response:
To satisfy your curiosity, I watched it when it first came out and found it a total joke. It's not surprising that you find this pseudo-documentary on any equal par with the production from the BBC that interviewed real scientists that actually have peer reviewed publications that support everything that they say within the documentary that I posted.
It shows no scientific evidence whatsoever and only politicizes the issues brought up. Mis-quoting actual scientific research and taking many sentences in actual research out of context, and finally making up garbage.
You have eaten up all this as if it were even similar to the actual science posted.
The pseudo-documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle” also abusively uses “cut and paste”, out-of-context statements by at least one legitimate scientist. The result willfully misconstrues the original meaning to instead promote the producer’s agenda. The following are statements by Carl Wunsch, professor of physical oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and are posted at:
The Great Global Warming Swindle » Celsias
[SIZE=+1]Climate scientist ‘duped to deny global warming’[/SIZE]
A Leading US climate scientist is considering legal action after he says he was duped into appearing in a Channel 4 documentary that claimed man-made global warming is a myth. Carl Wunsch, professor of physical oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the film, The Great Global Warming Swindle, was ‘grossly distorted’ and ‘as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two’.
He says his comments in the film were taken out of context and that he would not have agreed to take part if he had known it would argue that man-made global warming was not a serious threat. ‘I thought they were trying to educate the public about the complexities of climate change,’ he said. ‘This seems like a deliberate attempt to exploit someone who is on the other side of the issue.’ He is considering a complaint to Ofcom, the broadcast regulator. -
Guardian
Professor Wunsch said: “I am angry because they completely misrepresented me. My views were distorted by the context in which they placed them. I was misled as to what it was going to be about. I was told about six months ago that this was to be a programme about how complicated it is to understand what is going on. If they had told me even the title of the programme, I would have absolutely refused to be on it. I am the one who has been swindled.” -
Independent
The above web site has multiple other links that refute the assertions made in the pseudo-documentary.
A complete listing of MIT’s Professor Carl Wunsch's comments on the pseudo-documentary can be found at:
http://ocean.mit.edu/~cwunsch/CHANNEL4.html
The example, you have shown that in the past CO2 rises do not initiate global warming, no, they do not, it's indefinite. However it has been shown clearly that CO2 is a greenhouse gas beyond a shadow of a doubt. What is also beyond a shadow of a doubt is that what humans release is not in equilibrium with the environment thus contributing to a net spike in CO2. Your video attempts to dismiss CO2 as any form of greenhouse gas that is capable of altering the climate - bullshit.
Here's an example of it cherry picking.
The Actual Recent Temperature Record
This first pair of pictures compares the [SIZE=+2]partial[/SIZE] temperature record as presented in “The Great Global Warming Swindle” vs. the actual observations as shown at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The vertical bars at the right are the pseudo-documentary’s assertion that most of the recent rise in global temperatures occurred before 1940. The exact words from the pseudo-documentary are:
“Most of the rise in temperature occurred before 1940.” (About 14 min. 20 sec. into the presentation.)
Please take a close look at the right-hand portion of the graph.
The picture below shows the actual changes in the world’s temperature as presented by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Data @ NASA GISS: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis: Graphs
Again please take a close look at the right-hand portion of the graph. The pseudo-documentary version of the temperature graph omits the last 20 years of data. (And “fluffed” the graph to disguise this omission.) The rapid increase in world temperatures over the last 20 years has paralleled the rapid rise in carbon dioxide concentrations. However, the pseudo-documentary does not include this data. (Note: The slight cooling that took place from 1940 to the 1960’s was caused by increasing sulfates in the atmosphere
About 23 minutes into the pseudo-documentary, an assertion is made that carbon dioxide is not responsible for global warming because ice records show there have been several instances where warming has begun some ~800 years before carbon dioxide levels begin to increase. The actual 800-year lead is true, but the conclusion presented in the pseudo-documentary is not true.
As pointed out by Jeff Severinghaus (Professor of Geosciences, Scripts Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=13 ), historical warm-up periods begin via some variable event that starts a warming cycle. For example, in the past, these initializing events were usually set off by, as I mentioned before already,
Milankovitch variations in the earth’s orbit that changed the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the northern hemisphere. This time, the initialization event has been a human induced spike in carbon dioxide concentrations.
In turn, the initial warming event triggers a chain reaction/feedback release of carbon dioxide (blue line in the above chart) and methane (red line in the above chart) from the earth’s oceans, which then drives the rest of the warm-up cycle. Please see Jeff Severinghaus’ article
“What does the lag of CO2 behind temperature in ice cores tell us about global warming?”
at the above web page for more information.
Alternately please see a longer article:
“The lag between temperature and CO2.” by Eric Steig
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/the-lag-between-temp-and-co2/
Another assertion in the pseudo-documentary is that sunspots are responsible for global warming. The pseudo-documentary can’t make up its mind whether to assert that it’s sunspots, or some indeterminate “Solar Activity” that is causing changes in temperature; but we will present the pseudo-documentary’s “Solar Activity” chart and compare it with the historical sunspot record.
The Print Screen image above shows the pseudo-documentary’s “Solar Activity” chart. The blue-green line shows the temperature for most of the last 400 years. Again, the film’s producer has omitted the steep warming seen in the last 20 years. If the chart had included this recent warming, the blue-green line would have run off the top of the chart. (See the first pair of pictures.)
The red line is purported to depict “Solar Activity”. If whatever the pseudo-documentary chose to represent as “Solar Activity” had any correlation to observed temperatures, then the red line should have spiked just as the recent temperature has. Of course the red line is conveniently not plotted for the last few decades.
The red line may have been based on original work by Nathan Rive and Eigil Friis-Christensen. They have issued a joint statement stating that the “red line” data was made up of fabricated data that was presented as genuine.
NR+EFC Statement
Regarding: “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, broadcast in the UK on Channel 4 on March 8, 2007
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…it incorrectly rules out a contribution by anthropogenic greenhouse gases to 20th century global warming.
Ian Clark (The spokesman for the earlier discredited quote: “We can’t say that CO2 will drive climate, it certainly never did in the past.”) supports this incorrect solar/sunspot conjecture.
Look to the sun
The chart above is an excerpt from NASA’s “Solar Cycle Update” at
Solar Minimum is Coming.
It shows the actual number of observed sunspots over the last 400 years. (The number of sunspots has been counted for the last 400 years, and this record is our only direct measurement of “Solar Activity” for this time span.) The actual information as shown above doesn’t resemble the red line in the pseudo-documentary. The source data for the red line in the pseudo-documentary thus remains a mystery.
If short term temperatures followed a sunspot cycle, we should see similar short term temperature oscillations that correspond to the ~11 year sunspot cycle. No short term correlation exists. The pseudo-documentary tries to correlate the minor 1940 top in temperatures with the number of sunspots. A quick look at the sunspot chart shows no 1940 correlation. Similarly, if sunspots were responsible for the large observed increase in world temperatures over the last few decades, then there should also be some unusual anomaly in the sunspot pattern over the same last few decades. No such anomaly exists.
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