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The Great Global Warming Swindle
Brendan Case
World
On The Web
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Nearly three years ago, Al Gore pronounced in his documentary,
An Inconvenient Truth, “The debate in the scientific community
is over” concerning global warming. That assertion echoes
throughout the channels of the popular media, rising in volume
and pitch with every reverberation. Its proponents enjoy increasing
public acclaim (and funding), and receive the highest honors across
disciplines. Does this cacophony from the advocates of man-made
warming mark the close of any real debate?
The
Great Global Warming Swindle, a documentary released last
year by British television producer Mark Durkin (to scarcely a
whisper from critics of any scientific persuasion), has the temerity
to suggest otherwise. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist at
the University of Virginia, and author of perhaps its only review
in an American newspaper, described
this film as “a devastating documentary…based on sound
science and interviews with real climate scientists, including
me.”
The film features interviews with prominent scientists and media
figures who have voiced skepticism of the prevailing account of
climate change. These include, among others, Lord Nigel Lawson,
former Secretary of the Exchequer in Britain, and among the first
government officials to allocate public funds for research into
emissions-linked climate change in the 1980’s; Dr. John
Christy, listed as a “lead author” of the 2001 IPCC
report, and still claimed by the organization as a “contributor”;
Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace; and Dr. Ian Clark,
a paleo-climatologist, and expert in the ice core-sampling that
forms the heart of Gore’s argument in An Inconvenient Truth.
(Article continues below)
Durkin uses these interviews as a springboard to propose several
audacious hypotheses. Among the most gut-wrenching, the interviewed
scientists claim that increasing carbon dioxide does not, in fact,
increase the Earth’s temperature; rather, they insist, the
causal link between carbon dioxide levels and temperature runs
the opposite direction—”Temperature,” claims
Dr. Ian Clark, pointing impressively to a graph showing two jagged
lines chasing one another across the millennia, “is leading
CO2 levels by 800 years.” The documentary proposes that
changes in solar activity, rather than carbon dioxide, predominantly
influences global temperature, and that the current orthodoxy
of anti-industrial environmentalism arose out of an unlikely allegiance
between pro-nuclear British conservatives, lead by Margaret Thatcher,
and neo-Marxists ideologically displaced by the fall of the Soviet
Union.
Whether the argument presented in The Great Global Warming Swindle
is true or not, the documentary provides an important perspective
on what is potentially the most monumental issue facing the world
today. Anyone evaluating the dramatic claims of the new environmental
movement—denounced by its very father, Patrick Moore, as
“anti-human” in the closing moments of the film—will
do well to consider its claims.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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