Hi there for all of those who watched the great global warming swindle, and responded to my previous post on global warming and still follow the belief that it is caused by solar change please read this artcile (from Sydney newspaper) :
The problem with
The Great Global Warming Swindle, which the ABC plans to screen and which caused a sensation when it was broadcast in Britain earlier this year, is that to make its case it relies not on visionaries, but on people whose findings have been proven wrong. The implications could not be graver. Thousands of people could be misled into believing there is no problem to address.
The film's main contention is that the rise in global temperatures is caused not by greenhouse gases but by changes in the sun's activity. It is built around the premise that in 1991 the Danish atmospheric physicist Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen discovered that recent temperature variations on Earth coincided with the length of the cycle of sunspots: the shorter they were, the higher the temperature. Unfortunately, he found nothing of the kind. A paper published in the journal Eos in 2004 reveals that the finding was the result of incorrect handling of data. The truth is the opposite: temperatures have continued to rise as the length of the sunspot cycle has increased.
So Friis-Christensen developed another means of demonstrating that the sun was responsible, claiming to have discovered a remarkable link between cosmic radiation influenced by the sun and global cloud cover. This is the mechanism the film proposes for global warming. But, again, the method was exposed as faulty. It relied on satellite data which did not measure global cloud cover.
So the hypothesis changed again. Without acknowledging that his previous paper was wrong, Friis-Christensen's co-author, Henrik Svensmark, declared there was a correlation not with total cloud cover but with low cloud cover. This, too, turned out to be incorrect. Then, last year, Svensmark published a paper purporting to show that cosmic rays could form tiny particles in the atmosphere. Accompanying it was a press release that went way beyond the findings reported in the paper to claim the study showed that past and present climate events are the result of cosmic rays.
This doesn't seem to have troubled the makers of the program, who report the cosmic ray theory as if it trounces all competing explanations.
The film also says man-made global warming is disproved by conflicting temperature data. Professor John Christy speaks about the discrepancy he found between temperatures at the Earth's surface and temperatures in the troposphere (or lower atmosphere). But the program fails to mention that in 2005 his data was proved wrong, by three papers in Science magazine.
Christy said last year he was mistaken. He was one of the lead authors of a paper that states the opposite of what he says in the film. Previously reported discrepancies between the amount of warming near the surface and higher in the atmosphere have been used to challenge the reality of human-induced global warming. Specifically, it was said surface data showed substantial warming, while early versions of satellite and radiosonde (weather-balloon) data showed little or no warming above the surface. This significant discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been identified and corrected.
Until recently, when found to be wrong, scientists went back to their labs to start again. Now, emboldened by the global denial industry, some, like the filmmakers, shriek censorship.
There is one scientist in the film whose work has not been debunked: the oceanographer Carl Wunsch. In the film he appears to support the idea that increasing carbon dioxide is not responsible for rising global temperatures. But Wunsch says he was misrepresented by the program, and misled by the people who made it.
You can sustain a belief in these propositions only by ignoring the overwhelming body of contradictory data. To form a balanced, scientific view, you have to consider all the evidence, on both sides of the question. The failure to understand the scientific process just makes the job of whipping up a storm that much easier. The less true a program is, the greater the controversy.
George Monbiot
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