"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."

I was offended.

Not only by the fact that they misrepresented (and therefore slandered) legitimate scientists, but by the fact that they thought I was stupid enough to buy into their bullshit.

I take that as a personal insult.

Don't believe anything you see in a TV documentary made in the UK.

Documentary makers here have no obligation to be accurate, though factual programmes should present a wide range of views.

That is the implication of a series of rulings by Ofcom, the regulatory body for responsible for upholding broadcast standards in the UK, on complaints made about a British TV documentary called The Great Global Warming Swindle.

Channel 4, the television company that commissioned and broadcast the documentary, first shown on 8 March last year, subsequently sold the show to 21 countries and released it on DVD. Numerous clips have been viewed on video-sharing site YouTube.

According to the Ofcom ruling, while all programmes dealing with important issues should be impartial, only news programmes have to be presented with "due accuracy". It doesn't matter if other programmes are misleading as long as they don't cause "harm or offence", and the regulator's interpretation of harm is so narrow that it effectively gives broadcasters a green light to mislead the public.

The "documentary" in question attacked the idea that global warming is caused by human activity.

To achieve this, writer and director Martin Durkin didn't look at the many genuine questions and uncertainties relating to climate change. Instead, he assembled a one-sided package of misrepresentations and fabrications based mainly on inaccurate newspaper reports, opinion pieces and old propaganda disseminated by the oil lobby and its stooges.
Blatant errors

For instance, parts of some of the graphs were actually made up, as the programme makers effectively admitted when they corrected the most blatant errors for later broadcasts.

For me and my colleagues, this shameful piece of television was the final straw that persuaded us to do a special setting out the science behind the many climate myths and misconceptions.

We were not the only ones outraged. Durkin's documentary also prompted many complaints to Ofcom. Dave Rado, a concerned layman, worked with scientists to produce one detailed complaint claiming 137 breaches of the UK's broadcasting regulations. Those involved stress that they are not trying to stifle free speech, but rather to prevent the media from practicing "systematic deception".

Now, more than a year after the broadcast, Ofcom has finally gotten around to ruling on these complaints (pdf). It has upheld some of the claimed breaches.
Upheld complaints

The programme misrepresented the views of David King, then the chief scientific advisor to the UK government, and gave him no opportunity to respond, Ofcom has decided. The programme criticised King for comments he did not make.

Ofcom also partly upheld similar complaints by oceanographer Carl Wunsch and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Channel 4 will have to broadcast summaries of Ofcom's ruling in each of the three cases.

So much for fairness. What about the general issue of factual accuracy? According to Ofcom's broadcasting code: "Factual programmes or items or portrayals of factual matters must not materially mislead the public".

The code goes on to say that "due impartiality must be preserved on ... major matters relating to current public policy" and "in dealing with matters, an appropriately wide range of significant views must be included and given due weight".

Ofcom has ruled that the final part of the programme was in breach of the code relating to impartiality and presenting a wide range of views.

The decision is fairly meaningless, however, as it has not imposed any sanction. Channel 4 will not have to broadcast anything relating to this ruling.
Factual failings

What seems extraordinary, though, is that Ofcom has decided Durkin's programme was not in breach of the code when it comes to factual accuracy. So apparently:

• It's OK to fabricate graphics.

• It's OK to state that volcanoes emit more carbon dioxide than humans when in fact humans emit far more.

• It's OK to present scientists as experts in fields they in fact know little about.

• It's OK to present disputed claims as if they were well-established and accepted scientific facts.

• It's OK to claim: "There is no evidence at all from Earth's long climate history that carbon dioxide has ever determined global temperatures", when there is overwhelming evidence going back many decades that CO2 does play a role.

• It's OK to deliberately confuse long-term changes in sea ice cover with the seasonal coming and going of ice.

• It's OK to state that Margaret Thatcher made a speech to scientists at the Royal Society saying: "There's money on the table for you to prove this stuff" (meaning global warming) when she did not say any such thing. The extraordinary idea being that climate change was an issue cooked up by climate scientists in order to get funding.

• It's OK to state that, "The common belief that carbon dioxide is driving climate change is at odds with much of the available scientific data: data from weather balloons and satellites, from ice core surveys, and from the historical temperature records" when this is clearly untrue.

• It's OK to claim that an individual called Piers Corbyn produces more accurate weather forecasts than the UK's Met Office when there is no evidence of this at all.

The list could go on and on, but you get the picture. I can't think of any supposedly factual programme on British TV that was less accurate than Durkin's polemic. For Ofcom to rule that it was not factually misleading is extraordinary and sets a disastrous precedent for programmes relating to controversial scientific issues.
'Harm and offence'

The reasoning behind this decision, according to the judgement, is that for non-news programmes the rule on factual accuracy applies only to "content which materially misleads the audience so as to cause harm and offence". It goes on to say that only "actual harm" rather than "potential harm" matters.

In other words, discouraging action to avoid future catastrophes does not count as harm.

On this basis, Ofcom decided that all the falsehoods in the programme relating to the causes of climate change could simply be ignored. The programme will not cause harm by affecting people's behaviour, the judgement claims, because most viewers know the views expressed are not the scientific consensus.

Well, yes, most viewers might know what the consensus is, but an awful lot of them do not accept it. What's more, most viewers would not have been aware how many of the statements in the programme were false.
Poor record

By Ofcom's logic, a programme that presented the long-discredited myths about AIDS not being caused by HIV as being true would not count as causing harm either. Indeed, astonishingly, the ruling makes exactly this comparison.

As for the factual inaccuracies not causing offence, well, I get hopping mad when I see a pack of lies presented as the truth. Does that kind of offence not count? Clearly not.

The other thing I find extraordinary about this case is that Channel 4 is a publicly owned company. Despite its public remit, it has a record of broadcasting similar nonsense.

What's more, with its advertising revenues falling, it is currently campaigning to get its hands on part of the BBC's licence fees. What a horrifying prospect.

In my opinion, if Channel 4 carries on producing programmes like The Great Global Warming Swindle, the sooner it goes bust the better off Britain and the world will be.

Please understand that TV channels bring out this shit on purpose, knowing full well that they will have to apologise afterwards and never broadcast it again. This is not an issue for them, as its already been aired, with an apology near to a year later - "to be ignored".

Two good examples would be most war-porn and the pro-vivisection propaganda (such as monkey rats & me). It gets pulled, they apologise, but the damage is already done. Will they bring out another documentary to represent it in the light they should of?

Not at all, that's the idea. Welcome to videoworld of youtube, etc, that will continue showing the now considered "rare" and "banned" "truth" about global warming, only by C4!

Think about it. After you've aired some crap, all you have to do is apologise and in doing so you re-popularise the entire fairy tale - great!

However. Words mean nothing, direct action is everything and the states getting desperate.

It is quite clear that most broadcast programmes and items about global warming accept that human-created CO2 is bringing about catastrophic warming. The debate is how fast this is happening and what actions government should take to slow it down or stop it. None of these programmes or items feel it necessary to 'balance' this position with the idea that there is no human-created CO2 causing warming.

Do your comments mean that pro-global warming should be subject to similar criticism?

For instance, it is debatable that a majority of climate scientists support human-made global warming.

 http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/08/29/less-half-published-scientists-endorse-global-warming-theory
Less Than Half of Published Scientists Endorse Global Warming Theory
By Noel Sheppard
August 29, 2007 - 14:01 ET
...Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers "implicit" endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no "consensus."...

is that current rapid climate change is largely caused by human-induced additions of carbon dixoide to the atmosphere from fossil fuel use and land-use change. The other Simon is talking rubbish.

Here is a repost from 'Science' world-leading scientific journal, from 2004 - the evidence has only got stronger since:


Science 3 December 2004:

BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER:

The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change

Naomi Oreskes*

Policy-makers and the media, particularly in the United States, frequently assert that climate science is highly uncertain. Some have used this as an argument against adopting strong measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, while discussing a major U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report on the risks of climate change, then-EPA administrator Christine Whitman argued, "As [the report] went through review, there was less consensus on the science and conclusions on climate change" (1). Some corporations whose revenues might be adversely affected by controls on carbon dioxide emissions have also alleged major uncertainties in the science (2). Such statements suggest that there might be substantive disagreement in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This is not the case.

The scientific consensus is clearly expressed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme, IPCC's purpose is to evaluate the state of climate science as a basis for informed policy action, primarily on the basis of peer-reviewed and published scientific literature (3). In its most recent assessment, IPCC states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities ... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. ... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations" [p. 21 in (4)].

IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years, all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members' expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements. For example, the National Academy of Sciences report, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, begins: "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise" [p. 1 in (5)]. The report explicitly asks whether the IPCC assessment is a fair summary of professional scientific thinking, and answers yes: "The IPCC's conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue" [p. 3 in (5)].

Others agree. The American Meteorological Society (6), the American Geophysical Union (7), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling (8).

The drafting of such reports and statements involves many opportunities for comment, criticism, and revision, and it is not likely that they would diverge greatly from the opinions of the societies' members. Nevertheless, they might downplay legitimate dissenting opinions. That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords "climate change" (9).

The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

Admittedly, authors evaluating impacts, developing methods, or studying paleoclimatic change might believe that current climate change is natural. However, none of these papers argued that point.

This analysis shows that scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature agree with IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and the public statements of their professional societies. Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect.

The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for failing to act on what is not known. But our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it.

Many details about climate interactions are not well understood, and there are ample grounds for continued research to provide a better basis for understanding climate dynamics. The question of what to do about climate change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen.

References and Notes


A. C. Revkin, K. Q. Seelye, New York Times, 19 June 2003, A1.
S. van den Hove, M. Le Menestrel, H.-C. de Bettignies, Climate Policy 2 (1), 3 (2003).
See www.ipcc.ch/about/about.htm.
J. J. McCarthy et al., Eds., Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2001).
National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Science of Climate Change, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions (National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 2001).
American Meteorological Society, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 84, 508 (2003).
American Geophysical Union, Eos 84 (51), 574 (2003).
See www.ourplanet.com/aaas/pages/atmos02.html.
The first year for which the database consistently published abstracts was 1993. Some abstracts were deleted from our analysis because, although the authors had put "climate change" in their key words, the paper was not about climate change.
This essay is excerpted from the 2004 George Sarton Memorial Lecture, "Consensus in science: How do we know we're not wrong," presented at the AAAS meeting on 13 February 2004. I am grateful to AAAS and the History of Science Society for their support of this lectureship; to my research assistants S. Luis and G. Law; and to D. C. Agnew, K. Belitz, J. R. Fleming, M. T. Greene, H. Leifert, and R. C. J. Somerville for helpful discussions.
10.1126/science.1103618