The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com
By Al Webb
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published March 6, 2007
LONDON -- With a packet of claims that are almost certain to
defy conventional wisdom, a television documentary to be aired
in Britain this week condemns man-made global warming as a myth
that has become "the biggest scam of modern times."
The program titled "The Great Global Warming Scandal" and
set for screening by TV Channel 4 on Thursday dismisses claims
that high levels of greenhouse gases generated by human activity
causes climate change. Instead, the program suggests that the
sun itself is the real culprit.
The documentary, directed by filmmaker Martin Durkin, is at
odds with scientific opinion as outlined in a United Nations
report in February, which blames mankind for global warming.
In his program, Mr. Durkin rejects the concept of man-made
climate change, calling it "a lie ... the biggest scam of modern
times."
The truth, he says, is that global warming "is a
multibillion-dollar worldwide industry, created by fanatically
anti-industrial environmentalists, supported by scientists
peddling scare stories to chase funding, and propped up by
compliant politicians and the media."
Channel 4 says that the program features "an impressive
roll-call of experts," including nine professors, who are
experts in climatology, oceanography, meteorology, biogeography
and paleoclimatology.
It also says the experts come from prestigious institutions
such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Pasteur Institute in
Paris, the Danish National Space Center and universities and
other schools in London, Ottawa, Jerusalem, Alabama, Virginia
and Winnipeg, Canada.
"It's very rare that a film changes history," says Martin
Durkin, "but I think this is a turning point, and in five years
the idea that the greenhouse effect is the main reason behind
global warming will be seen as total bunk," he says.
His program collides sharply with the premise outlined in
former Vice President Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary, "An
Inconvenient Truth," which presents a bleak picture of how a
buildup in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide affects the
global climate, with potentially disastrous consequences.
"Al Gore might have won an Oscar," says Mr. Durkin, in a
preview of the documentary, "but the film is very misleading,
and he has got the relationship between [carbon dioxide] and
climate change the wrong way around."
One of the filmmaker's experts, paleontologist professor Ian
Clark of the University of Ottawa, says that global warming
could be caused by increased activity on the sun, such as
massive eruptions, and that ice-core samples from Antarctica
show that, in fact, warmer periods in Earth's history have come
about 800 years before rises in carbon dioxide levels.
Mr. Clark's findings appear to contradict the work of other
scientists, who have used similar ice-core samples to illustrate
that raised levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have
accompanied the various global warming periods.
"The fact is that [carbon dioxide] has no proven link to
global temperatures," says Mr. Durkin. "Solar activity is far
more likely to be the culprit."
Scientists in the Channel 4 documentary cite what they claim
is another discrepancy involving conventional research, saying
that most of the recent global warming occurred before 1940,
after which temperatures around the world fell for four decades.
Mr. Durkin's skeptical specialists view this as a flaw in
the official view, because the worldwide economic boom that
followed the end of World War II produced more carbon dioxide,
and therefore should have meant a rise in global temperatures --
something he says did not happen.
"The Great Global Warming Swindle" also questions an
assertion by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change's report, published last month, that it was backed by
some 2,500 of the world's leading scientists.
Another of Mr. Durkin's professors, Paul Reiter of Paris'
Pasteur Institute, an expert in malaria, calls the U.N. report a
"sham" because, he says, it included the names of scientists --
including his own -- who disagreed with the report and who
resigned from the panel.
"That is how they make it seem that all the top scientists
are agreed," he says. "It's not true."
Mr. Reiter says his name was removed only after he
threatened legal action against the panel. The report itself, he
adds, was finalized by government appointees.
Yet another expert in the Durkin documentary, Philip Stott,
professor emeritus of biogeography at the School of Oriental and
African Studies in London, is more circumspect.
"The [climate] system is too complex to say exactly what the
effect of cutting back on [carbon dioxide] production would be
or, indeed, of continuing to produce [carbon dioxide]."
"The greenhouse effect theory worried me from the start,"
Mr. Stott says, "because you can't say that just one factor can
have this effect."
"At the moment, there is almost a McCarthyism movement in
science where the greenhouse effect is like a puritanical
religion, and this is dangerous," he says. |
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