Channel 4 misrepresented some of the world's leading climate scientists in a controversial documentary that claimed global warming was a conspiracy and a fraud, the UK's media regulator will rule next week.
But it is understood that Channel 4 will still claim victory because the ultimate verdict on a separate complaint about accuracy, which contained 131 specific points and ran to 270 pages, will find that it did not breach the regulator's broadcasting code and did not materially mislead viewers.
The Guardian: Channel 4 to be censured over controversial climate film. Watchdog finds documentary was unfair to scientists but did not mislead viewers
Ofcom will say: "Channel 4 unfairly attributed to the former chief scientist, David King, comments he had not made and criticized him for them and also failed to provide him an opportunity to reply".In the program, the concluding voice over from the climate change skeptic Fred Singer claimed "the chief scientist of the UK" was "telling people that by the end of the century, the only habitable place on Earth will be the Antarctic and humanity may survive thanks to some breeding couples who moved to the Antarctic ... it would be hilarious if it weren't so sad".King has never made such a statement and it is believed Singer confused his views with those of the contrarian scientist James Lovelock.
Related story from The Indpendent on Sunday, 2nd May 2004: Why Antarctica will soon be the only place to live - literally
"Antarctica is likely to be the world's only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked, the Government's chief scientist, Professor Sir David King, said last week."
To the AGW propogandists: I’m sorry but you’ve only yourselves to blame for not allowing un- biased/evenly funded research science to run its course!
The Greens are Going Crazy
By Alan Caruba (07/27/08)
It’s hard to ignore the fact that the Greens are going crazy, not just in the United States, but around the world. They are increasingly frantic over the opposition being voiced against global warming, one of the greatest hoaxes in modern history.
The Greens have bet everything on global warming as the reason for giving up the use of long established sources of energy such as oil, coal and natural gas. The object has been to slow everything the modern world calls progress.
In India, a spokesman for that nation of one billion people has flatly refused to accept the global warming hoax. China shows no sign of yielding to the global warming lies. The greatest agricultural and mercantile economy to have ever existed, the United States of America continues to thwart its own growth by yielding to the lies.
Recently the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, said that “coal makes us sick. Oil makes us sick. It’s global warming. It’s ruining our country. It’s ruining our world.”
No, what makes us sick is listening to such preposterous lies. A Rasmussen telephone survey taken after Sen. Reid’s absurd statement found that 52% of voters surveyed rejected his views about coal and oil, double the amount of those who agreed.
What is troublesome, however, is that the same survey found the voters evenly divided on whether global warming exists or poses a threat. Fully 47% of those surveyed believe that human activity affects the climate. Both candidates for President are publicly committed to the global warming hoax by varying degrees.
Despite an intense, decades-long propaganda campaign, coupled with indoctrination in our nation’s schools, the truth is beginning to emerge.
In March, an international conference on climate change organized by The Heartland Institute brought together over 500 of the world’s leading climatologists, meteorologists, economists and others for three days of seminars and presentations that completely refuted the pronouncements of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and disputed the lies of Al Gore’s famed “documentary.”
As recently as July 8, the Space and Science Research Center held a news conference in which it stated that the warming that has occurred since the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850 was completely natural, i.e., had nothing to do with human or industrial activity.
More significantly, the Center went on record saying that, “After an exhaustive review of a substantial body of climate research, and in conjunction with the obvious and compelling new evidence that exists, it is time that the world community acknowledges that the Earth has begun the next climate change.” The current warming period is not only at an end, but a distinct cooling cycle has begun and will bring “predominantly colder global temperatures for many years into the future.”
Just how crazed has the environmental movement become? On July 7 it was announced that Argentine scientists have been strapping plastic tanks to the backs of cows to collect and measure how much methane gas they produce.
Methane, like carbon dioxide, is a minor component of the Earth’s atmosphere. Methane is also released from swamps, landfills and other sources. If it and CO2 played a significant role in determining the world’s climate, it would be a cause for concern, but it is the Sun that primarily drives the Earth’s climate cycles. Solar activity has gone quiet in recent years as fewer and fewer sunspots, magnetic storms, have been seen.
To maintain the global warming hoax, thousands of events and natural phenomena have been blamed on it. A recent example is the floods in America’s mid-West. The National Wildlife Federation released a statement on July 1 blaming global warming.
Climate experts at The Heartland Institute were quick to respond. Dr. Joseph D’Aleo, Executive Director of the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project, said, “Alarmists have adopted the can’t-lose position that all extremes of weather—cold, warm, wet, or dry—are all due to global warming”, adding that, “The record snows, severe weather, and heavy rainfall have been the result of rapid cooling in the northern tier of the United States and Canada, not global warming.”
Early in July, Bret Stephens, writing in The Wall Street Journal, called global warming “a mass hysteria phenomenon”, noting that “NASA now begrudgingly confirms that the hottest year on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954. Data from 3,000 scientific robots in the world’s oceans show there has been slight cooling in the past five years…”
The global warming hoax has never been about the climate. It is about competing economic theories. “Socialism may have failed as an economic theory,” wrote Stephens, “but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism.”
The United States Senate refused to consider the UN Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change that requires massive reductions in carbon dioxide emissions based solely on the global warming hoax, but other nations did sign on. None have ever met their obligation to limit CO2 emissions, nor need they have bothered.
At the recent G8 conference an international agreement to cut CO2 emissions was given serious consideration despite the fact that the Earth is now a decade into a cooling cycle likely to last several decades or longer. The impact of this proposal on the lives of ordinary citizens will prove needlessly costly. Proposals in some nations for various taxes based on global warming are a form of fraud.
The sensible refusal by leaders in emerging economies such as China and India would make it impossible for any limitations on carbon emissions by Western nations to have any impact, even if such reductions had anything to do with the realities of the Earth’s climate.
The only thing that can be predicted with certainty is that the Greens will become increasingly unhinged and crazed by the failure of the global warming hoax.
"Sums the AGW believers position brilliantly: "
No, it doesn't. Not at all. A nice work of polemic, but if you want to know what the AGW position is, you will have to look elsewhere.
SJT
Satellite data don't have the urban heat island effects and a host of other surface factors which bias measurements. That said I do hope Roy Spencer and John Christie are aware of the presence of Langmuire sheafs or plasma double layers in the region where the satellites make the measurements. There is more going on up there than most realise, and, there is one zone - the mesosphere where we have little or no data - balloons can't get there, and its too low for satellites to sample, let alone the manner orbiters.
That's a very insightful comment, Bickers. Very eloquently and concisely written. You’re one of the reason I return to this site over and over again. Thank you.
I would only add that the AGW prophets of doom have exactly (if unconsciously) copied the ancients who manipulated sin and guilt and fear of catastrophic divine retribution, i.e. great floods, great fires, plagues, starvation and mass exile. As you note, therein, lies the subconscious mytho-sociological power of the AGW meme.
Like the ancients, today's demagogues who manipulate the tautology of "climate change" do so to amass immense political power in the hands of a very few. Their success is a sign of the failure of our education system to teach classical humanities and history. Today we are ahistorical, living from sound bite to image and back again. The past isn’t part of our cultural calculus.
Please note, that those promoting the AGW hysteria do not need to be consciously aware of the great harm that they do. If they were, the moral dissonance would be so great as to destroy a normal person.
No great evil is required at this point, simply the ever-present strange attractor of concentrated political power. The Stalins and the Maos come later in the Hegelian cycle of history. For now we are content with the moralistic clowns, the Bob Browns, Clive Hamiltons and the Tim Flannerys. They are Eric Hoffer’s True Believers… the precursors to the Weimar Republic’s voting itself out of existence. Forgive them for they, for the most part, know not what they do. They won’t have that excuse for long, however.
To actually control the direction of the climate (never mind for a moment the nonsensical nature of such a proposal) entails centralized authoritarian control over every aspect of energy usage in society.
Seizing control of energy usage rights is the latest strategy of the authoritarian collectivist impulse to crack the individualist tendency towards increasing liberty, which has had the upper hand since 1944.
Democracies are constitutional and often fitted with bills of rights and multiple layers of protection for civil liberties. However, there are no clauses in any bill of rights that protects one’s liberty in regard to the consumption of energy. Yet, energy is the primary driver of all the other civil liberties we value so highly. Too bad the founding fathers weren’t physicists!
AGW hysteria is a neat way for that ever present authoritarian streak in humanity to make an end run around the common law legal framework a thousand years in the making.
We take our economic and civil liberties for granted at our peril!
“I prefer the wicked rather than the foolish. The wicked sometimes rest.”……Alexandre Dumas