The great Channel 4 swindle 04 April 07

Few readers of this site will have missed the brouhaha raised by the UK broadcaster Channel 4’s transmission of a climate-denial programme called ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’, made by the fanatically anti-environmentalist and former Revolutionary Communist Martin Durkin. Not surprisingly, it was fully of myths, distortions and downright lies – just what we’ve come to expect from dwindling band of so-called ‘sceptics’ over the years. Those featured on the programme were all the old favourites: Philip Stott, Richard Lindzen, Fred Singer and so on – all 10 of the best-known global warming deniers were given long and sympathetic interviews.

Initially the resulting discussion centred around how Channel 4 – supposedly a reputable public-service broadcaster – could transmit (and then defend) a programme which contained so many outright falsehoods – the claim, for example, that volcanoes produce more CO2 than humans each year is simply wrong, as the most cursory fact-check by the programme editors would have shown. In addition, graphs were distorted to ‘prove’ a correlation between recent temperature rise and solar activity – when the real scientific evidence suggests no such link. However, clearly Channel 4 were more interested in putting out propaganda than in looking for the truth – and the programme was clearly very effective in confusing people who do not have time to become experts on every aspect of this rather vexed issue.

I won’t revisit the whole discussion here – but interested readers might be interested in Sir John Houghton’s detailed rebuttal (Sir John is a former IPCC chair) and the related posting on RealClimate, as well as the letter from Carl Wunsch – an oceanographer who was stitched up by the programme to make it appear as if he denied the link between CO2 and temperature.

More interesting still is the correspondence between George Monbiot, whose own film on climate change (looking at whether the UK government is likely to meet its targets for CO2 reduction) was also shown on Channel 4 in the same week, and Hamish Mykura, the man at C4 responsible to putting the Swindle lies on air. What really irks George is that his film was then used by Mykura as part of his claim that the channel was simply showing ‘both sides of the debate’ – a flawed concept if ever there was one, and something in any case which only seems to have occurred to Channel 4 after the fact.

But most entertaining of all is Paul Kingsnorth’s imagined Channel 4 commissioner’s meeting where the public school post-modernists who run the channel are discussing how to wind up the greens… and the resulting post-mortem. Enjoy.