They don’t like it up ‘em

Last night Channel 4 aired that Anthropological Global Warming ‘denial’ documentary George Monbiot tried to warn us about

And it was bloody marvellous

I’m kicking myself for not recording it. No doubt somebody else did and will be sticking it up on the web soon.

‘I wanted to call it “Apocalypse My Arse”, but in the end we decided on “The Great Global Warming Swindle”. It’s a provocative title, which helps with ratings.’

The program was far from perfect and committed many of the same sins that the Global Warming Climate Change Lobby does in its own propaganda. Even though the documentary made very many good points, it did contain flaws in its reasoning and oversimplifications that someone with a different point of view could go to work on.

Alternatively, you could just launch a pathetic ad hominem attack on the scientists in the show, dribble on about conspiracy theorists conspiring against the sacred work of the Global Warming movement or, funniest of all, complain that the documentary only presented one side of the case and that it wasn’t balanced – as the first commentator on this post whined

Boo fucking hoo. Someone from the movement that claims the 'debate is over' and labels all those who disagree as ‘deniers’ (i.e. Nazis) is pissed off that one show, just one show, didn’t recycle the same old crap we have to listen to day after day after day.

The ad hominen attack I linked to above was written by an ‘environmental journalist’ who was clearly stung by the suggestion that her breed have a vested interest in promoting climate change. Nonsense of course and a disgraceful slur on the thousands of hard-working, selfless humanitarians who devote their lives to traveling from one multi-million dollar, transglobal enviro-jolly to the next.

It’s a shame about all those poor souls in the developing world though – the Greater Good demands that they can’t burn any of their oil or coal, build any hydro projects or develop nuclear power. But hey, fuck ‘em. There are too many of the bastards anyway.

Hmmm, I love the smell of cultural imperialism in the morning.

And it’s no surprise that some of the 'deniers'' claims are dismissed as being ‘ludicrous conspiracy theories’ (I keep being told by the BBC and the Guardian that there are a lot of them about these days).

One of the ‘ludicrous conspiracy theories’ was the suggestion that many scientists advocate Global Warming because that’s where the funding is. This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it's simply an opinion on how academia works. I think back to my postgraduate days twenty years ago and remember quite clearly that some subjects were strongly favoured over others when it came to funding availability. Back then, as I recall, biotechnology and robotics were the shit hot subjects and you were well-advised to work them into any funding application. So what if someone claims that Global Warming has become the money magnet these days? How is that a conspiracy theory?

Well, it's easier to play the increasingly overused 'conspiracy theory' card than put together a reasoned response isn't it.




For a nice example of the grant funding paradigm in action, flip on a TV documentary channel and watch any archaeological documentary made in the last ten years. Almost all will conclude that the answer to whatever ancient question they have been discussing will include some reference to climate change. They have to. That’s where the loot is.




A key obstacle faced by the Global Warming Lobby is the undeniable fact that the Earth’s temperature and climate have always varied, even before people even existed. Personally, my money has always been on some variant of this guy's ideas being a (the?) major factor in climate change. Climate variation is periodic and as old as the Earth – and it’s a good bet that the variation is somehow related to periodicity in the Sun’s output or the Earth’s distance from the Sun.

The problem with that line of thought from the Lobby’s point of view is that even the most rabid enviro-twat will have real trouble arguing that taxing the shit out of people in the developed world, suppressing development in the rest of the world and putting enviro-twats in charge of things will have any noticeable impact on the Earth’s orbit or the temperature of the Sun. Even middle-class hubris has its limitations.

I was particularly interested to see what the response would be to the claim made in The Great Global Warming Swindle that geological records show that, in the past, CO2 levels have only started to rise after global temperatures started picking up.

"We need to band together to END GLOBAL COOLING!!!

Oh wait, the Earth has started to warm...

END GLOBAL WARMING!!!!

Oh wait, it's starting to cool again.

END GLOBAL COOLING!!!!

This is fun! =]"

I trawled around a few blogs, clicked on some links and found some ingenious rationalisations that attempt to fit the evidence of a 'lag' in CO2 increases into the existing Global Warming paradigm. For example, utter shite like this…


What does the lag of CO2 behind temperature in ice cores tell us about global warming?

This is an issue that is often misunderstood in the public sphere and media ... At least three careful ice core studies have shown that CO2 starts to rise about 800 years (600-1000 years) after Antarctic temperature during glacial terminations…

Does this prove that CO2 doesn't cause global warming? The answer is no.

The reason has to do with the fact that the warmings take about 5000 years to be complete. The lag is only 800 years. All that the lag shows is that CO2 did not cause the first 800 years of warming, out of the 5000 year trend. The other 4200 years of warming could in fact have been caused by CO2 ...

The 4200 years of warming make up about 5/6 of the total warming. So CO2 could have caused the last 5/6 of the warming, but could not have caused the first 1/6 of the warming.

From studying all the available data (not just ice cores), the probable sequence of events at a termination goes something like this. Some (currently unknown) process causes Antarctica and the surrounding ocean to warm. This process also causes CO2 to start rising, about 800 years later. Then CO2 further warms the whole planet, because of its heat-trapping properties…


In summary:

• We don’t actually know what process has triggered past global warming events but it definitely wasn’t a CO2 rise
  
  
• However, some people have decided that this unknown process, for some equally unknown reason, arbitrarily stops being significant just as the level of CO2 starts to rise. At which point elevated CO2 levels change from being a consequence of increased temperature to being a cause of increased temperature
  

Yup, I think I can see why this area is frequently misunderstood.

.