The Great Global Warming Swindle

[Renton 22031]

Anyone see this on Channel 4 last night? It clashed with part of the match so I taped it.

 

http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites...ndle/index.html

 

Fascinating program, which I must admit challenged many of my preconceptions of global warming and has left me confused on what to believe. It was inevitably one-sided and it'd be nice to hear the middle view point for a change, but these bits particularly interested me:

 

Historically, CO2 has been associated with global temperature rises, BUT the temperature rise ocurred first, so CO2 was a symptom of global warming, not a cause. This contradicts everything I thought I knew and makes me feel pretty uncomfortable.

 

The anti-global warming movement is big business with vested interests of its own, which suppress any information which contradict man's involvement in warming. The IPCC is not representative of all climatologists, and in fact many have their names on it without agreeing with their documents.

 

The cost of cutting carbon emissions will be catastrophic for the developing world. It's yet another example of selfish, hand-wringing, middle-class westerners imposing their non-sensical "values" on the world's poorest people. In one word - hypocrisy.

 

Anyway, like I say, the program may have been nonsense, but at least it's asked important questions which need to be answered. I'll have to look into it a bit more now, in the meantime I'm going to have to find out more, and keep my carbon guilt on hold.

[Fop 1]

Anyone see this on Channel 4 last night? It clashed with part of the match so I taped it.

 

http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites...ndle/index.html

 

Fascinating program, which I must admit challenged many of my preconceptions of global warming and has left me confused on what to believe. It was inevitably one-sided and it'd be nice to hear the middle view point for a change, but these bits particularly interested me:

 

Historically, CO2 has been associated with global temperature rises, BUT the temperature rise ocurred first, so CO2 was a symptom of global warming, not a cause. This contradicts everything I thought I knew and makes me feel pretty uncomfortable.

 

The anti-global warming movement is big business with vested interests of its own, which suppress any information which contradict man's involvement in warming. The IPCC is not representative of all climatologists, and in fact many have their names on it without agreeing with their documents.

 

The cost of cutting carbon emissions will be catastrophic for the developing world. It's yet another example of selfish, hand-wringing, middle-class westerners imposing their non-sensical "values" on the world's poorest people. In one word - hypocrisy.

 

Anyway, like I say, the program may have been nonsense, but at least it's asked important questions which need to be answered. I'll have to look into it a bit more now, in the meantime I'm going to have to find out more, and keep my carbon guilt on hold.

 

 

It's very true that Global Warming went from being an interesting theory (in the late 80’s and early 90’s), to being what is now effectively a religion.

 

TBH if you think about old Victorian moral "holier than thou" one-upmanship and then contrast it to the current trendy "greener than thou" morality (for want of a better word) the differences and motivations driving them are the same…. it has grown into both a religious and political force and a huge money spinner.

 

 

 

The big problem with the issue in the last 10 years is that the both sides have vested interests in pushing forward propaganda and the truth is kind of irrelevant to either side…. genuine searching science (as oppose to grant chasing) is hard to find (and frankly is suppressed by both sides).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The stupid thing about "green" westerners is that unless they (and everyone else) are prepared to live in conditions Romans would have turned their noses up at (and indeed cull a couple of billion off the human population of the world) it's all a pointless load of rubbish anyway.

 

Take the latest green trend in heating, ultra efficient wood burners.... a great idea in concept, but the amount of LAND needed to grow wood "sustainably" for just one household is HUGE…. and even if you have that amount of land per household (which we quite simply don’t in the UK) that still doesn’t factor in planting, cutting and transporting costs of the wood.

 

 

 

 

So basically if our CO2 is either the major or even just a minor driving factor, the temperature is going to rise (unless we kill a few billion people and the rest live like cavemen) or if it’s not a factor at all and it’s currently solar winds causing issues…. then there’s even less we can do about it.

 

 

Not that any of it really matters as the eco-fascists are just as self interested as the oil companies, and in the end and it’s just normal people in the west, developing world and else where that will pay the price for their little propaganda wars (as usual).

Edited March 9, 2007 by Fop

[Renton 22031]

Agree, good post Fop. I'm still really interested in what's driving the change though, even if it can't be stopped. It's just finding unbiased information on it is very hard. Yesterday's program was fascinating, for instance, but in the end it was more of a polemic with no chance for the other side to address the issues bought up. Looking on the channel 4 website on the forums just confuses matters more. I guess I'll have to become a climate agnostic and see what happens.

[Tooj 17]

Christ Renton mate I do apologise I kept on seeing your name as the last post in here and was thinking I see nothing by Radgina.

[Renton 22031]

Christ Renton mate I do apologise I kept on seeing your name as the last post in here and was thinking I see nothing by Radgina.

 

Why would Radgi be in a serious thread?

[Radgina 1]

Christ Renton mate I do apologise I kept on seeing your name as the last post in here and was thinking I see nothing by Radgina.

 

Why would Radgi be in a serious thread?

 

i was just about to apologise for 2pants Renton and add the fact that I enjoy your debates throughout the serious threads, I find you always well informed, generally looking at both sides of the debate rather than band-wagon jumping and putting forward your points in very often well constructed posts.

 

But I won't bother now

[Renton 22031]

Christ Renton mate I do apologise I kept on seeing your name as the last post in here and was thinking I see nothing by Radgina.

 

Why would Radgi be in a serious thread?

 

i was just about to apologise for 2pants Renton and add the fact that I enjoy your debates throughout the serious threads, I find you always well informed, generally looking at both sides of the debate rather than band-wagon jumping and putting forward your points in very often well constructed posts.

 

But I won't bother now

 

 

Aaah. If it helps I'm bullied my Mancy and Gemmill and the like too!

[Tooj 17]

Christ Renton mate I do apologise I kept on seeing your name as the last post in here and was thinking I see nothing by Radgina.

 

Why would Radgi be in a serious thread?

 

i was just about to apologise for 2pants Renton and add the fact that I enjoy your debates throughout the serious threads, I find you always well informed, generally looking at both sides of the debate rather than band-wagon jumping and putting forward your points in very often well constructed posts.

 

But I won't bother now

 

 

Aaah. If it helps I'm bullied my Mancy and Gemmill and the like too!

Perhaps you could both form some sort of support group?

[Radgina 1]

Christ Renton mate I do apologise I kept on seeing your name as the last post in here and was thinking I see nothing by Radgina.

 

Why would Radgi be in a serious thread?

 

i was just about to apologise for 2pants Renton and add the fact that I enjoy your debates throughout the serious threads, I find you always well informed, generally looking at both sides of the debate rather than band-wagon jumping and putting forward your points in very often well constructed posts.

 

But I won't bother now

 

 

Aaah. If it helps I'm bullied my Mancy and Gemmill and the like too!

 

no problem.

[Renton 22031]

Bullied members:

 

Renton

Radgi

J69

LeazesMag

Sima

 

Anyone else want to join our support group?

[Radgina 1]

Bullied members:

 

Renton

Radgi

J69

LeazesMag

Sima

 

Anyone else want to join our support group?

 

If you don't mind please don't lump me in with Sima and LM !!!

 

However please carry on with the debates

[luckyluke 2]

Bullied members:

 

Renton

Radgi

J69

LeazesMag

Sima

 

Anyone else want to join our support group?

 

Give me your dinner money or I'll flush your head down the bogs.

[Ketsbaia 0]

I've never believed in this Global Warming lark, like. In the 70's wasn't there a massive panic about temperatures dropping and a new ice age? Temperature fluxuations have been happening since the beginning of time and will keep happening until the end of time - We're not to blame. Anyone who tells you otherwise deserves a slap for being so fucking stupid and jumping on the green bandwagon.

[spongebob toonpants 4165]

I read somewhere the other day that the temperature on Mars had gone up in a similar fashion to the temperature on earth over recent years. I will see if I can find the link

[wykikitoon 20902]

Balls, missed it

[BlueStar 0]

I read somewhere the other day that the temperature on Mars had gone up in a similar fashion to the temperature on earth over recent years. I will see if I can find the link

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/20...rs-warming.html

 

If you read page two though, seems like a fair amount of people think he's talking shite by relating this to the warming of the earth.

[Renton 22031]

Hmmm, interesting piece about the producer of this program (from the Guardian, some 7 years ago).

 

In October 1998 a television producer named Martin Durkin took a proposal to the BBC’s science series, Horizon. Silicone breast implants, he claimed, far from harming women, were in fact beneficial, reducing the risk of breast cancer. Horizon commissioned a researcher to find out whether or not his assertion was true. After a thorough review, the researcher reported that Mr Durkin had ignored a powerful body of evidence contradicting his claims. Martin Durkin withdrew his proposal. Instead of dropping it, however, he took it to Channel 4 and, astonishingly, sold it to their science series, Equinox.

 

To help him make the programme, Durkin hired Najma Kazi, a highly respected TV researcher and producer who was previously a research biochemist. After two weeks she walked out. “It’s not a joke to walk away from four or five month’s work,” she told me, “but my research was being ignored. The published research had been construed to give an impression that’s not the case. I don’t know how that programme got passed. The only consolation for me was that I’m really glad I didn’t put my name to it.”

 

But the programme was broadcast, in May last year. Silicone implants, it insisted, appeared to reduce the incidence of breast cancer. Women claiming that their operations had caused severe health problems were dismissed as cranks, malingerers and compensation chasers. The researchers who believed that there was a problem were accused of practising “junk science”.

 

Mr Durkin has often been accused of taking liberties with the facts. In 1997 he made a series for Channel 4 called “Against Nature”, which compared environmentalists with Nazis, conspiring against the world’s poor. No one would suggest that green claims should not be subjected to critical examination, but the people he interviewed were lied to about the contents of the programmes and given no chance to respond to the accusations the series made.

 

The Independent Television Commission handed down one of the most damning verdicts it has ever reached: the programme makers “distorted by selective editing” the views of the interviewees and “misled” them about the “content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part.” Channel 4 was forced to make a humiliating prime time apology. After the series was broadcast, I discovered that the assistant producer and several of its interviewees worked for the right-wing libertarian magazine masquerading as “Living Marxism”, which has just been successfully sued by ITN. All the arguments Against Nature made had been rehearsed in LM.

 

So what do you do with a director with a record like this, who has brought your channel into disrepute, who has misled both his contributors and his audience? If you are Michael Jackson, the head of Channel 4, you commission him to make more programmes.

 

On Monday, Channel 4 will broadcast a 90-minute Equinox programme about genetic engineering, made by Martin Durkin and called, appropriately enough, “Modified Truth”. Already it appears that the programme-making has suffered from Mr Durkin’s characteristic approach. “I feel completely betrayed and misled”, reports Dr Mae-Wan Ho, a geneticist Durkin interviewed. “They did not tell me it was going to be an attack on my position.”

 

Neither Martin Durkin nor, extraordinarily, Charles Furneaux, the commissioning editor of the science series Equinox, has a science background. They don’t need one, for science on Channel 4 has been reduced to a crude manifesto for corporate libertarianism.

 

When Michael Jackson arrived at Channel 4, he cancelled a series called Global Raiders, on which a quarter of a million pounds had already been spent. It would have examined the adverse impacts of big business around the world. Since 1989, according to the research group 3WE, Channel 4 has reduced its international factual output by 56 per cent. Holiday programmes have boomed, but “ecological programming now appears to be virtually extinct”.

 

The station, in other words, is censoring not just a few ideas, but entire subject areas. Serious coverage of science, the environment, the developing world and, above all, abuses of corporate power, has been all but stamped out. The Mark Thomas Comedy Product is a glowing exception, but I suspect it is allowed on air only because it makes people laugh.

 

Perhaps intellectual honesty is too fusty, too boring, for the chic, post-modern Channel 4. But perhaps there is something else at work, perhaps we should question whether senior staff have come to identify themselves with the companies providing their revenues, and are, as a result, seeking to modify the truth. If so, then it is hardly surprising that they have handed so much work to a charlatan.

 

In October 1998 a television producer named Martin Durkin took a proposal to the BBC’s science series, Horizon. Silicone breast implants, he claimed, far from harming women, were in fact beneficial, reducing the risk of breast cancer. Horizon commissioned a researcher to find out whether or not his assertion was true. After a thorough review, the researcher reported that Mr Durkin had ignored a powerful body of evidence contradicting his claims. Martin Durkin withdrew his proposal. Instead of dropping it, however, he took it to Channel 4 and, astonishingly, sold it to their science series, Equinox.

 

To help him make the programme, Durkin hired Najma Kazi, a highly respected TV researcher and producer who was previously a research biochemist. After two weeks she walked out. “It’s not a joke to walk away from four or five month’s work,” she told me, “but my research was being ignored. The published research had been construed to give an impression that’s not the case. I don’t know how that programme got passed. The only consolation for me was that I’m really glad I didn’t put my name to it.”

 

But the programme was broadcast, in May last year. Silicone implants, it insisted, appeared to reduce the incidence of breast cancer. Women claiming that their operations had caused severe health problems were dismissed as cranks, malingerers and compensation chasers. The researchers who believed that there was a problem were accused of practising “junk science”.

 

Mr Durkin has often been accused of taking liberties with the facts. In 1997 he made a series for Channel 4 called “Against Nature”, which compared environmentalists with Nazis, conspiring against the world’s poor. No one would suggest that green claims should not be subjected to critical examination, but the people he interviewed were lied to about the contents of the programmes and given no chance to respond to the accusations the series made.

 

The Independent Television Commission handed down one of the most damning verdicts it has ever reached: the programme makers “distorted by selective editing” the views of the interviewees and “misled” them about the “content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part.” Channel 4 was forced to make a humiliating prime time apology. After the series was broadcast, I discovered that the assistant producer and several of its interviewees worked for the right-wing libertarian magazine masquerading as “Living Marxism”, which has just been successfully sued by ITN. All the arguments Against Nature made had been rehearsed in LM.

 

So what do you do with a director with a record like this, who has brought your channel into disrepute, who has misled both his contributors and his audience? If you are Michael Jackson, the head of Channel 4, you commission him to make more programmes.

 

On Monday, Channel 4 will broadcast a 90-minute Equinox programme about genetic engineering, made by Martin Durkin and called, appropriately enough, “Modified Truth”. Already it appears that the programme-making has suffered from Mr Durkin’s characteristic approach. “I feel completely betrayed and misled”, reports Dr Mae-Wan Ho, a geneticist Durkin interviewed. “They did not tell me it was going to be an attack on my position.”

 

Neither Martin Durkin nor, extraordinarily, Charles Furneaux, the commissioning editor of the science series Equinox, has a science background. They don’t need one, for science on Channel 4 has been reduced to a crude manifesto for corporate libertarianism.

 

When Michael Jackson arrived at Channel 4, he cancelled a series called Global Raiders, on which a quarter of a million pounds had already been spent. It would have examined the adverse impacts of big business around the world. Since 1989, according to the research group 3WE, Channel 4 has reduced its international factual output by 56 per cent. Holiday programmes have boomed, but “ecological programming now appears to be virtually extinct”.

 

The station, in other words, is censoring not just a few ideas, but entire subject areas. Serious coverage of science, the environment, the developing world and, above all, abuses of corporate power, has been all but stamped out. The Mark Thomas Comedy Product is a glowing exception, but I suspect it is allowed on air only because it makes people laugh.

 

Perhaps intellectual honesty is too fusty, too boring, for the chic, post-modern Channel 4. But perhaps there is something else at work, perhaps we should question whether senior staff have come to identify themselves with the companies providing their revenues, and are, as a result, seeking to modify the truth. If so, then it is hardly surprising that they have handed so much work to a charlatan.

[Fop 1]

Hmmm, interesting piece about the producer of this program (from the Guardian, some 7 years ago).

 

To be fair I very, very, very much doubt that it was unbiased (such things simply don’t make good TV tbh).... but the other side of that to that is be aware of the leanings (and to some degree fantasies) of the guy that wrote the piece in that quote (they are never going to be people that would write nice things about each other).

 

 

It's a bit like with Michael Moore, I guess, it would be foolish to take anything he said as fact or even anything more than entertainment (he’s amazingly good a presenting conjecture as fact and misrepresenting), but equally he does sometimes reveal "the truth" genuinely as well.

 

 

 

 

This really goes back to the truth being the first thing to be lost (and as I mentioned I’m not really sure either side really give a toss what the actual truth is – it’s not really relevant to either agenda).

 

 

 

At the end of the day the science will always sort itself out, but what state the world will be in by then who knows.

[BlueStar 0]

The guy's a mental Marxist, he's been in trouble with regulators for his misleading editing before because of his programmes, which are essentially a vehicle for Living Marxism magazine and its cronies.

[Super_Steve_Howey 0]

If it's anything like Dispatches then it will have been littered with half-truths, misrepresentations and lying to interviewees. Not allowing participants to view the programme first is a given too

[wykikitoon 20902]

W00t the birds parents taped it so I shall watch it the morrow

[Happy Face 29]

Parky's wet dream.

 

Either way you look at it, it's a conspiracy.

[Jimbo 175]

Parky's wet dream.

 

Either way you look at it, it's a conspiracy.

 

Its great that we can cherry-pick which conspiracy theorys that we give creedance to, so we can still ridicule others with less popular theorys.

[Guest alex]

Parky's wet dream.

 

Either way you look at it, it's a conspiracy.

 

Its great that we can cherry-pick which conspiracy theorys that we give creedance to, so we can still ridicule others with less popular theorys.

Did anyone see South Park the other night? The one where it turns all the 9/11 conspiracy websites are run by the US Government in order to maintain the facade that they control everything. It was canny funny.

[Park Life 71]

Is Gloal warming happening? Yes.

Is the future of life on this planet in danger? Yes.

What or whom is to blame? The facts are being managed.

It's not for us to worry about it won't happen for years. Wrong. Insurance companies are factoring in climate change issues into their policies as we speak, especially to do with coastal areas and shipping.

Is there still time? Nobody really knows.