Complaint to Ofcom Regarding “The Great Global Warming Swindle”

With regard to some scientific research into global warming having been funded by the fossil fuel industry (see Comment 119, page 99), there is considerable peer-reviewed evidence that studies funded by corporations that have a financial interest in the study’s outcome are much more likely to reach the desired conclusions than those which aren’t – see, for example, Okike et al 2007 (PDF available at: http://tinyurl.com/2rnyw3); Vartanian et al 2007 (http://tinyurl.com/2zpp5y); and Peppercorn at al 2007 (http://tinyurl.com/yvu5er).

Good science involves testing (and accepting or rejecting) a proposed hypothesis based purely on the evidence, rather than starting with a predetermined conclusion and then trying to find evidence that appears to support that conclusion. Wherever there is a risk that the latter might be happening, the integrity of the entire scientific process is put at risk. This potential for corruption – or even for unconscious bias – is clearly against the public interest; and to point this out is clearly not to be guilty of prejudice, as the narrator of the programme claimed that it was.

More importantly, most of the criticism of funding by the fossil fuel industry has not been of their funding of research projects, as the programme claimed; but rather of their funding of a huge, and very well–funded misinformation campaign, as is well-documented by media and scholars (see 3.2 below). The deliberate efforts of this misinformation campaign was perpetuated and greatly raised in profile by the Channel 4 programme (see for example The Vancouver Sun, April 23, 2007, http://tinyurl.com/2wcrjg).

There is very strong and growing evidence (see http://tinyurl.com/v8u2d, http://tinyurl.com/2ebvwa and http://tinyurl.com/2udvt7) that a well-funded disinformation campaign costing tens of millions of dollars is currently being run by a large number of lobby groups that are funded by the fossil fuel industry, many of these lobby groups being directly linked to contributors to the Channel 4 programme; and that the aims of this campaign are: to mislead the public about the existence of a link between CO₂ and global warming; to convince the public that increasing the atmospheric level of CO₂ is good for us; and to convince the public that there is much less consensus about the science of man-made global warming than there really is – all in order to confuse the public and decrease public support for government action to reduce emissions.

Continued …