Oh dear, Channel Four’s reputation is now in freefall after more revelations on its supposedly ground-breaking programme, “The Great Global Warming Swindle.”
On Monday we blogged how Carl Wunsch, who had been interviewed for the programme, now complained that “I am the one who was swindled. What we now have is an out-and-out propaganda piece … My appearance in the “Global Warming Swindle” is deeply embarrasing, and my professional reputation has been damaged. I was duped”.
Now an investigation of the evidence by The Independent newspaper “shows the film was riddled with distortions and errors”. The programme was “based on graphs that were distorted, mislabelled or just plain wrong. The graphs were nevertheless used to attack the credibility and honesty of climate scientists”.
The Independent continues: “A graph central to the programme’s thesis, purporting to show variations in global temperatures over the past century, claimed to show that global warming was not linked with industrial emissions of carbon dioxide. Yet the graph was not what it seemed”.
“Martin Durkin, who wrote and directed the film, admitted yesterday that one of the graphs contained serious errors but he said they were corrected in time for the second transmission of the programme following inquiries by The Independent”.
“Mr Durkin’s film argued that most global warming over the past century occurred between 1900 and 1940 and that there was a period of cooling between 1940 and 1975 when the post-war economic boom was under way. This showed, he said, that global warming had little to do with industrial emissions of carbon dioxide”.
“The programme-makers labelled the source of the world temperature data as “Nasa” but when we inquired about where we could find this information, we received an email through Wag TV’s PR consultant saying that the graph was drawn from a 1998 diagram published in an obscure journal called Medical Sentinel. The authors of the paper are well-known climate sceptics who were funded by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the George C Marshall Institute, a right-wing Washington think-tank”.
“However, there are no diagrams in the paper that accurately compare with the C4 graph. The nearest comparison is a diagram of “terrestrial northern hemisphere” temperatures – which refers only to data gathered by weather stations in the top one third of the globe”.
“However, further inquiries revealed that the C4 graph was based on a diagram in another paper produced as part of a “petition project” by the same group of climate sceptics. This diagram was itself based on long out-of-date information on terrestrial temperatures compiled by Nasa scientists”.
“However, crucially, the axis along the bottom of the graph has been distorted in the C4 version of the graph, which made it look like the information was up-to-date when in fact the data ended in the early 1980s. Mr Durkin admitted that his graphics team had extended the time axis along the bottom of the graph to the year 2000”.
Durkin told the Independent “There was a fluff there”.
Well, the Great Global Warming Swindle did just that – Swindle the viewer. Ooops Channel 4.