The Great Global Warming Swindle!

[John L]

Here is the entire show, that has been advertised on the BBC for several weeks now. It will require a lengthy watch, but is well worth the time.

Tell us what you REALLY think, but you must first watch the movie, so you will know what you are critiqueing. I have already read one piece, and that does not count. You must give your own informed opinion.

Note the link has been reestablished.


Note: Here is the Latest Google Link reestablished

[drgonzaga]

You very well know what the reaction will be and you should be ready for the attack from the Eco-Nazis and the proponents of social democracy...the program really did not make any new statement but simply highlighted what was said repeatedly as this entire farce moved into over-drive as a result of the strange confluence between displaced ideologues requiring a cause for old revolutionary rhetoric and institutionalized bureaucracy deciding on which teat advocates of techne may feed.

[SavesTheDay]

Great post John. I'm watching it now....

[John L]

drgonzaga Wrote:You very well know what the reaction will be and you should be ready for the attack from the Eco-Nazis and the proponents of social democracy...the program really did not make any new statement but simply highlighted what was said repeatedly as this entire farce moved into over-drive as a result of the strange confluence between displaced ideologues requiring a cause for old revolutionary rhetoric and institutionalized bureaucracy deciding on which teat advocates of techne may feed.

For you and me, that is totally correct. However, if you will note, the show was done in a very professional AND easily understood manner. And the conclusion of the show did unto the 'feeling' left, what they have been doing for G-d know how long: tugging at the viewer's heartsleeves. Only difference here, is that the effect on the Third World is absolutely true!

I found it more than difficult to rebutt, so the only manner of getting at the producers will be to use personal attacks AND attempt to keep it from reaching the TV public. Whether or not they do, is yet to be seen.

One thing is clear to me. I would wager 10:1 odds, that for every one hundred "regular" citizens, who view the show, over 9.5 of them will be so affected, that no amount of further hysteria will sway them with regards to the GW hyperventilating being spewed out of the MSM, money hungry scientists, AND power seeking politicians.

I was partucilarly impresses by Dr Partick Moore. His presentation there will certainly garner him tremendous hardship, from his former fellows within the Environment movement. I consider him, and Bjørn Lomborg to be two highly courageous people, willing to take the arrows of slander, from all quarters, and continue to speak logically. The others are doing their jobs as climate scientists.

[track_snake]

John L Wrote:

drgonzaga Wrote:You very well know what the reaction will be and you should be ready for the attack from the Eco-Nazis and the proponents of social democracy...the program really did not make any new statement but simply highlighted what was said repeatedly as this entire farce moved into over-drive as a result of the strange confluence between displaced ideologues requiring a cause for old revolutionary rhetoric and institutionalized bureaucracy deciding on which teat advocates of techne may feed.

For you and me, that is totally correct. However, if you will note, the show was done in a very professional AND easily understood manner. And the conclusion of the show did unto the 'feeling' left, what they have been doing for G-d know how long: tugging at the viewer's heartsleeves. Only difference here, is that the effect on the Third World is absolutely true!

I found it more than difficult to rebutt, so the only manner of getting at the producers will be to use personal attacks AND attempt to keep it from reaching the TV public. Whether or not they do, is yet to be seen.

One thing is clear to me. I would wager 10:1 odds, that for every one hundred "regular" citizens, who view the show, over 9.5 of them will be so affected, that no amount of further hysteria will sway them with regards to the GW hyperventilating being spewed out of the MSM, money hungry scientists, AND power seeking politicians.

I was partucilarly impresses by Dr Partick Moore. His presentation there will certainly garner him tremendous hardship, from his former fellows within the Environment movement. I consider him, and Bjørn Lomborg to be two highly courageous people, willing to take the arrows of slander, from all quarters, and continue to speak logically. The others are doing their jobs as climate scientists.

---------------------------------------------
Well... Neither Lomborg nor Moore is opposing the theory of global warming. The question is only how much and what it will mean.

From the US point of view, there are other reasons to decrease dependence on foreign oil than just global warming, and expand use of other energy. For example that air pollution is still a health problem in many urban areas, and that 70% of US oil is imported. Among countries delivering oil to US are Venezuela, Nigeria and many countries in the Middle East.

From the US point of view, I am advocating increased use of nuclear energy. The construction of new nuclear plants providing cheap electricity should be a priority. This will provide cheap energy for cars (plug-in hybrids) as well as public transportation in bigger cities.

Of course wind mills, ethanol and other programs can contribute but the main alternative source of energy is and will be nuclear energy.

/track_snake

[John L]

Please watch the show T_S. Please take the time and watch the show before you rebutt.

Quote:Of course wind mills, ethanol and other programs can contribute but the main alternative source of energy is and will be nuclear energy.

I sorry, but ethanon is really a dead end, as for the US. It is too expensive, ie too energy intensive, to become economically viable. It's simple economics. Here, read this.

[John L]

Here is a critique of the show

Quote:Global warming labeled a 'scam'
By Al Webb
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published March 6, 2007

LONDON -- With a packet of claims that are almost certain to defy conventional wisdom, a television documentary to be aired in Britain this week condemns man-made global warming as a myth that has become "the biggest scam of modern times."

The program titled "The Great Global Warming Scandal" and set for screening by TV Channel 4 on Thursday dismisses claims that high levels of greenhouse gases generated by human activity causes climate change. Instead, the program suggests that the sun itself is the real culprit.

The documentary, directed by filmmaker Martin Durkin, is at odds with scientific opinion as outlined in a United Nations report in February, which blames mankind for global warming.

In his program, Mr. Durkin rejects the concept of man-made climate change, calling it "a lie ... the biggest scam of modern times."

The truth, he says, is that global warming "is a multibillion-dollar worldwide industry, created by fanatically anti-industrial environmentalists, supported by scientists peddling scare stories to chase funding, and propped up by compliant politicians and the media."

Channel 4 says that the program features "an impressive roll-call of experts," including nine professors, who are experts in climatology, oceanography, meteorology, biogeography and paleoclimatology.

It also says the experts come from prestigious institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the Danish National Space Center and universities and other schools in London, Ottawa, Jerusalem, Alabama, Virginia and Winnipeg, Canada.

"It's very rare that a film changes history," says Martin Durkin, "but I think this is a turning point, and in five years the idea that the greenhouse effect is the main reason behind global warming will be seen as total bunk," he says.

His program collides sharply with the premise outlined in former Vice President Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," which presents a bleak picture of how a buildup in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide affects the global climate, with potentially disastrous consequences.

"Al Gore might have won an Oscar," says Mr. Durkin, in a preview of the documentary, "but the film is very misleading, and he has got the relationship between [carbon dioxide] and climate change the wrong way around."

One of the filmmaker's experts, paleontologist professor Ian Clark of the University of Ottawa, says that global warming could be caused by increased activity on the sun, such as massive eruptions, and that ice-core samples from Antarctica show that, in fact, warmer periods in Earth's history have come about 800 years before rises in carbon dioxide levels.

Mr. Clark's findings appear to contradict the work of other scientists, who have used similar ice-core samples to illustrate that raised levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have accompanied the various global warming periods.

"The fact is that [carbon dioxide] has no proven link to global temperatures," says Mr. Durkin. "Solar activity is far more likely to be the culprit."
Scientists in the Channel 4 documentary cite what they claim is another discrepancy involving conventional research, saying that most of the recent global warming occurred before 1940, after which temperatures around the world fell for four decades.

Mr. Durkin's skeptical specialists view this as a flaw in the official view, because the worldwide economic boom that followed the end of World War II produced more carbon dioxide, and therefore should have meant a rise in global temperatures -- something he says did not happen.

"The Great Global Warming Swindle" also questions an assertion by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report, published last month, that it was backed by some 2,500 of the world's leading scientists.

Another of Mr. Durkin's professors, Paul Reiter of Paris' Pasteur Institute, an expert in malaria, calls the U.N. report a "sham" because, he says, it included the names of scientists -- including his own -- who disagreed with the report and who resigned from the panel.

"That is how they make it seem that all the top scientists are agreed," he says. "It's not true."

Mr. Reiter says his name was removed only after he threatened legal action against the panel. The report itself, he adds, was finalized by government appointees.

Yet another expert in the Durkin documentary, Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, is more circumspect.

"The [climate] system is too complex to say exactly what the effect of cutting back on [carbon dioxide] production would be or, indeed, of continuing to produce [carbon dioxide]."

"The greenhouse effect theory worried me from the start," Mr. Stott says, "because you can't say that just one factor can have this effect."

"At the moment, there is almost a McCarthyism movement in science where the greenhouse effect is like a puritanical religion, and this is dangerous," he says.

[track_snake]

John L Wrote:Please watch the show T_S. Please take the time and watch the show before you rebutt.

Quote:Of course wind mills, ethanol and other programs can contribute but the main alternative source of energy is and will be nuclear energy.

I sorry, but ethanon is really a dead end, as for the US. It is too expensive, ie too energy intensive, to become economically viable. It's simple economics. Here, read this.

-------------------------
Yes. I will watch it.

Ethanol is a dead end. I agree with that. But it might not be a dead end for the many farmers in the Midwest that now makes money on supplying corn to ethanol distilleries. About 25% of the US corn production goes to ethanol production now. This has also contributed to price increases on meat and chicken due to higher feed costs (much of the feeds given to pigs and poultry are based on corn).

It is much more efficient to produce ethanol from sugar cane in Brazil. But Pres. Bush is afraid to lose support in the midwest if he would take away the present 54 cent a gallon tariff on ethanol from Brazil. If he does so, all ethanol plants in the Midwest would be killed.

/track_snake

[drgonzaga]

Track Snake is correct in some respects and it is interesting that we are seeing the scenario played out in heavy rhetoric within the EU! The French have made clear that their "alternative" energy is nuclear power (at present the French rely on this source for 80% of their energy needs) and this position has raised the ire of the Greens as well as the "usual suspects" drawn from the old loud-mouths birthed by the ban-the-bomb crowd.

Now, he is wrong over ethanol overall, but correct as to how the American approach has been wrong. Cane sugar and not corn (which is not only problematic in terms of efficiency but also because of its chemistry) is the correct alternative but on this issue agricultural politics has been the smoke clogging the cylinders. Conversion is all old technology that vested interests have basically squelched as a result of traditional attitudes and the costs of adaptation versus the status quo. The fooling around with "electric" cars is even more technolithic; however...

[stroll]

John L Wrote:I found it more than difficult to rebutt, so the only manner of getting at the producers will be to use personal attacks AND attempt to keep it from reaching the TV public. Whether or not they do, is yet to be seen.

Well, you wouldn't want to rebutt anything, and why would anyone want to get at the producers? The BBC is known for showing controversial quality material from all sides of the spectrum. It's been shown already on channel 4, btw.

Quote:One thing is clear to me. I would wager 10:1 odds, that for every one hundred "regular" citizens, who view the show, over 9.5 of them will be so affected, that no amount of further hysteria will sway them with regards to the GW hyperventilating being spewed out of the MSM, money hungry scientists, AND power seeking politicians.

Perhaps you overestimate the gullibility of the 'feeling' BBC viewers? This is not Fox-news, you know.

[mr_yak]

NYT to Gore ... Cool it!

Quote:“Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet,” Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. “Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.”

In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore’s claim that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this” threatened change.

Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.”

... damn pesky scientists! Don't they realize that there is more to the truth than just the facts??! :lol:

[drgonzaga]

Well Stroll, Monbiot of The Guardian, is out with his knives and even the NY Times did a little piece without mentioning the program. Now, as you know, documentaries of this type are meant to antagonize (and often the producers do take some liberties--in the instance of Michael Moore downright slander and falsification (he's also in the news because a pair of producers pulled a Roger & Me on him!).

Here's Monbiot:

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climat...72,00.html

Here's the NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/scienc...ref=slogin

And Michael Moore got his in a new documentary called Manufacturing Dissent:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/movies...b6&ei=5070

Which is more than appropriate because it goes to the heart of how easily public opinion is manipulated and manipulable at the hands of the axe grinders.

Whether it be the neo-Luddites in the streets, the "deprived" because they are deranged, or the pandits of pomposity that confuse science for theology and are forever seeking a single cause for complex subjects--we won't mention the politicians of perdition since demagogues will always be demagogues or demagores in this instance--information chaos is the handmaiden of anarchy.

[John L]

drgonzaga Wrote:Well Stroll, Monbiot of The Guardian, is out with his knives and even the NY Times did a little piece without mentioning the program. Now, as you know, documentaries of this type are meant to antagonize (and often the producers do take some liberties--in the instance of Michael Moore downright slander and falsification (he's also in the news because a pair of producers pulled a Roger & Me on him!).

Here's Monbiot:

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climat...72,00.html

Here's the NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/scienc...ref=slogin

And Michael Moore got his in a new documentary called Manufacturing Dissent:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/movies...b6&ei=5070

Which is more than appropriate because it goes to the heart of how easily public opinion is manipulated and manipulable at the hands of the axe grinders.

Whether it be the neo-Luddites in the streets, the "deprived" because they are deranged, or the pandits of pomposity that confuse science for theology and are forever seeking a single cause for complex subjects--we won't mention the politicians of perdition since demagogues will always be demagogues or demagores in this instance--information chaos is the handmaiden of anarchy.

One thing that should be mentioned here is the lack of connection between Michael Moore and Patrick Moore. Michael Moore has no relationship to the program, whle Patrick Moore, of GreenSpirit, is shown in the Channel 4 presentation. This could be confusing to many reading the above.

[Independents4Bush]

The link is down but I have the video. I'll try to watch it some time this week.

[SavesTheDay]

stroll Wrote:

John L Wrote:I found it more than difficult to rebutt, so the only manner of getting at the producers will be to use personal attacks AND attempt to keep it from reaching the TV public. Whether or not they do, is yet to be seen.

Well, you wouldn't want to rebutt anything, and why would anyone want to get at the producers? The BBC is known for showing controversial quality material from all sides of the spectrum. It's been shown already on channel 4, btw.

Quote:One thing is clear to me. I would wager 10:1 odds, that for every one hundred "regular" citizens, who view the show, over 9.5 of them will be so affected, that no amount of further hysteria will sway them with regards to the GW hyperventilating being spewed out of the MSM, money hungry scientists, AND power seeking politicians.

Perhaps you overestimate the gullibility of the 'feeling' BBC viewers? This is not Fox-news, you know.

Good job proving the video wrong. It's ovbious that since you cannot do so, you're just going to throw out insults.
Have another sip of your Kool-Aid

[John L]

I just added another link to the show. It works now.

[KenRI]

John, any other sources for this video beside the 2 defendants of the Viacom lawsuit? :lol:
I would guess youtube will be taking it down soon as well.

[John L]

KenRI Wrote:John, any other sources for this video beside the 2 defendants of the Viacom lawsuit? :lol:
I would guess youtube will be taking it down soon as well.

I haven't looked for more, but I think that there will be others. Try Googling it. But you are right. The Anti-Skeptics Left will go out of it's way to ensure it is taken down everywhere. After all, some of the scientists, who do not follow the line, are now being threatened with their life. This is exactly what one can expect from the Collectivist Left.

Actually, I am surprised that it even made it to primetime.

[drgonzaga]

JohnL wrote:

Quote:Actually, I am surprised that it even made it to primetime.

You should not be, JL, given that it was broadcast by Channel 4, which has made it a habit to pan conventional wisdom in the"establishment" of Britain's politics. They have just skewered Bonnie Prince Charlie for his perpetual popping off over issues and "causes".

Skepticism is the natural attribute of science (it is the necessary catalyst) but in a politicized environment the skeptic is always assaulted particularly if science is verified by simply counting numbers, of opinion that is.

[John L]

drgonzaga Wrote:JohnL wrote:

Quote:Actually, I am surprised that it even made it to primetime.

You should not be, JL, given that it was broadcast by Channel 4, which has made it a habit to pan conventional wisdom in the"establishment" of Britain's politics. They have just skewered Bonnie Prince Charlie for his perpetual popping off over issues and "causes".

Skepticism is the natural attribute of science (it is the necessary catalyst) but in a politicized environment the skeptic is always assaulted particularly if science is verified by simply counting numbers, of opinion that is.

In truth, I am not up to speed on the 'goings' of British TV. Anyway, your point is a nice thing to know. But I am still surprised that it would be allowed to make it to primetime. I'll wait to see if it Ever makes it to the Science, or History Channel here in the US. It will most certainly not make it to the main networks.