Complaint to Ofcom Regarding “The Great Global Warming Swindle”

The common belief that carbon dioxide is driving climate change is at odds with much of the available scientific data: data from weather balloons and satellites; from ice core surveys and from the historical temperature records. But if carbon dioxide isn’t driving climate, what is?

Isn’t it bizarre to think that it’s humans, you know when we’re filling up our car, turning on our lights, we’re the ones controlling climate? Just look up in the sky. Look at that massive thing, the sun. Even humans at our present six and a half billion are minute relative to that.

In the late 1980s, solar physicist Piers Corbyn decided to try a radically new way of forecasting the weather. Despite the huge resources of the official Met Office, Corbyn’s new technique consistently produced more accurate results. He was hailed in the national press as “Super-weather-man”. The secret of his success was the sun.

The origin of our solar weather technique of long range forecasting came originally from study of sunspots and the desire to predict those; and then I realised it was actually much more interesting to use the sun to predict the weather.

Sunspots, we now know, are intense magnetic fields which appear at times of higher solar activity. But for many hundreds of years, long before this was properly understood, astronomers around the world used to count the number of sunspots in the belief that more spots heralded warmer weather. In 1893, the British astronomer Edward Maunder observed that during the Little Ice Age there were barely any spots visible on the sun: a period of inactivity which became known as the Maunder Minimum. But how reliable are sunspots as an indicator of the weather?