Global Warming
Reverend the Hon. Dr GORDON MOYES: I wish to comment on Director Martin Durkin’s documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle , shown on the ABC last week. It argues that man-made emissions have only a marginal impact on the world’s climate, and that climate change can be better explained by changing patterns of solar activity. It ends with the warning that uncontrolled global warming hysteria is potentially devastating to economic development in the Third World. The Great Global Warming Swindle contains some memorable assertions. Lord Lawson of Blaby said:
Politicians no longer dare to express any doubt about climate change. There is such intolerance of any dissenting voice. This is the most politically incorrect thing possible, to doubt this climate orthodoxy.
Professor Richard Lindzen of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said:
People have decided that you have to convince other people that since no scientist disagrees, you shouldn’t disagree either. Whenever you hear that, that’s pure propaganda.
Professor John Christy, lead author, said:
We have a vested interest in creating panic, because then money will flow to climate science.
Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, said:
The whole global warming business has become like a religion, and people who disagree are called heretics.
The filmmakers promoted it as “the definitive response to AI Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth “. Reaction to the documentary has been mixed. When first aired in the United Kingdom, the documentary attracted 2.5 million viewers, and 246 complaints to the television regulator. Carl Wunsch, professor of oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was also interviewed for The Great Climate Change Swindle , and his comments were included. He has since said that he strongly disagrees with the film’s conclusions and the way his material was used. He said:
My appearance in the “Global Warming Swindle” is deeply embarrassing. I was duped. I ask that the film should never be seen again publicly with my participation included.
Durkin says Wunsch was not duped into taking part. Further revelations have emerged. Patrick Moore was correctly quoted in the documentary as being a founding member of Greenpeace, but he has been an active critic of it for the past 21 years. Nigel Calder edited the New Scientist , but that was back in 1962. Durkin has also admitted that the claim that volcanoes produce significantly more carbon dioxide than humans is wrong, but claims this is minor and has been corrected.
Britain’s Channel 4 said supporters of the documentary outweighed the critics six to one. ABC director of television Kim Dalton said that all sides of the hotly contested global warming debate deserved to be represented. I obviously agree with this point of view. The Great Climate Change Swindle website does make a point when it says:
The whole global warming alarm, we believe, raises serious issues about the way science functions in the real world, about the political bias of scientists, about censorship within the scientific community itself, about the routine practice of scientists drawing false or inflated conclusions from ambiguous or uncertain data, about the manifest failure of the peer review process, about the extraordinary unwillingness of scientists who have invested time and reputation in a particular theory to consider evidence which directly contradicts it, about the elevation of speculation to the level of solid data, and much else besides.
I am not saying I have all the evidence on this, nor am I definitively saying that climate change is or is not happening; I am simply saying that it needs more critical attention than it is currently getting. Christians are not expected to be experts in these fields, but they are expected to carefully weigh the evidence. My question in the climate change debate is, “Who is swindling whom?”
It seems that this new controversy is based on a very old issue: Who makes money and gains power from this? Those with a vested interest in maintaining current emissions oppose the science of climate change ferociously, while new economies and organisations that profit from emissions abatement schemes and increased environmental concern fervently support it. The thoughtful people in the middle ground need to be aware of this while listening to all aspects of the debate before deciding on their response. 27 June 2007.
