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Complaint to Ofcom Regarding “The Great Global Warming Swindle”

Appendix F: Some Factors to Consider when Setting the Penalty

F.3 Factors Tending to Lead to an Increase in the Level of any Penalty

8. This may include, but would not necessarily be limited to:

repeated contraventions by the same person;
continuation of the contravention by the person concerned after either becoming aware of the contravention or being notified of an investigation by Ofcom;
the degree of wilfulness or intentionality of the contravention;
the complicity of senior management in any contravention; and
the ineffectiveness or repeated failure of internal mechanisms or procedures intended to prevent contravention by the person concerned or other persons in the same group.

F.3.1 Post-programme Breaches of Ofcom’s Penalty Guidelines by Martin Durkin

Points to consider:

As stated above, Martin Durkin from WagTV and Channel 4 have been subject to a previous ITC ruling. The repetition of breaches should be taken into account.

Following the broadcast of The Great Global Warming Swindle, when publicly confronted for using misleading/falsified graphs in the documentary, Durkin responded, in correspondence with a scientist at Imperial College and a well- known science writer (see http://tinyurl.com/2q6ngj: “never mind an irresponsible bit of film-making,” and seemed to justify his inaccuracies on the basis that he felt the BBC’s coverage of the global warming issue was also biased (“wilfulness or intentionality”).

In addition, even though Durkin was made aware on March 9, in the course of this correspondence, that the Friis- Christensen graph in the programme contained disputed and possibly faked data (see Comment 60, page 55), this section of the programme was broadcast unchanged on March 12 on More4 (“continuation of the contravention by the person concerned after … becoming aware of the contravention”).

Since the broadcast, Durkin has also continued to present the Channel 4 programme’s viewpoints publicly as if they were uncontested facts. In a column in The Daily Telegraph on 17 March (http://tinyurl.com/2clgy4 he claims in that article that the so-called “hockey stick” temperature reconstruction has been discredited, that the Friis-Christensen solar- temperature graph hasn’t been disputed, that the ice-core record indicates that carbon dioxide cannot drive temperature change, and that sulphur dioxide (SO₂) emissions are higher now than they were in the 1970s therefore we must experience cooling now.

3.1

A report by the US National Research Council’s Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate reviewed all the research that has been done to date on surface temperature reconstructions for the last 2,000 years, including the Mann paper that Durkin referred to as the “hockey stick”. The Committee published a report in 2006 that agreed that there were statistical shortcomings in the MBH analysis, but concluded that they were small in effect. (http://tinyurl.com/36dzh3). See also Bob Ward’s correspondence with Martin Durkin on this subject at http://tinyurl.com/yr9ujs (PDF).

Continued …

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Page 162 of 176	Final Revision	Last updated: 11 Jun 2007