RESEARCH - 'THE GREAT GLOBAL WARMING SWINDLE'

'The Great Global Warming Swindle' 

2007, Martin Durkin

This documentary produced in 2007 argues against the virtually unchallenged consensus that global warming is man-made and suggests that the scientific view of climate change is funded and is influenced by profound political agendas. The film presents the views of scientists, politicians, writers and others who dispute that anthropogenic global warming may well be the biggest scam of modern times.  

This is a story of how a theory about climate change turned into a political ideology and influenced a distortion of a whole area of science. How a political campaign on global warming and climate change became a bureaucratic bandwagon. How tens of thousands of jobs rely on the theory of climate change and how it become a great industry of censorship and intimidation. How westerners invoked the threat of climatic disaster to hinder vital industrial progress to the developing world and how the environmental force became the biggest cause of hindrance in developing countries. And finally how the creation of the IPCC (the United Nations inter-governmental panel on climate change) was praised by world leaders and how they are presented in the media as having the stamp of authority of an impressive international organisation.

"the global warming tale became the definitive media scare of an idea that effects and shapes a whole generation.."

In 2005 a House of Lords enquiry was set up to examine the scientific evidence of man-made global warming. Lord Lawson of Blaby (a British conservative politician and journalist), served in parliament in the 1970's and 80's as part of Margaret Thatchers cabinet as Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Secretary of state for Energy until finally Chancellor of the Exchequer. In his time in office Lord Lawson was the first government official to devote and grant money to global warming and environmental research. This was a direct cause of Thatchers political U-turn surrounding the topic of climate change;

 'revised position on climate change was based on reading Julian Morris’s Climate Change: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom published by her old friends at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), Richard Lindzen’s Global Warming: The Origin and Nature of the Alleged Scientific Consensus from the Koch- and Exxon-funded free market Cato Institute and Fred Singer’s Climate Policy: From Rio to Kyoto: A Political Issue for 2000 and Beyond put out by the right wing Centre for the New Europe.'

All three men were members of free market think tanks and were funding recipients of the fossil fuel industry. So Thatcher, in turning to scepticism, relied entirely on publications put out by free market lobby groups, rather than scientific literature. So her stance on the environmental agenda was whatever international action agreed upon to deal with environmental issues must be an outcome of economic growth, as without the economic growth the wealth required to pay for the protection of the environment would not be generated. 

  Through this scientific research into man-made global warming there were a number of key points that the scientists of the IPCC and other organisations made to demonstrate the the idea of fundamental human involvement was a myth. We are told that the earths climate is changing but the earths climate is always changing?

The research covered a range of events and was mainly based around the levels of carbon dioxide (C02) in the atmosphere. There are some key periods expressed in this research within the earths history where C02 levels and the climate on earth are in direct correlation resulting in significantly warm or cold periods, in the most part before human industrialisation which is a huge factor in C02 levels. The Holocene period, Medieval warm period and the 'little ice age' were all closely examined. They also argued that industrial growth should cause the temperature to rise, but does it? C02 forms 0.54% (as of 2007) of the gasses in the atmosphere and humans equate to producing half of that.

In Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth' series he maintained that there is a direct correlation between carbon dioxide levels and warmer climates which was clarified in a research expedition in Ostock, Antartica where the results show that over millions of years that C02 is a result of global temperatures warming rather than being the cause. 

The end publication and the view of the scientists, writers and politicians in this particular film saw that the ocean is the biggest emitter and diffuser of C02 and that the climate is controlled by clouds, which are controlled by cosmic rays, which are controlled by the sun.

The sun is driving climate change, C02 is irrelevant?
This is a reflection on merely one side of the great global warming debate, the next step is to look at other sources and compare them with these science and political based theories. i will next look at the side of the environmentalists who have profoundly different views on the causes and effect of global warming and climate change.