The Impact of Global Warming

“The Great Global Warming Swindle”, along with Christopher Horner’s bestselling book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming, aims to convince the public that the present rise in global temperatures is due to solar forcing rather than man-made carbon dioxide. This despite evidence of the driest conditions since the beginning of the Holocene in southern Victoria and very large rainfall increases in the southeast of Western Australia – the replication of which there is equally little evidence for.

The film begins with a quite surprising and little-known fact about the origin of global warming theory from a renegade Swedish atmospheric scientist (whose name I could not find on Google) at a time when it was widely thought that we would soon be in a new ice age. However, after that it goes rapidly downhill, even when it looks at how Margaret Thatcher took an interest in global warming theory as a result of her desire to see England independent of both Middle Eastern oil and coal miners, whose strikes are shown quite explicitly in one of the film’s few interesting passages.

The diagrams of solar intensity and temperature are clearly quite false because they go only to the period before the recent warming, and many writers have noted that solar intensity and orbital forcing suggest the earth should be experiencing a “cool-down”, as some interviewee critics of the film noted, rather than the warming generated by carbon dioxide. There is also no mention of sulfate aerosols or “global dimming” causing the cold period between 1943 and 1956 or of how global warming is already known to have changed the upper atmosphere quite abruptly. “The Great Global Warming Swindle” even fails to show how the earth has geologically been mainly much warmer than it is now – at the cost of utterly impoverished soils supporting only animals with extremely small brains.

All in all, no matter what Australia’s and Red America’s ultra-gentle, ultra-meek and hypersensitive outer-suburban families who cannot accept the hurt from drastically less cheap petrol and housing think, global warming is for real and is likely to get much worse in the future, simply because those who advocate radical action like freeway demolition and large-scale public transit investment are having so few children that more fertile global warming sceptics or deniers will form a very large proportion of future generations. What they will do when global warming gets much worse is very hard to tell.
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It would be nice if much of what this video tells us is true: Climate change is a fabrication of a left-wing, scientific conspiracy; much of the purported temperature rise we think we see across the planet is a result of faulty measurements or forces we can’t control; and the like.

Alas, much of what the video tells us isn’t true. Your first clue when watching the movie is that (although it was produced in 2006), no data are reported after ~ 2000. Hmmm…why would that be for a video that purports to be “cutting edge?” Would it have anything to do with the fact that, by 2003, warming had increased to such a point that scientists finally had their “smoking gun” with respect to human activity, CO2, and climate change? No explanation is given for this truncation of data at 2000…we’re just asked to accept it. This is but one example of intentional distortion of the facts — but you have to tip your hat to these guys for their cleverness.

If you see this as an antidote to potential manipulation by the Gore video and Gore followers, ask yourself: How do you know you’re not being manipulated by this video as well? To get some traction on that question, start by looking at the Wikipedia entry for this video…it’ll give you some sense of the larger political context within which this movie sits.

Then go over to the website realclimate(dot)org Click on the “start here” icon and scroll down to the bottom of the page for the links about “thinking seriously about contrarian views.” Check out the links, learn a bit more about the innards of the scientific controversies (the basic principles aren’t that complicated, and they’re often at odds with the claims in this video). And look for the discussion of this movie on the site.

As for my bias…I’m a political scientist with deep faith in deliberative democracy. We’re at our best when we’re debating issues that matter with all the passion that we can muster. So I invite the arguments among us that this video fuels (and which it fueled big time in the United Kingdom). But surely we owe it to ourselves, and to the sanctity of democratic debate, to learn as much as we can about the foundational facts of an issue before reaching tentative conclusions.

You may agree. That is perhaps what brought you to this page. Check out the video, then…but stay wary and critical. The “there’s no such thing as climate change” camp has an agenda too, with some powerful allies in the fossil-fuel industry.

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