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Golden Valley Environment Group The Great Global Warming Swindle? Thursday 8 March 2007 - a key day in the global warming debate? The Great Global Warming Swindle on Channel 4 claimed to destroy the myth that carbon dioxide (and man's actions) was responsible for climate change. Central to the programme's argument was the theme that there was a political and scientific bandwagon that had to prove a link between carbon dioxide, man's economic activities and global warming - apparently all down to a decision by Mrs Thatcher to take on the coal miners here in the UK and her wish to promote nuclear power. A series of plausible sounding arguments were produced, neatly edited together, from some workers in (or nearish) the field of climate science to debunk the idea that man-made carbon dioxide was leading to a warming of the climate. The main culprit for the warming they said was the sun, sun spots in particular and the solar wind which they argued can change levels of cloud cover on earth. Another driver in the film was the idea that to disagree, to challenge to discuss was actively suppressed and scientists with dissenting views were silenced by a self interested lobby group - implying that bad science and distortion were order of the day. Shame then that they couldn't use unbiased, up to date information rather than old, incomplete and apparently misleading data. The theories they showed are not new, the temperature records not up to date and seemingly distorted (missing the past 10 very warm years for example) and one of the key professors they wheeled out (Carl Wunsch) has publicly stated he was misrepresented, misled and deliberately distorted - he does not disagree with carbon dioxide-driven climate change - he just thinks there are too many arguments at the extremes and some more rational debate is needed - eminently sensible. Watch the programme (I have a tape if anyone wants to borrow it), but do so with an open mind and read the responses - for example George Monbiot - Guardian 13 March, and many more... Yes - let's have a debate, yes there are a lot of extreme and misleading statements out there but we don't need to resort to this sort of level of argument. A last word - when someone says the global warming scientists are a large group with jobs to protect (true of course) think for a second about those whose jobs depend directly on carbon - no reason to pick on Shell (they do a lot on renewables amongst other things) but they have 108,000 (Shell website) employees and a massive turnover - and that's just one example of a company dependent on carbon..... Airline Fuel Taxation On a similar theme, there's a petition on the No10 website about airline fuel tax petition Click here to return to top of this page.
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