Man Made Global Warming is a Media Made Myth

I have read some books written by the skeptics and I've seen that video before. The only thing it convinced me of is that the deniers are extremely biased. They want to believe it their way and no amount of scientific debunking of their claims will change their views. They cherry pick the data to support their beliefs. Thankfully these crackpots are in the minority. The only people who take them seriously are people who choose to for short-term political or economic reasons.

Are they 'skeptics' or 'deniers'? Can't you make up your mind which pejorative to use?

And ironically, change "deniers" to "believers" and just about everything you stated is as just as true, except that the "minority" becomes the "majority", which is indeed scary.

You aren't fooling anybody with this rhetoric. Try addressing the issues. And watch the Glenn Beck video I just posted. He addresses this particular issue quite succinctly.
 
Book I'm reading is called 'The Weather Makers' by Tim Flannery, if anyone is interested.

Supposed to write an essay/review of it, comparing it to Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth' in its presentation of the issue. :coffee:
 
Are they 'skeptics' or 'deniers'? Can't you make up your mind which pejorative to use?

And ironically, change "deniers" to "believers" and just about everything you stated is as just as true, except that the "minority" becomes the "majority", which is indeed scary.

You aren't fooling anybody with this rhetoric. Try addressing the issues. And watch the Glenn Beck video I just posted. He addresses this particular issue quite succinctly.

Form, Glenn Beck is the last person I'd reference for global warming.

Since I have to start limiting my CFC posting, I'll just agree to disagree with you.

I know that nothing I say will sway your opinion and the idea that you could change mine is laughable.
 
Form, Glenn Beck is the last person I'd reference for global warming.

If you knew anything about me from my previous postings, you would know how little I typically think of him and his opinions. But did you watch the video? He has most of the "man is destroying the planet" crowd pegged. They are afraid of real science. They don't want skepticism. They don't want reasonable questions to be raised. They want everybody to agree with them whether they are right or not. That's not science. That's politics.

I know that nothing I say will sway your opinion and the idea that you could change mine is laughable.

Actually, that is simply not true. I'm a skeptic but I could certainly be swayed or even convinced with the proper data and theories. OTOH, I think you are right about yourself. You have already made up your mind.

Since I have to start limiting my CFC posting, I'll just agree to disagree with you.

(Inverted. Good luck to you for whatever reason you must stop posting.)
 
Um, nope. Not even close. To claim that only shows you didn't even bother to watch it before trying to discredit the producers instead of addressing the issues it presents. Are you claiming all the scientists in the documentary are also engaging in "obfuscatory deception" as well?





Link to video.



a quick google search or wiki search on the great global warming swindle shows that many of the scientists involved rejected and discredited the editing and production of that video for unfairly using their quotes and taking them out of context. There are some very harsh critiques by very respected institutions. It simply cannot be used as a source when the subject of such high criticism by so many other parties particularly when its findings have not been reproduced or reinforced.

So do you actually have any contradictory evidence, other than a disgraced BBC Production, to refute the basis of the Greenhouse Effect? I understand being skeptical, but as of now there is nothing substantial enough to discredit the current theory as far as i have still seen.

Because here i am, searching through the Stanford University Press periodicals and I'm not finding a whole lot. Then again Fox News and BBC 4 say..
 
a quick google search or wiki search on the great global warming swindle shows that many of the scientists involved rejected and discredited the editing and production of that video for unfairly using their quotes and taking them out of context. There are some very harsh critiques by very respected institutions.

Have you actually watched the video yourself? It is completely inconceivable that any of the actual speakers "rejected and discredited the editing and production" as you allege. So let's see them.

And institutions now offer "harsh critiques"? What institutions are those?

It simply cannot be used as a source when the subject of such high criticism by so many other parties particularly when its findings have not been reproduced or reinforced.

You seem to misunderstand. This isn't a scientific treatise. It is a POV documentary featuring prominent scientists in the field of atmospheric research and environmentalism. It is nothing more and it is nothing less. You can try to refute their statements or you can continue to try to Swift Boat their legitimacy. I'm really not interested in the latter. After all, I can easily research their qualifications since they are all legitimate scientists as well as the founder of Greenpeace.
 
Have you actually watched the video yourself? It is completely inconceivable that any of the actual speakers "rejected and discredited the editing and production" as you allege. So let's see them.

And institutions now offer "harsh critiques"? What institutions are those?

I have watched it. Someone in a similar thread in the "Science and Technology" forum posted it.

Here are some excerpts from Wikipedia:

According to Houghton(co-chair IPCC Scientific Assessment working group 1988-2002) the programme was "a mixture of truth, half truth and falsehood put together with the sole purpose of discrediting the science of global warming

The British Antarctic Survey released a statement about the The Great Global Warming Swindle. It is highly critical of the programme, singling out the use of a graph with the incorrect time axis, and also the statements made about solar activity: "A comparison of the distorted and undistorted contemporary data reveal that the plot of solar activity bears no resemblance to the temperature curve, especially in the last 20 years

A second issue was the claim that human emissions of CO2 are small compared to natural emissions from volcanoes. This is untrue: current annual emissions from fossil fuel burning and cement production are estimated to be around 100 times greater than average annual volcanic emissions of CO2. That large volcanoes cannot significantly perturb the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere is apparent from the ice core and atmospheric record of CO2 concentrations, which shows a steady rise during the industrial period, with no unusual changes after large eruptions

Alan Thorpe, professor of meteorology at the University of Reading and Chief Executive of the UK Natural Environment Research Council, commented on the film in New Scientist. He wrote, "First, let's deal with the main thesis: that the presence or absence of cosmic rays in Earth's atmosphere is a better explanation for temperature variation than the concentration of CO2 and other gases. This is not a new assertion and it is patently wrong: there is no credible evidence that cosmic rays play a significant role...Let scepticism reign, but let's not play games with the evidence

The Royal Society has issued a press release in reaction to the film. In it, Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society, shortly restates the predominant scientific opinion on climate change and adds: Those who promote fringe scientific views but ignore the weight of evidence are playing a dangerous game. They run the risk of diverting attention from what we can do to ensure the world's population has the best possible future.

Thirty-seven British scientists signed a letter of complaint, saying that they "believe that the misrepresentations of facts and views, both of which occur in your programme, are so serious that repeat broadcasts of the programme, without amendment, are not in the public interest.

On July 5, 2007, The Guardian reported that Professor Mike Lockwood, a solar physicist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory had carried out a study, initiated partially in response to The Great Global Warming Swindle, that disproved one of the documentary's key planks — namely that global warming directly correlates to solar activity. Lockwood's study showed that solar activity had diminished subsequent to 1987, despite a steady rise in the temperature of the Earth's surface.

In a BBC interview about this study, Lockwood commented on the graphs shown in the documentary: All the graphs they showed stopped in about 1980, and I knew why, because things diverged after that ... You can't just ignore bits of data that you do not like.

Volume 20 of the Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society presented a critique by David Jones, Andrew Watkins, Karl Braganza and Michael Coughlan. The Great Global Warming Swindle does not represent the current state of knowledge in climate science… Many of the hypotheses presented in the Great Global Warming Swindle have been considered and rejected by due scientific process.

Carl Wunsch, professor of Physical Oceanography at MIT, is featured in the Channel 4 version of the programme. Afterwards he said that he was "completely misrepresented" in the film and had been "totally misled" when he agreed to be interviewed.[7][33] He called the film "grossly distorted" and "as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two.Ofcom divided Wunsch's complaint into three parts, ruling in his favour on two parts and against him on one part.

Eigil Friis-Christensen's research was used to support claims about the influence of solar activity on climate, both in the programme and Durkin's subsequent defence of it. Friis-Christensen, with environmental Research Fellow Nathan Rive, criticised the way the solar data were used:"We have concerns regarding the use of a graph featured in the documentary titled ‘Temp & Solar Activity 400 Years’. Firstly, we have reason to believe that parts of the graph were made up of fabricated data that were presented as genuine. The inclusion of the artificial data is both misleading and pointless. Secondly, although the narrator commentary during the presentation of the graph is consistent with the conclusions of the paper from which the figure originates, it incorrectly rules out a contribution by anthropogenic greenhouse gases to 20th century global warming.


George Monbiot writing for The Guardian accused Channel 4 of being more interested in generating controversy than in producing credible science programmes

Geoffrey Lean, The Independent's environment editor, was critical of the programme. He noted that Dominic Lawson is the son and brother-in-law, respectively, of two prominent global warming sceptics

Mr Durkin admitted that his graphics team had extended the time axis along the bottom of the graph to the year 2000. 'There was a fluff there,' he said. If Mr Durkin had gone directly to the NASA website he could have got the most up-to-date data
 
I have watched: Inconvenient Truth, The Swindle, Loose Change, Expelled, Fahrenheit 911 and a whole lot of UFO, Extraterrestials and a lot of psychic power proving videos. I can say with confidence that they all use the same tactics. And that they have a lot of facts but it only takes a small amount of editing, truth twisting, leap of faiths, unfounded conclusions to make bull sound convincing. Inconvinient Truth is a little different, since it uses exaggeration to get the message across. And keep in mind Al Gore is a politician first, a scientist 16th.
 
Um, nope. Not even close. To claim that only shows you didn't even bother to watch it before trying to discredit the producers instead of addressing the issues it presents. Are you claiming all the scientists in the documentary are also engaging in "obfuscatory deception" as well?
I watched it some time ago, when it first went through the rounds and got discredited. It's been known as junk for a long time, long enough for any 'skeptic' to have figured out that it was crap if they were going to 'skeptically' look at it.

I've watched it more than once, including rewatching parts to see if the producers actually were the scum that they seemed to be. There's no way a real skeptic would use Swindle to discount the current GHG concerns. People would only latch onto Swindle if they were willing to latch onto anything that gave them dissonance solace.

Seriously, it's pretty well the worst 'refutation' of AGW one can find. It's the POSTER CHILD of AGW denier obfuscation.
 
Perhaps it would be better if you posted a site showing a debunking of said video? Maybe even part of it. Right now you sound like someone completely ignoring a person's argument.
 
Here are some excerpts from Wikipedia:
Thanks for pointing out the Wikipedia article. For some reason, it didn't appear as it usually does when I googled the video earlier. Otherwise, I would have read it myself.

Here's a few comments from the article which you didn't include in your quotes:

A number of academics, environmentalists, think-tank consultants and writers are interviewed in the film in support of its various assertions. They include the Canadian environmentalist Patrick Moore, founding member of Greenpeace but for the past 21 years a critic of the organisation; Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Patrick Michaels, Research Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia; Nigel Calder, editor of New Scientist from 1962 to 1966; John Christy, professor and director of the Earth System Science Center at University of Alabama; Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute; the former British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson; and Piers Corbyn, a British weather forecaster.

Any noted quacks or wackos who deserve your collective enmity in that list?

According to Houghton the programme was "a mixture of truth, half truth and falsehood put together with the sole purpose of discrediting the science of global warming", which he noted had been endorsed by the scientific community, including the Academies of Science of the major industrialised countries and China, India and Brazil.

No, the sole purpose was to show that there is still a great deal of skepticism and doubt amongst rsepectable scientists and academicians who have often received death threats for merely expressing their views.

And once again, "endorsement' doesn't mean doodley in science.

Scientists will continue to monitor the global climate and the factors which influence it. It is important that all legitimate potential scientific explanations continue to be considered and investigated. Debate will continue, and the Royal Society has just hosted a two day discussion meeting attended by over 300 scientists, but it must not be at the expense of action. Those who promote fringe scientific views but ignore the weight of evidence are playing a dangerous game. They run the risk of diverting attention from what we can do to ensure the world's population has the best possible future.[28]

In other words, "Once the war starts, you need to shut up!" Bill O'Reilly...

Did any of the other "conspiracy theory" videos you (collectively) try to liken it to win any awards?

Awards and recognition

Shortlisted in the Best Documentary category in the British television industry's 2008 Broadcast awards.[75]
Best Documentary at the Io Isabella Film Festival held in Southern Italy.[76]
Jury Prize in the 3rd International Science Film Festival Awards 2008 held in Athens.[77]

I would also contend that it is at least as unbiased as "An Inconvenient Truth", which continues to be shown to public school children in the US and UK as though it was the unvarnished gospel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth

Global warming skeptics were critical of the film. Richard S. Lindzen wrote in a June 26, 2006 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that Gore was using a biased presentation to exploit the fears of the public for his own political gain. [101] Roy Spencer wrote an open letter to Gore criticizing his presentation of climate science in the film, asserting that the Arctic had a similar temperature in the 1930s before the mass emissions of carbon dioxide began.[102] Timothy F. Ball rejected Gore’s claim that there has been a sharp drop-off in the thickness of the Arctic ice cap since 1970, stating that the data was taken only from an isolated area of the Arctic and during a specific cooling period.[103]

William Gray said of the movie: "We're brainwashing our children. They're going to the Gore movie An Inconvenient Truth and being fed all this. It's ridiculous."[104] While discussing the companion book to the movie Gray said, "This is a slick propaganda book. The pictures are very good. But there are factual errors."[105]

A March 13, 2007 article in The New York Times reported on concerns among some scientists about the tone and the accuracy of the film, noting that they "argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous." Gore's discussion of a rise in sea level of up to 20 feet (6.1 m), while not stating a timeframe, appears in contrast with a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which predicts a maximum rise of 23 inches (580 mm) this century, excluding non-linear effects on ice sheets; although that too discusses the possibilities of higher rises if the ice sheets melt. The article also states that "a report last June by the National Academies seemed to contradict Mr. Gore’s portrayal of recent temperatures as the highest in the past millennium."[106][107] The article quotes both defenders and critics of the film; Gore responds that scientists may disagree with him on some details, "but we do agree on the fundamentals."[106]

The documentary film The Great Global Warming Swindle, broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK in 2007, brought together skeptical scientists and others who disagree with the IPCC position regarding human-caused global warming. The film claims that Gore misrepresented the data in An Inconvenient Truth, and contends that the actual relationship between carbon dioxide and the temperature is the other way round (that is, rise in temperature preceded an increase in carbon dioxide in the ice core samples and therefore does so today). The claim that CO2 increases lag temperature increases in the historical ice core record is not disputed. The inference that the same relationship holds today, have been disputed by believer scientists and others such as John T. Houghton,[108] the British Antarctic Survey,[109] Eigil Friis-Christensen,[110] and the Royal Society.[111] The UK media regulator OfCom has since upheld some complaints against the programme (while rejecting others and declining to investigate the majority).[112]

http://phillytalk.com/reality-check/global-warming/debunking-an-inconvenient-truth.html

Details of these points here.

1. Carbon Dioxide’s Effect on Temperature. The relationship between global temperature and carbon dioxide (CO2), on which the entire scare is founded, is not linear. Every molecule of CO2 added to the atmosphere contributes less to warming than the previous one.

2. Kilimanjaro. The snows of Kilimanjaro are melting not because of global warming but because of a local climate shift that began 100 years ago.

3. Glaciers. Glaciers around the world have been receding at around the same pace for over 100 years.

4. The Medieval Warm Period. Al Gore says that the “hockey stick” graph that shows temperatures remarkably steady for the last 1,000 years has been validated, and ridicules the concept of a “medieval warm period.” That’s not the case.

5. The Hottest Year. Satellite temperature measurements say that 2005 wasn't the hottest year on record — 1998 was — and that temperatures have been stable since 2001

6. Heat Waves. The summer heat wave that struck Europe in 2003 was caused by an atmospheric pressure anomaly; it had nothing to do with global warming.

7. Record Temperatures. Record temperatures — hot and cold — are set every day around the world; that’s the nature of records. Statistically, any given place will see four record high temperatures set every year.

8. Hurricanes. There is no overall global trend of hurricane-force storms getting stronger that has anything to do with temperature

9. Tornadoes. Records for numbers of tornadoes are set because we can now record more of the smaller tornadoes

10. European Flooding. European flooding is not new (p. 107). Similar flooding happened in 2003. Research from Michael Mudelsee and colleagues from the University of Leipzig published in Nature (Sept. 11, 2003) looked at data reaching as far back as 1021

11. Shrinking Lakes. Scientists investigating the disappearance of Lake Chad (p.116) found that most of it was due to human overuse of water.

12. Polar Bears. Polar bears are not becoming endangered. A leading Canadian polar bear biologist wrote recently, “Climate change is having an effect on the west Hudson population of polar bears, but really, there is no need to panic. Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number.

13. The Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream, the ocean conveyor belt, is not at risk of shutting off in the North Atlantic (p. 150). Carl Wunsch of MIT wrote to the journal Nature in 2004 to say, “The only way to produce an ocean circulation without a Gulf Stream is either to turn off the wind system, or to stop the Earth’s rotation, or both”

14. Invasive Species. Gore’s worries about the effect of warming on species ignore evolution. With the new earlier caterpillar season in the Netherlands, an evolutionary advantage is given to birds that can hatch their eggs earlier than the rest. That’s how nature works.

15. Species Loss. When it comes to species loss, the figures given on p. 163 are based on extreme guesswork, as the late Julian Simon pointed out. We have documentary evidence of only just over 1,000 extinctions since 1600 (see, for instance, Bjørn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist, p. 250).

16. Coral Reefs. Coral reefs have been around for over 500 million years. This means that they have survived through long periods with much higher temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations than today.

17. Malaria and other Infectious Diseases. Leading disease scientists contend that climate change plays only a minor role in the spread of emerging infectious diseases.

18. Antarctic Ice. There is controversy over whether the Antarctic ice sheet is thinning or thickening. Recent scientific studies have shown a thickening in the interior at the same time as increased melting along the coastlines. Temperatures in the interior are generally decreasing. The Antarctic Peninsula, where the Larsen-B ice shelf broke up (p. 181) is not representative of what is happening in the rest of Antarctica.

19. Greenland Climate. Greenland was warmer in the 1920s and 1930s than it is now.

20. Sea Level Rise. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not forecast sea-level rises of “18 to 20 feet.” Rather, it says, “We project a sea level rise of 0.09 to 0.88 m for 1990 to 2100, with a central value of 0.48 m.

21. Population. Al Gore worries about population growth; Gore does not suggest a solution. Fertility in the developed world is stable or decreasing. The plain fact is that we are not going to reduce population back down to 2 billion or fewer in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, the population in the developing world requires a significant increase in its standard of living to reduce the threats of premature and infant mortality, disease, and hunger.

22. Energy Generation. A specific example of this is Gore’s acknowledgement that 30 percent of global CO2 emissions come from wood fires used for cooking (p. 227). If we introduced affordable, coal-fired power generation into South Asia and Africa we could reduce this considerably and save over 1.6 million lives a year. This is the sort of solution that Gore does not even consider.

23. Carbon-Emissions Trading. The European Carbon Exchange Market, touted as “effective” on p. 252, has crashed.

24. The “Scientific Consensus.” On the supposed “scientific consensus”: Dr. Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California, San Diego, (p. 262) did not examine a “large random sample” of scientific articles. She got her search terms wrong and thought she was looking at all the articles when in fact she was looking at only 928 out of about 12,000 articles on “climate change.”

25. Economic Costs. Even if the study Gore cites is right (p. 280-281), the United States will still emit massive amounts of CO2 after all the measures it outlines have been realized. Getting emissions down to the paltry levels needed to stabilize CO2 in the atmosphere would require, in Gore’s own words, “a wrenching transformation” of our way of life. This cannot be done easily or without significant cost. The Kyoto Protocol, which Gore enthusiastically supports, would avert less than a tenth of a degree of warming in the next fifty years (emphasis added)

Finally, Gore quotes Winston Churchill (p. 100) — but he should read what Churchill said when he was asked what qualities a politician requires: “The ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen.”

What do you (collectively) have to say about those criticisms?
 
Did any of the other "conspiracy theory" videos you try to liken it to win any awards?
Yes. Zeitgeist did.

Zeitgeist said:
A remastered version of the film was screened on November 10, 2007 at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood as part of a film festival held there (the 4th Annual "Artivist Film Festival") where it won the "Best Feature" award in the "Artivist Spirit" category for feature-length documentaries.[12] [13] In 2008, "Zeitgeist Addendum", the sequel, received the same award.[11] These awards feature prominently in the two films' promotional material but have failed to attract any interest in the media.

Conspiracy theory films certainly can win awards given to them by their followers. A film award has absolutely nothing to do with the credibility of a documentary. The only possible relevant awards would be those given by experts.
 
Perhaps it would be better if you posted a site showing a debunking of said video? Maybe even part of it. Right now you sound like someone completely ignoring a person's argument.

Yeah, that's the problem with some of the real junk sources in any topic. There are some sources that are so outrageous that there's no point again going through all the problems. I know that outright denying a source isn't good argumentation, but geez, it's The Great Global Warming Swindle, for goodness sake. I probably shouldn't have reacted the way I did, but, golly, I wasn't expecting people to still be sourcing it.

It's been out, and debunked for over two years now. I guess we could link to old discussions, but is there any point? It's the recognised junk piece of AGW discussion. The thread is revolving around a 'skeptic' who hasn't stumbled across the numerous problems with that piece, even in all the time it's been out.

Sometimes dissonance is just dissonance.
 
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