‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ wasn’t accurate? NO…

29th July 2007

‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ wasn’t accurate? NO…

posted in Global Warming by themaiden |

For months, global warming skeptics have been touting The Great Global Warming Swindle as a balanced and fair counterpart to those calling for urgent action on the issue of climate change. In reality, The Swindle is a misleading, dishonest and ill-conceived work of propaganda that is chock full of paid industry mouth pieces while being anorexically thin on genuine evidence.

The Conscious Earth: The Death of The Great Global Warming Swindle

Actually, this isn’t much of a surprise. I touched on it once in a response to Noonan, who foolish thought the film would make Lib’ral head explode: Blogs for Piercing Questions. And I posted a quick reference to a review written by my favorite bunch of climate scientists: A Swindle of a Swindle. The film is chock full of all the normal ’skeptic’ nonsense: the CO2 and the Sun, among things.

Now I find a video of part of an interview with the film’s creator. Follow the link to Conscious Earth to watch it. I especially like how the correlation between the Sun and global warming is asserted even after being told that the correlation breaks down after 1980. Very interesting.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 29th, 2007 at 7:04 am and is filed under Global Warming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1 On July 29th, 2007, kip152 said:

What the hell do you expect? The target audeience for that crap believes the universe was created in six days.

2 On July 29th, 2007, themaiden said:

Kip,

Yes, I’m tempted to agree. ‘Skepticism’ does seem to have a pretty strong religious base and I’ve noted before that Fringe Scientists Stick Together. Still, it probably isn’t quite accurate to generalize that far. The ’six days’ people are only part of the target audience.

3 On August 8th, 2007, Sam D said:

Yeah, those religious types are totally sceptical (please excuse the UK/Aussie spelling, I can’t help myself) about all sorts of science, but apply the same methods to belief in God and it is a different matter altogether.

4 On August 9th, 2007, themaiden said:

Hi Sam,

Indeed. I often try to address faith by forcing believers to apply the same arguments to it that they apply to other things day in and day out. Never seems to work.

5 On August 15th, 2007, Bud Prize said:

Then where’s the contrary evidence to the fact that CO2 levels rise AFTER the warming event? (as proven by the ice core samples) This is the sole premise for Gore’s theory and it is backwards. I’m sure you won’t answer that question; You will change the subject 10 times over until you’re in a comfy gray zone of religion and straw man arguments.
Why has the publisher of Gore’s book listed it under the category “Human Affairs” and not “Science”? (It’s on the inner flap). Yet bookstores will place it in the science section. Why? Did his very own publisher miscategorize it? Oh. That’s right. There is NO science in the book!

6 On August 16th, 2007, themaiden said:

Bud,

As to the question I won’t answer… “Then where’s the contrary evidence to the fact that CO2 levels rise AFTER the warming event?” I can’t give you any contradictory evidence because there isn’t any– if you are talking about time-scales in the hundreds of thousands of years. In recent history– on the timescale that matters for this issue– the reverse is true. But the question betrays a misunderstanding of what CO2 does in the atmosphere.

CO2 is a blanket, not a heater. It doesn’t heat the Earth, per se. Instead it makes surface temperatures go up by trapping heat, much the way blankets work. The heater is something else. The heater is the Sun, and because the Earth/Sun system is so complicated a lag isn’t all that surprising.

Let’s step back a bit. “1) The Sun provides the most heat to the Earth at noon. 2) Temperatures peak at 3pm or so. Oh look! There is a lag! Guess that means that the Sun has nothing to do with hot afternoons, right?” No. Obviously not. There is simply a lag in the system because of the complexity of the system. Over long time scales global temperature is similar.

Here is a question for you. It is noon and the temperatures are rising. You lay down in the shade and throw on a blanket or two. Do you or do you not get hot faster and hit higher temperatures than you would without the blankets?