Ofcom is about to release its report into complaints made against Channel 4 regarding its film broadcast last year about the great global warming swindle.
Channel 4 misrepresented some of the world’s leading climate scientists in a controversial documentary that claimed global warming was a conspiracy and a fraud, the UK’s media regulator will rule next week.
In a long-awaited judgment following a 15-month inquiry, Ofcom is expected to censure the network over its treatment of some scientists in the programme, The Great Global Warming Swindle, which sparked outcry from environmentalists.
Complaints about privacy and fairness from the government’s former chief scientist, Sir David King, and the Nobel peace prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be upheld on almost all counts, the Guardian has learned.
Channel 4 feel vindicated, though, because their main argument is upheld and that they did not mislead the public.
But it is understood that Channel 4 will still claim victory because the ultimate verdict on a separate complaint about accuracy, which contained 131 specific points and ran to 270 pages, will find that it did not breach the regulator’s broadcasting code and did not materially mislead viewers.
Okay, fine. But, and here’s the rub, if you are going to present an argument, it should be accurate, factual and fair. Honest and open debate based upon facts is more likely to win over waverers than misrepresenting your opponents. This is no better than the environmentalists labelling skeptics as “deniers” in an attempt to demonise what is, frankly, a perfectly valid and rational position. Take this, for example:
In the programme, the concluding voiceover from the climate change sceptic Fred Singer claimed “the chief scientist of the UK” was “telling people that by the end of the century, the only habitable place on Earth will be the Antarctic and humanity may survive thanks to some breeding couples who moved to the Antarctic … it would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad”.
Except:
King has never made such a statement and it is believed Singer confused his views with those of the contrarian scientist James Lovelock. King did once say that “the last time the Earth had this much C02, the only place habitable was the Antarctic”.
One assumes that programme makers have research budgets… Clearly this one wasn’t particularly well spent. This film – and the subsequent fall-out – undermines the skeptics’ case because they have used the same tactics as Al Gore with his “An Inconvenient Truth”. Facts, people, facts, not fiction. if someone didn’t say something, don’t say that they did.
All of which is echoed in a comment over at DKs on a similar theme.
*Both* sides have produced a huge amount of bullshit and it is *very* difficult to get a clear picture, not without a substantial amount of private study. Something I, and I’m sure most of us, don’t have time for.
Quite so. And Channel 4 haven’t helped.
It is a terrible shame, isn’t it? Very much a mixed result, this one.
Mark Wadsworths last blog post..Spotted over at St John of Redwood’s …
“King did once say that “the last time the Earth had this much C02, the only place habitable was the Antarctic”.”
You are right; this statement is so demonstrably false that they should have just taken it and demolished it for two hours.
DK
The frustrating thing is that there was no need to lie. The evidence against the warmists’ claims – particularly those encapsulated in Gore’s film – is well founded. Even the High Court found that 9 out of the 12 sample claimed inaccuracies in “An Inconvenient Truth” were indeed crap. Given Hansen’s call for oil company executives to be criminalised together with the American Physical Society’s sheer funk, the sceptics come out smelling of roses.
The “sceptics” haven’t got a leg to stand on. Their ideology requires AGW not to be true, so they’ll cast around desperately for any old bollocks that they can cite as “evidence”. It’s all about following preconceptions, not facts.
You accuse environmentalists of what you do yourself. Projection, I call it.
Ah, an amateur psychologist (and not a very good one at that). You can call it what you like, old bean; it’s a free country. It doesn’t make it accurate though and it isn’t – it’s rank bollocks.
Scepticism is the default position. It is not an ideology – this is almost as stupid as suggesting that atheism is a religion.
If AGW is demonstrably true, sceptics would be won over by the evidence.
That is bollocks, because you’re not sceptics, but deniers. The word may be overused but it’s still applicable. Your “libertarianism” is simply not compatible with an acceptance of AGW… so then forget all about AGW, evidence or no evidence.
I was, and still am, a sceptic, until the evidence convinced me. Some, such as you, are too blinkered to accept it. This is why Durkin needs to lie, because he couldn’t tell the truth, it would shatter the world.
If AGW turned out to be bollocks my world would carry on turning, if it turned out to be true every “libertarian” assumption would be undermined, so you desperately deny.
It is never okay to lie. Hence my comments in the original post. It simply makes matters worse.
Durkin didn’t need to lie because the truth is; the AGW prophets of doom have been spinning enough to make Blair and company look like amateurs. Picking their lies and obfuscation apart is a simple enough matter.
Their case rests on computer modelling which is about as useful as using Grand Theft Auto to predict traffic flows, fudged figures from heat sensors (some in hot spots and some that no longer exist, yet continued to produce figures – strange, that), the now thoroughly discredited Mann Hockey stick and of course, outright lies such as the complete nonsense from Greenpeace about the Iberian peninsular sinking into the sea.
Far from being blinkered, I have changed my mind on AGW. I now realise that we have been sold a pup.
So, kindly refrain from the amateur psychology – I don’t tend to take kindly to people who presume to know better than I what is going on inside my head.
Oh, yeah, one final point – I suggest you leave Pascal’s Wager to the religious freaks where it belongs. I don’t fall for it there, and I certainly won’t here.
*This comment has been edited. Having cooled down, I thought better of my rather intemperate remarks. Sorry.
Whatever your intemperate comments were you should have left them in place. That guy is a total asshat and deserved whatever you said!
Zorro, I felt, on balance, that it lost me the moral ground.
David Cameron’s Forehead made a number of tactical errors that had me seeing red (hence my shooting from the hip). Firstly, he tried to tell me what was going on inside my head. That, frankly, is guaranteed to earn my undying contempt – I detest people who try to play the amateur psychologist. Then he repeated the “denier” canard. As this is nothing more than a crude attempt to close down debate, the contempt was piling up big time. Finally telling me that I am blinkered when, in fact, I have changed my mind on the subject (so, by default, I cannot be blinkered) really was the cream on the apple pie.
So, I suggested that he was in the running for fuckwit of the week. That was the gist of it anyway. I believe I used words such as stupid and arrogant, as well…
Oh, dear, all my good intentions have evaporated. You would appear to be a bad influence.