[ExI] "Up against the warming zealots"...hmmm

[Damien Broderick]

<http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22105154-30417,00.html>

Martin Durkin says his British documentary rejecting the idea of 
human-caused global warming has survived last week's roasting by the 
ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation]| July 21, 2007

WHEN I agreed to make The Great Global Warming Swindle, I was warned 
a middle-class fatwa would be placed on my head.

So I wasn't shocked that the film was attacked on the same night it 
was broadcast on ABC television last week, although I was impressed 
at the vehemence of the attack. I was more surprised, and delighted, 
by the response of the Australian public.

The ABC studio assault, led by Tony Jones, was so vitriolic it 
appears to have backfired. We have been inundated with messages of 
support, and the ABC, I am told, has been flooded with complaints. I 
have been trying to understand why.

First, the ferocity of the attack, I think, revealed the intolerance 
and defensiveness of the global warming camp. Why were Jones and co 
expending such energy and resources attacking one documentary? We are 
told the global warming theory is robust. They say you'd have to be 
off your chump to disagree. We have been assured for years, in 
countless news broadcasts and column inches, that it's definitely 
true. So why bother to stamp so aggressively on the one foolish 
documentary-maker - who clearly must be as mad as a snake - who steps 
out of line?

I think viewers may also have wondered (reasonably) why the theory of 
global warming has not been subjected to this barrage of critical 
scrutiny by the media. After all, it's the theory of global warming, 
not my foolish little film, that is turning public and corporate 
policy on its head.

The apparent unwillingness of Jones and others at the ABC to give 
airtime to a counterargument, the tactics used to minimise the 
ostensible damage done by the film, the evident animosity towards 
those who questioned global warming: all of this served to give 
viewers a glimpse of what it was like for scientists who dared to 
disagree with the hallowed doctrine.

Why are the global warmers so zealous? After a year of arguing with 
people about this, I am convinced that it's because global warming is 
first and foremost a political theory. It is an expression of a whole 
middle-class political world view. This view is summed up in the 
oft-repeated phrase "we consume too much". I have also come to the 
conclusion that this is code for "they consume too much". People who 
believe it tend also to think that exotic foreign places are being 
ruined because vulgar oiks can afford to go there in significant 
numbers, they hate plastic toys from factories and prefer wooden ones 
from craftsmen, and so on.

All this backward-looking bigotry has found perfect expression in the 
idea of man-made climate disaster. It has cohered a bunch of 
disparate reactionary prejudices (anti-car, anti-supermarkets, 
anti-globalisation) into a single unquestionable truth and cause. So 
when you have a dig at global warming, you commit a grievous breach 
of social etiquette. Among the chattering classes you're a leper.

But why are the supporters of global warming so defensive? After all, 
the middle classes are usually confident, bordering on smug.

As I found when I examined the basic data, they have plenty to be 
defensive about. Billions of dollars of public money have been thrown 
at global warming, yet the hypothesis is crumbling around their ears.

To the utter dismay of the global warming lobby, the world does not 
appear to be getting warmer. According to their own figures (from the 
UN-linked Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the temperature 
has been static or slightly declining since 1998. The satellite data 
confirms this. This is clearly awkward. The least one should expect 
of global warming is that the Earth should be getting warmer.

Then there's the ice-core data, the jewel in the crown of global 
warming theory. It shows there's a connection between carbon dioxide 
and temperature: see Al Gore's movie. But what Gore forgets to 
mention is that the connection is the wrong way around; temperature 
leads, CO2 follows.

Then there's the precious "hockey stick". This was the famous graph 
that purported to show global temperature flat-lining for 1000 years, 
then rising during the 19th and 20th centuries. It magicked away the 
Medieval warm period and made the recent warming look alarming, 
instead of just part of the general toing and froing of the Earth's climate.

But then researchers took the computer program that produced the 
hockey stick graph and fed it random data. Bingo, out popped hockey 
stick shapes every time. (See the report by Edward Wegman of George 
Mason University in Virginia and others.)

In a humiliating climb down, the IPCC has had to drop the hockey 
stick from its reports, though it can still be seen in Gore's movie.

And finally, there are those pesky satellites. If greenhouse gases 
were the cause of warming, then the rate of warming should have been 
greater, higher up in the Earth's atmosphere (the bit known as the 
troposphere). But all the satellite and balloon data says the exact 
opposite. In other words, the best observational data we have flatly 
contradicts the whole bally idea of man-made climate change.

They concede that CO2 cannot have caused the warming at the beginning 
of the 20th century, which was greater and steeper than the recent 
warming. They can't explain the cooling from 1940 to the mid-'70s. 
What are they left with? Some mild warming in the '80s and '90s that 
does not appear to have been caused by greenhouse gases.

The whole damned theory is in tatters. No wonder they're defensive.

The man-made global warming parade, on one level, has been a 
phenomenal success. There isn't a political party or important public 
body or large corporation that doesn't feel compelled to pay lip 
service. There are scientists and journalists (a surprising number) 
who have built careers championing the cause. There's more money 
going into global warming research than there is chasing a cure for 
cancer. Many important people and institutions have staked their 
reputations on it. There's a lot riding on this theory. And it has 
bugger-all to do with sea levels. That is why the warmers greeted my 
film with red glowing eyes.

Last week on the ABC they closed ranks. They were not interested in a 
genuine debate. They wanted to shut it down. And thousands of 
wonderful, sane, bolshie Australian viewers saw right through it.

God bless Australia. The DVD will be out soon.