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Extracts from Ofcom Complaint, by Category: Falsification/Manipulation

1. Falsification/Manipulation of Graphs

This point, which would have vastly changed the message presented by the Channel 4 programme, was omitted, and in omitting it, the public have been greatly misled.

On April 27, 2007 Friis-Christensen issued a joint statement with one of the lead authors of this complaint, Nathan Rive, stating specifically that Friis-Christensen’s views had been seriously misrepresented by the Channel 4 programme – see Comment 60 below.]

(In breach of the 2003 Communications Act Section 265, Ofcom 5.4, 5.5, 5.7, 7.2, 7.3, 7.6, 7.9)

[Narrator]	What they found was an incredibly close correlation between what the sun was doing and changes in temperature on earth. Solar activity, they found, rose sharply to 1940, fell back for four decades until the 1970s, and then rose again after that.
[Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen, Director, Danish National Space Centre]	When we saw this correlation between temperature and solar activity or sunspot cyclings, then people said to us: “okay it can be just a coincidence.” So how can we prove that it’s not just a coincidence? Well one obvious thing is to have a longer time series, or a different time series. Then we went back in time.

[Comment 60: Cut to a graph comparing temperature and solar cycle length since 1540, which is (mostly) taken from Friis-Christensen and Lassen, J . Atmos. Terr. Phys. 57, 835 (1995). As with their 1991 paper, the documentary fails to mention that the paper’s results have been strongly disputed in the scientific literature (see Peter Laut, 2003, http://tinyurl.com/2ule4h, PDF, and Damon and Laut, 2004, http://tinyurl.com/2cwntm, PDF).

Continued …

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Comment 60: Sunspot activity since 1540]


Page 9 of 16	Final Revision	Last updated: 11 Jun 2007