The Great Global Warming Swindle

Last night on ABC TV certainly was exciting. They broadcast the controversial "documentary" by Martin Durkin "The Great Global Warming Swindle" followed by an interview by Tony Jones and then a forum with an expert panel and an audience full of interesting characters.

Basically the documentary put forward a case that humans are not creating climate change through carbon dioxide emissions, that temperatures are increasing and climate change is part of the earth's natural process, volcanic emissions and sunspots.

The conclusions I guess were that we can keep driving our cars and we don't have to bother pushing for renewable energy in developing nations, that those nations need to invest in coal right now, in order to end world poverty (?)

How I wish it were true! I wanted to believe! Imagine if all we had to do was cope with climate change, and not have to reduce our carbon emissions as well!
I could stop worrying about energy efficient housing and get back to worrying about resource depletion, ecosystem and habitat preservation, clean water, etc.

Unfortunately, from the outset, the doco appeared flawed with un-rigorous presentations and dubious science. The panel afterwards confirmed my fears.

Today I read an interesting article "The Great Global Warming Swindle": a critique., published in the Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol 20. by David Jones, Andrew Watkins, Karl Braganza and Michael Couglan of the National Climate Centre, Bureau of Meteorology.

I suggest you read it for a bit of scientific rigor.

The main errors it saw in the documentary were:

• Graphs and information used in the documentary were incorrect and/or had no identifiable source and/or have been superseeded and/or were made up in part.
• Temperatures today ARE higher than they have been in the last 1000+ years (evidenced by many different temperature measurement methods worldwide)
• Human activities ARE creating climate change, evidenced by climate "fingerprints"
• Volcanoes actually only produce less that 2% of the annual emissions of carbon dioxide produced by humans.
• Ice core temperatures measurements from the past only tell us the local temperature and not the global temperature so are not relevant to measuring global temperature, and indeed do show the climate scientists more intricate understanding of the fluctuations in earths temperatures .
• Sunspot theory is some kind of unsubstantiated conspiracy theory, and not fully documented in the documentary.

Anyway, the document is well written and a good read, so don't just read this post on the issue.
And there is a lot more stuff out there.

Moral of the story:
SORRY BUT THERE IS NO CLIMATE CHANGE SWINDLE :(

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