Scientists move against Channel 4 'Swindle' 25 April 07

Usually in environmental controversies, the voices of the campaigners are the most strident. Not so with the Channel 4 film 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' - this time it is the climate scientists who are mobilising to defend their work against a campaign of disinformation and misrepresentation by the anti-environmental film-maker Martin Durkin.

Durkin’s Swindle is so riddled with errors, misrepresentations and factual innacuracies that it is difficult to know where to start in structuring a complaint. The claim that volcanoes produce more CO2 than humanity, for example, is just one point on which he is flat wrong – volcanic CO2 is 2% or less of human emissions. So hats off to Bob Ward, a former press officer with the Royal Society and now director of Global Science Networks in London, who has taken on the task with gusto. His ‘Misrepresentation of the Science’ document has been sent to the British broadcasting regulator Ofcom, accompanying a complaint pointing out that Durkin has breached Section 5.7 of the Broadcasting Code, which states “Views and facts must not be misrepresented”.

The latest scientific salvo comes in an open letter to Martin Durkin asking that he refrain from releasing the Swindle on DVD until the errors and distortions are corrected. To quote: “We believe that the misrepresentations of facts and views, both of which occur in your programme, are so serious that repeat broadcasts of the programme, without amendment, are not in the public interest. In view of the seriousness of climate change as an issue, it is crucial that public debate about it is balanced and well-informed.”

The letter continues: “We understand that Wag TV [Durkin’s production company] has plans to distribute a DVD version of the programme. Although we recognise that DVD versions of programmes are not covered by the Ofcom Broadcasting Code, we feel that it would be very much against the public interest to distribute the DVD without removing the major misrepresentations that appeared in the broadcast versions of the programme in early March. In fact, so serious and fundamental are the misrepresentations that the distribution of the DVD of the programme without their removal amounts to nothing more than an exercise in misleading the public.”

The list of signatories is impressive – including Bob (Lord) May, former president of the Royal Society and many other climate science luminaries. Not a single campaigner is listed – these people are experts defending their work from a man whose whole TV career has been built on misrepresenting environmental science to support his extremist ideological position.