Complaint to Ofcom Regarding “The Great Global Warming Swindle”

The following figures were obtained using the Google News and the Google News Archive Search, searching for “climate change” plus the name of one of the contributors to the Channel 4 programme; and in the case of the Archive Search, setting the start date to May 13, 2006. The search was performed on May 13, 2007, so the two searches combined covered the news articles published during that 12 month period.

Google search results that referred to someone else of the same name (e.g. a different “Ian Clark”) were not included in the results below.

These figures show that the views of most of the contributors to the Channel 4 programme on climate change have received extensive press coverage during the past 12 months – in fact, they have received a remarkable amount of coverage, given that their views on climate science represent a tiny minority view within the climate science community; that few of the contributors to the programme are climate scientists; and that some of them are not scientists at all.

Note also that the figures below are far from being exhaustive. For example, Nigel Calder recently wrote a much discussed and highly controversial opinion article in The Sunday Times (February 11, 2007, http://tinyurl.com/2fhq57; and see Realclimate: http://tinyurl.com/2klpu6; which Google News and Google News Archive Search fail to find. Also, doing a LexisNexis media search (http://alacarte.lexisnexis.com) [Note: After this complaint was submitted, LexisNexis discontinued its AlaCarte service] finds many articles that Google misses (and vice versa); but LexisNexis searches also find a lot of spurious and duplicate articles, because of which the authors of this complaint decided to use Google News searches for this research.

So the true figures could well be much higher than the figures shown below.

Thus the implied claim made by the Channel 4 programme (see Comment 33, page 26 and Comment 66, page 61) that its contributors’ views are being “censored” by the press, and that they are being treated like “heretics” is directly and verifiably contradicted by the facts.

They must be aware of the media coverage they are receiving, especially as many of the articles were written by them; so this appears to have been an attempt to intentionally mislead the viewer.

Press Articles About Climate Change During the Past 12 Months Featuring Each Contributor to the Channel 4 Programme

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