Complaint to Ofcom Regarding “The Great Global Warming Swindle”

The mainstream opinion of the time, however, can be summarized by a 1975 National Academy of Sciences report that stated “we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate” (http://tinyurl.com/ythc45). Hence, the climate scientists at that time were wary of making predictions, and were recommending further research rather than political action. To compare the 1970s discussion of global cooling to the current consensus on global warming is therefore disingenuous.]

(In breach of Ofcom 5.7, 5.10)

[Comment 69: The suggestion that Bert Bolin was a “lone voice” suggesting warming is far from the truth. In fact, the science behind the enhanced greenhouse effect from carbon dioxide goes back to the 19th century, and particularly the work of another Swede, Svante Arrhenius. See the history of the science written by American Institute of Physics, at http://tinyurl.com/35jvdt and their timeline at http://tinyurl.com/2v4drn.

By the 1970s, after the work of Callendar, Revelle, Keeling, Manabe and many others, carbon dioxide was well-established as a cause of global warming. For example, a 1970 report cited warming from CO₂ as likely (http://tinyurl.com/347uox, [William Connolley]), while Broecker (Science 189, 460 (1975) http://tinyurl.com/33m5tm) and Damon and Kunen (Science 193, 447 (1976) http://tinyurl.com/34plgf) published papers predicting warming in subsequent decades. It was hardly an “eccentric” theory, as implied by the narrator later.

Moreover, the total neglect by the Channel 4 programme of many decades of prior research appears to have been a deliberate attempt to mislead viewers into thinking that the theory of global warming is relatively new and untested, when in fact it is more than 150 years old.]

(In breach of the 2003 Communications Act Section 265, Ofcom 5.4, 5.5, 5.7, 5.11, 5.12)