The Great Global Warming Swindle has been treated by climate change deniers as a handy stick to beat down any argument, as if somehow the fact the Channel 4 choose to air the documentary proved that climate change is all a hoax. However, todays Ofcom report confirms that what many of those who had been interviewed for the show had said at the time, they were unfairly treated and what they said was shown out of context.

Former UK chief scientific adviser Sir David King had been misquoted and had not been given a chance to put his case, the regulator said.

The ruling also found in favour of Carl Wunsch, an oceanographer who said he had been invited to take part in a programme that would "discuss in a balanced way the complicated elements of understanding of climate change", but was horrified at the resulting "out-and-out propaganda piece, in which there is not even a gesture toward balance".

"I think this is a vindication of the credibility and standing of the IPCC and the manner in which we function, and clearly brings out the distortion in whatever Channel 4 was trying to project," said Rajendra Pachauri, the organisation's chairman.

Channel 4 will now have to broadcast an outline of the Ofcom ruling against them but that's all, there are no further sanctions. Sir John Houghton, former head of the Met Office and chairperson of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said the Ofcom ruling wasn't a damning as it should have been.

He said, "It's very disappointing that Ofcom hasn't come up with a stronger statement about being misled, I know hundreds of people, literally hundreds, who were misled by it - they saw it, it was a well-produced programme and they imagined it had some truth behind it, so they were misled and it seems Ofcom didn't care about that."

Bob Ward, of the Royal Society, said "The ruling noted that Channel 4 had admitted errors in the graphs and data used in the programme, yet decided that this did not cause harm or offence to the audience."

The Ofcom definition of a misleading programme requires not just that the viewer it misled but also caused harm or offence in the process. Apparently making people feel that climate change wasn't caused by human activities did not result in harm or offence.