Complaint to Ofcom Regarding “The Great Global Warming Swindle”

These international developments pre-date Margaret Thatcher’s interest in climate change, which was first made public in a speech to the Royal Society in September 1988 (which is at: http://tinyurl.com/2kvovo). A search of Thatcher’s speeches shows that this was her first public statement on the issue (see: http://tinyurl.com/2oboey). They also pre-date the “Climate Modelling Unit” of the UK Met Office (the Hadley Centre), which was not opened until 1990 (see: http://tinyurl.com/27pzzu. Hence the chronology described in the documentary is completely incorrect and, given that the real history of the IPCC is freely available, was apparently intended to mislead the public in order to discredit the IPCC.

In view of the rest of the history presented in the documentary (below), it should also be noted that Margaret Thatcher’s Royal Society speech was made after global warming had become a major international public issue in the summer of 1988, sparked by the Senate testimony of NASA scientist James Hansen in June of that year (see http://tinyurl.com/2rfv7q, PDF, http://tinyurl.com/rvyfz and http://tinyurl.com/2tvz9j). This occurred three years after the end of the miners' strike, and after many coal mines had already been closed (see: http://tinyurl.com/37297g. Not only was the issue scientifically and politically important before Thatcher’s first public interest, it would seem superfluous for her to invent the issue to break the miners' unions, given that their power had already been fatally undermined.

Furthermore, to blame a worldwide scientific consensus over man-made global warming on a British strike is analogous to the conspiracy theorists who claim for example that Israel masterminded 9/11; and as it’s the narrator who is putting this conspiracy theory forward as if it were a fact, this is outside Channel 4’s remit as a public service broadcaster.

Regarding the point about Middle Eastern oil, one should note that Britain was a net exporter of oil in the 1980s and 90s (http://tinyurl.com/3xbr3w).

All this information is in the public domain: thus this statement could only have been an intentional attempt to discredit the IPCC in the mind of the audience by misrepresenting the facts.]

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

[Comment 73: The First Assessment Report (FAR) of the IPCC, published in 1990, predicted temperature rises by the end of the 21st century of 3°C (as a “best guess” under “business-as-usual”) accompanied by a sea level rise of 65cm. Both figures are consistent with the later reports (http://tinyurl.com/2trfqy and http://tinyurl.com/2xl4c6 [IPCC 2001, 2007]), and although posing a serious problem, it could not be construed as “disastrous”. The IPCC also acknowledged considerable uncertainty in these projections, and were very cautious in their language. For example, in the Executive Summary they stated that “[r]apid changes in climate will change the composition of ecosystems: some species will benefit while others will be unable to migrate and will become extinct” – a balanced assessment, incompatible with warnings of unmitigated disaster.

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