Complaint to Ofcom Regarding The Great Global Warming Swindle

2. Complete Transcript and Rebuttal

Page 44

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 2.5

Ice Core Data

[Narrator]

Former Vice President Al Gores emotional film An Inconvenient Truth is regarded by many as the definitive popular presentation of the theory of man-made global warming. His argument rests on one all-important piece of evidence taken from ice core surveys in which scientists drilled deep into the ice to look back into earths climate history hundreds of thousands of years. The first ice core survey took place in Vostok in the Antarctic. What it found, as Al Gore correctly points out was a clear correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature.

[Cut to Al Gore speaking on the film An Inconvenient Truth, with a graph of CO2 vs. temperature in the background]

Were going back in time now 650,000 years. Heres what the temperature has been on our earth. Now one thing that kinda jumps out at you is: Do ever fit together?Most ridiculous thing Ive ever heard.

The relationship is actually very complicated, but there is one relationship that is far more powerful than all the others, and its this: when there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer.

[Narrator]

Al Gore says that the relationship between temperature and CO2 is complicated; but he doesnt say what those complications are. In fact there was something very important in the ice core data that he failed to mention. Professor Ian Clark is a leading Arctic palaeoclimatologist, who looks back into the earths temperature record tens of millions of years.

[Prof Ian Clark]

When we look at climate on long scales were looking at geological material that actually records climate. If we were to take an ice sample for example, we use isotopes to reconstruct temperature; but the atmosphere thats imprisoned in that ice, we liberate it and then we look at the CO2 content.

[Narrator]

Professor Clark and others have indeed discovered, as Al Gore said a link between carbon dioxide and temperature. But what Al Gore doesnt say is that the link is the wrong way round.

[Cut to Prof Ian Clark in front of his laptop, on which hes demonstrating a graph. Cut to a separate animation of the graph.]

[Prof Ian Clark]

So here were looking at the ice core record from Vostok, and in the red we see temperature going up from early time to later time. At a very key interval when we came out of a glaciation; and we see the temperature going up, and then we see the CO2 coming up. The CO2 lags behind that increase – its got an 800 lag. So temperature is leading CO2 by 800 years.


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Section 2.5]

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Page 44 of 176

Final Revision

Last updated: 11 Jun 2007