming industry, culminating in a complaint to OFCOM
led by Bob Ward (formerly of The Royal Society), now with Risk Management Services.
Steve McIntyre has some observations here:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?cat=49
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1519
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1517
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1513
An Inconvenient Truth is also causing controversy in schools.
I think that The Great Global Warming Swindle did a good job of presenting the alternative view that there is no man-made climate catastrophe outside of flawed computer models, environmental groups are often more red than green, the politicised IPCC is not objective, and the sun-climate connection is the most likely explanation for over 4 billion years of climate change. Watch it and apply the same critical standards to An Inconvenient Truth.
Regards,
Paul Biggs
The Jig is up Pad, the ABC has finally come to their senses and is showing "The Great Global Warming Swindle" in July sometime, nothin like a bit of vindication. How can you weight up the truth if you dont listen to both sides of a story. Oh Happy Day, Dom
Nir is his own man. You wouldn't convert him to anything. He believes in AGW but challenges the extent of additional CO2 effect compared to other factors. Of course he has a vested interest in his own research and that's OK.
But Sid does raise an interesting point - do we have "serious scientists" who have been "converted" to contrarianism. A handful ? Hundreds? And that was "serious" climate scientists or relevant domain experts like Reiter. Not geologists, economists or administrators.
Paul, Nir has 'em nonplussed. And isn't he one of the newer converts to 'contrarianism' they keep asking us to produce?
The ‘enhanced greenhouse effect,’ has a very small effect:
http://www.sciencebits.com/IceCoreTruth
The non-CO2/temperature correlation and Sulphates from the 1940’s to late 1960’s is breifly examined here:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1536
Nir Shaviv again:
Temperature variations of 4 degrees give rise to CO2 variations of about 80 ppm, or typically to a changed forcing of ln(80/240)/ln(2)*4 W/m2 ~ 2 W/m^2. If climate sensitivity is larger than 2 deg/(W/m^2), or 8 degrees for CO2 doubling, then Earth’s climate would have been totally unstable due to CO2 feedback. We would have ended up as either Venus or a cold Earth. Luckily, the sensitivity is more like a 1 to 1.5 deg increase for CO2 doubling. This implies that CO2 has at most a ~20% amplification effect.
There are two reasons why the temperature should rise from the 1970’s.
First, there is a decrease in the average cosmic ray flux. If you look at the average of each cycle, you will see that there is an increase in the average cosmic ray flux until about the cycle of 1970, and then a decrease in the following two cycles. Note that the last cycle was not as strong, so the average CRF increased. This can explain why the temperature stopped warming from around 2000.
Second, one has to realize that the temperature response of Earth’s climate is a low pass filter due to the high heat capacity of the Oceans. This implies that:
- The temperature variations over the 11 year cycle are highly damped (but they are there at a level of 0.1 deg).
- There is a delay time in the system’s response. This means that the 11-year cycle will lag the solar forcing (and it does by 1-2 years). Over the centennial time scale, the sun’s activity significantly increased until the middle of the century, then it slightly decreased and somewhat increased from the 1970’s. If you pass this behavior through the climates “low pass filter”, you will find that because of Earth’s heat capacity, the temperature at 2000 should be higher than the temperature in 1950’s even if the decrease until the 1970’s is similar to the increase afterwards.
Thanks for the Reiter link, Arnost.