The Great Global Warming Swindle
Brian Clegg
Tuesday, 13 March 2007 19:43 UTC
Channel 4 TV in the UK has recently caused a furore by showing a programme that calls the scientific consensus on the causes of global warming a lie.
I don’t agree with the thesis of the documentary, and particularly not the way they’ve distorted the science, but is there a lesson here? Should science journalism be solely about reporting and interpreting science as done by scientists, or is it an acceptable/desirable part of our brief to question the received scientific wisdom?
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Replies
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I have not seen the Channel 4 documentary, but if reports are correct, I am not surprised, as this is the way that TV science shows seem to be going (Horizon is an example).
Climate change is a complex and subtle issue for various sound, scientific reasons (let’s leave out the political ones for now).
The problem with digesting it for the media is that journalists often fail to appreciate the subtleties of science and want everything to boil down to yes/no answers (news editors, actually, rather than journalists, are the worst offenders).
Journalists, as well as being steeped in their own self-importance, are also imbued with regrettable ideas such as ‘fairness’ and ‘democracy’, which means that any bozo off the street has the same ‘right’ to express any view, no matter how simian and ill-informed, as any person who actually knows what they are talking about.
When transferred to science, this crazy reality-TV view of the world means that any idea, however cracked or ill-supported, deserves ‘equal time’, and journalists will look sympathetically at those mavericks who ascribe the failure of their ideas to gain credence as some kind of cover-up — which is of course meat and drink to investigative journalists, being the most self-regarding of the lot.
The effect on science is regrettable, as the it will be to stifle all reasoned debate and force all scientists to present a united front, for fear that cretinous journalists will get the wrong end of the stick. Journalists will of course will react to this in smug contentment, as their impression will be that there really is a cover up, ignoring the fact that reasoned debate does not signal a subject in disarray, but one in rude health.
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I belive that the global warming is a conspiracy. It is nothing we can do about it, and it is studip to waste a lot of money at ‘’saving the world’’. We should give the money to poor people, and include Africa in the world industry.
Dont care about the global warming propaganda, the global warming is out of our hands!ยจ
Join; http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=191712482152#/group.php?gid=191712482152 -
Anyone who believes that climate change is not happening and that any money not spent reducing CO2 emissions could end up in the Third World clearly lives on a planet where both the laws of science and society are very different from those on our own tiny orb.
Look at this in another way, if all those clever scientists are wrong and we are not frying the planet, what damage is done by reducing CO2 emissions? If you look at many of the proposed measures, they will reduce energy consumption, prolonging the life of existing energy resources and reducing other sorts of pollution. They could also reduce my outrageous electricity bills as I fall in line and insulate my draughty house.
Yes, there will be an economic cost. There was when we took lead out of petrol, another clean up challenged by some, and CFCs out of refrigerators. And yet the world shrugged off those higher costs.
Some economists have argued that replacing a load of old and inefficient stuff will act as a catalyst for growth, which is probably a more reliable way of rescuing Africa, the only place that seems incapable of growing itself out of poverty.
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