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Complaint to Ofcom Regarding “The Great Global Warming Swindle”

2. Complete Transcript and Rebuttal

Most of the above is very basic, and very well-established and well-understood physics. While it is understandable that a layman should be unfamiliar with some of these concepts, it is quite inconceivable that Ball Clark and Singer, as well as the narrator, were unfamiliar with them. Thus they were clearly not simply expressing an ill-informed opinion, or making an error – they were apparently intentionally and knowingly setting out to mislead the public.]

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

2.6 “Humans Don’t Produce Much Carbon Dioxide”

[Narrator]	But how can it be that high temperatures lead to more CO₂ in the atmosphere? To understand this, we must first restate the obvious point that CO₂ is a natural gas produced by all living things.
[Nigel Calder]	Few things annoy me more than to hear people talking about carbon dioxide as being a pollutant. You’re made of carbon dioxide; I’m made of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is how living things grow.

[Comment 51: Humans are not “made of carbon dioxide” (Nigel Calder is confusing carbon dioxide with carbon). Besides, his statement is a non-sequitur: the statement could be more accurately applied to water: does the fact that humans are made of water imply that flooding is not a problem?]

(In breach of Ofcom 5.7)

[Narrator]

What’s more, humans are not the main source of carbon dioxide.

[Prof John Christy]

Humans produce a small fraction, in the single digits percentage-wise, of the CO₂ that is produced in the atmosphere.

[Narrator]

Volcanoes produce more CO₂ each year than all the factories and cars and planes and other sources of man-made carbon dioxide put together. More still comes from animals and bacteria, which produce about 150 gigatons of CO₂ each year, compared to a mere 6½ gigatons from humans.

An even larger source of CO₂ is dying vegetation – falling leaves, for example, in the autumn. But the biggest source of CO₂ by far is the oceans.

[Comment 52: Firstly, if volcanoes were a dominant source of CO₂, we should see spikes in the long-term CO₂ concentration record whenever volcanoes erupt – yet we do not. See the figure here: http://tinyurl.com/2n7nfz.

An article by the US Geological Survey (http://tinyurl.com/3hasm) highlights that humans contribute 150 times more CO₂ into the atmosphere than volcanoes every year, which is consistent with a British Geological Survey citation (http://tinyurl.com/2pelm4) that the annual emissions of CO₂ by volcanoes is less than 1% that of humans.

Continued …

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Section 2.6 / Comment 51: Non- sequitur and claim that humans are made of carbon dioxide / Comment 52: Claim that volcanoes are a dominant source of CO₂]


Page 47 of 176	Final Revision	Last updated: 11 Jun 2007