Complaint to Ofcom Regarding “The Great Global Warming Swindle”

Dr Nir Shaviv

Most of Dr Shaviv’s 36 peer-review articles have been in astronomy and not climatology (see http://tinyurl.com/2w76av).

The programme drew heavily on his 2003 paper written with Jan Veizer: Celestial driver of Phanerozoic climate, a PDF version of which is at: http://tinyurl.com/2wlppf; which claimed a link between cosmic ray flux and temperature over the past 500 million years. However, this paper has been strongly disputed in the peer reviewed literature.

Criticisms of Shaviv’s paper in the scientific literature include the charge of making arbitrary changes to time scales in order to show a correlation where there is none (Rahmstorf et al, http://tinyurl.com/32x9dt); and that it contains serious and very basic errors in the treatment of statistics (Jahnke and Knud, http://tinyurl.com/yry26j). These are very serious charges. See also Rahmstorf et al’s reply to Shaviv at http://tinyurl.com/2uq6xc (PDF). Shaviv has responded to the comments in both EOS Forum and GSA Today (http://tinyurl.com/2lf3mt).

These substantial scientific criticisms of Dr Shaviv’s work were not aired by the programme. See also the comments at http://tinyurl.com/3as2ev and the follow- up comments on the same page (you need to wait for the page to load fully and it will then automatically jump down to the relevant comment). See also the response at http://tinyurl.com/2w47pz.

In summary, Dr Shaviv is an astronomer rather than a climatologist; his only peer reviewed paper on climatology, which formed the centrepiece of the Channel 4 programme, has been shown to be flawed: yet this was not mentioned.

Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen

Dr Friis-Christensen is the Director of the Danish Space Research Institute http://tinyurl.com/2w5jux. He has published 75 articles, most of which are in astronomy rather than climatology (ISI WoS).

Two of his papers purporting to show correlations between solar cycle lengths and Northern hemisphere temperature featured prominently in the documentary. These were Friis-Christensen and Lassen, Science 254, 698 (1991) and Lassen and Friis- Christensen, J. of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 57, 835 (1995).

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