Looking for sensation and ignoring facts
The climate documentary to be shown by the ABC is bad science.
WERE it not for dissent, science, like politics, would have stayed in the dark ages. All the great heroes of the discipline Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein took tremendous risks in confronting mainstream opinion. Today's crank has often proved to be tomorrow's visionary.
But the syllogism does not apply. Being a crank does not automatically make you a visionary. But the point is often confused. Professor David Bellamy, for example, while making the incorrect claim that wind farms do not have "any measurable effect" on total emissions of carbon dioxide, has compared himself with Galileo.
The problem with The Great Global Warming Swindle, which caused a sensation when it was broadcast in Britain earlier this year and which the ABC plans to screen, is that to make its case it relies not on future visionaries, but on people whose findings have already been proved wrong. The implications could not be graver. Thousands have been misled into believing there is no problem to address.
The film's main contention is that the increase in global temperatures is caused not by rising greenhouse gases, but by changes in the activity of the sun. It is built around the discovery in 1991 by the Danish atmospheric physicist Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen that recent temperature variations on Earth are in "strikingly good agreement" with the length of the cycle of sunspots.
Unfortunately, he found nothing of the kind. A paper published in the journal Eos in 2004 reveals that the "agreement" was the result of "incorrect handling of the physical data". The real data for recent years show the opposite: that the length of the sunspot cycle has declined, while temperatures have risen. When this error was exposed, Friis-Christensen and his co-author published a new paper, purporting to produce similar results. But this too turned out to be an artefact of mistakes.
So Friis-Christensen and another author developed yet another means of demonstrating that the sun is responsible, claiming to have discovered a remarkable agreement between cosmic radiation influenced by the sun and global cloud cover. This is the mechanism the film proposes for global warming. But, yet again, the method was exposed as faulty. They had been using satellite data that did not in fact measure global cloud cover. A paper in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics shows that, when the right data are used, a correlation is not found.
Friis-Christensen's co-author, Henrik Svensmark, published a paper last year purporting to show that cosmic rays could form tiny particles in the atmosphere. Accompanying the paper was a press release that went way beyond the findings reported in the paper, claiming it showed that both past and present climate events are
the result of cosmic rays.
As Dr Gavin Schmidt of NASA has shown on www.real
climate.org, five missing steps would have to be taken to justify the wild claims in the press release. "We've often criticised press releases that we felt gave misleading impressions of the underlying work," Schmidt says, "but this example is by far the most blatant extrapolation beyond reasonableness that we have seen." None of this seems to have troubled the program-makers, who report the cosmic ray theory as if it trounces all competing explanations.
The film also maintains that manmade global warming is disproved by conflicting temperature data. Professor John Christy speaks about the discrepancy he discovered between temperatures at the Earth's surface and temperatures in the troposphere (or lower atmosphere). But the program fails to mention that in 2005 his data were proved wrong, by three papers in Science magazine.
Christy himself admitted last year that he was mistaken. He was one of the authors of a paper that states the opposite of what he says in the film.
Until recently, when found to be wrong, scientists went back to their labs to start again. Now, emboldened by the denial industry, some of them shriek "censorship". This is an example of manufactured victimhood. If you demonstrate someone is wrong, you are now deemed to be silencing him.
But there is one scientist in the film whose work has not been debunked: the oceanographer Carl Wunsch. He appears to support the idea that increasing carbon dioxide is not responsible for rising global temperatures. Wunsch says he was "completely misrepresented" by the program, and "totally misled" by the people who made it.
This is a familiar story to those who have followed the career of the director Martin Durkin. In 1998, the British Independent Television Commission found that, when making a similar series, he had "misled" his interviewees about "the content and purpose of the programs". Their views had been "distorted through selective editing". Channel Four had to apologise.
Cherry-pick your results, choose work already discredited, and anything and everything becomes true. The twin towers were brought down by controlled explosions; homeopathy works; black people are less intelligent than white people; species came about through intelligent design. You can find lines of evidence that appear to support all these contentions, and, in most cases, professors who will speak up in their favour. But this does not mean that any of them are correct. You can sustain a belief in these propositions only by ignoring the overwhelming body of contradictory data. To form a balanced, scientific view, you have to consider all the evidence, on both sides.
But for the film's commissioners, all that counts is the sensation.