The documentary, the Great Global Warming Swindle, aired on the United Kingdom’s Channel 4 recently and is now available on YouTube. We watched the show and found it provocative. However, it is obviously intended to be a polemic, not a balanced piece. An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary featuring Al Gore’s PowerPoint presentation on global warming, was not entirely balanced either, but it not could correctly be called a polemic because it does in fact represent the views of the large majority of climate scientists and national science academies in the world.
The Great Global Warming Swindle highlights concerns from a small minority of scientists and other critics of certain aspects of “anthropogenic global warming” theory and presents what appears to be a persuasive case - in terms of the structure of the arguments - for why we might be wrong in worrying about climate change. However, it turns out most of the documentary’s facts are way off, and the scientists’ quotes are often used in a way which directly contradicts what they were trying to say.
For example, the documentary states that volcanoes are responsible for far more greenhouse gas emissions than are humans. This is demonstrably wrong: volcanoes emit on average about 1% of the CO2 emissions associated with the burning of fossil fuels by humans. In fact, if fossil fuel emissions were swamped by volcanic or other natural sources, we would not observe the progressive buildup in atmospheric CO2 that first prompted scientists to evaluate the prospect of global warming.
The documentary also states that oceans emit more carbon dioxide – by a large factor – than humans. This is misleading. The oceans do in fact exchange very large amounts of CO2 with the atmosphere – but this two-way exchange, which was in approximate balance prior to the industrial revolution, cannot be compared directly to the one-way emission of CO2 to the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning. Since the industrial revolution the oceans have actually acted as a “sink” for fossil fuel CO2 because they have absorbed about a third of our emissions.In fact, Carl Wunsch, the MIT scientist interviewed in the documentary on this issue, submitted a letter to the documentary’s producers decrying the way in which his words were used completely out of context. He stated, in part:
“In the part of the ‘Swindle’ film where I am describing the fact that the ocean tends to expel carbon dioxide where it is warm, and to absorb it where it is cold, my intent was to explain that warming the ocean could be dangerous - because it is such a gigantic reservoir of carbon. By its placement in the film, it appears that I am saying that since carbon dioxide exists in the ocean in such large quantities, human influence must not be very important - diametrically opposite to the point I was making - which is that global warming is both real and threatening in many different ways, some unexpected.”
The documentary’s discussion of climate modeling is also way off. Models don't simply “assume,” as the documentary states, that carbon dioxide is responsible for warming. First, the influence of CO2 on planetary climates is well established via the greenhouse effect, which explains surface temperatures on earth as well as on neighboring planets such as Venus. The influence of CO2 on our climate has also been calibrated by studies of past climate change. For example, the climate of the Ice Ages cannot be explained without invoking the cooling effect of the lower atmospheric CO2 levels that prevailed at those times.
To calibrate climate models (in other words, to see if their outputs are accurate), scientists run the models from an earlier year, such as 1900, and then compare model outputs with observed temperature data. Model outputs can only match global temperature history when both natural climate variations and human-related greenhouse gas emissions are included as climate forcings. If greenhouse gas emissions are omitted as a factor, or if the sensitivity of the climate system to CO2 is reduced, the model outputs simply cannot explain the observed warming that has been especially prominent since 1970. These models are just one of many lines of evidence that give rise to the conclusion that human-related emissions are “very likely” responsible for the majority of warming over the last 50 years.
Global warming has now been examined in detail for over 25 years, and scientists are growing increasingly confident in their ability to explain the causes of past and present climate change. Predicting the future, and especially the details of ice sheet stability, sea level rise, and patterns of drought and flood, rests on a less secure basis, but climate scientists recognize these uncertainties and are working hard to address them.
It is for these reasons that the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, the Fourth Assessment Report, fell with such a resounding thud on desks around the world when it was released in February of this year. This document represents the consensus view of thousands of scientists and 169 nations, including the United States and China, the world’s two biggest emitters, and is the result of six years of work. This document states that humans are “very likely” responsible for the majority of warming over the last 50 years.
Achieving this kind of consensus is the hallmark of how the scientific method works. If global warming was a swindle, scientists, who are trained to be skeptical, would have rejected this theory long ago. The fact that the IPCC consensus was achieved gives its conclusions great credibility.
David Lea co-authored this article. He is a Professor in the Earth Science Department and Marine Science Institute at UC Santa Barbara. He also chairs UCSB’s Global Warming – Science and Society Event Series.
You will find me to be in 110% agreement with you on both the method and content by which the "skeptics" or "confusionists" are, and will continue, attacking the science behind climate change explanations.The scientific community, and the rest of us who concur with these findings, have a tremendous PR job to do in the next few years. As the mass-psychology of people is to want to feel safe and happy, rather than worried and willing to change, they will generally want to ignore, disagree with, or pooh-pooh the concept that WE are responsible for what is happening.
Numbers - and this is definitely a numbers oriented issue - confuse people. Large numbers confuse them largely. So things like thermal expansion of the oceans, sea level increases due to glacial melting, and 1000ppm atmospheric CO2 concentrations will only be understood by a few. What they need to understand are things like the following:
IF we do nothing to reverse the trend of GW - here is what will happen within less than 100 years...
The ENTIRE atmosphere will be hazardous to human health (per current OSHA and other health standards)
1/4 to 1/3 of all current species will be unable to adapt to these rapid changes, and will go extinct - creating further massive ecological disruptions.
New York City, virtually the entire state of Florida, and other low-lying coastal areas will be underwater, displacing at least 20% of the US population, and causing tens of trillions of dollars in economic losses.
These changes will affect the youngest portion of our current population, and for the rest of us, our children and grandchildren. This is not thousands of years in the future, it is a few decades.
We can as both individuals and as a society immediately begin to reduce our CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions, without affecting our standard of living, by simply migrating towards 21st century energy technologies and gradually abandoning 19th century ones, over the course of 40-50 years.
We have already wasted the last 25 years, or 20% of our available time, reaching the conclusion that the need to make this transformation is urgent. Now it is VERY urgent...and no doubt, we will have to spend another 10 or 20 years getting to a point where the majority of people embrace the need for change and are willing to implement, adopt, and invest in those changes.
Thanks for your article! RWVesel
Copyright © 2002-2006, CyberTech, Inc. - All rights reserved.