Complaint to Ofcom Regarding “The Great Global Warming Swindle”

[Comment 82: The great majority of the diverse research communities that have been drawn to research climate change have had no direct engagement with either media or politics: indeed many have sought to clearly mark out the distance between their research and popular and political debate. This has been seen as a factor in delaying widespread public understanding and engagement with climate change as an issue (see Smith 2005, http://tinyurl.com/2cm7qt).

It is right and proper that if a scientific problem is identified and judged by peer review committees to be serious, it should attract more funding; but to suggest that media attention necessarily yields funds is wholly incorrect. Not all potential problems that have been identified by scientists and which have received a great deal of media attention go on to attract large amounts of funding (for example, MMR vaccine, and the health effects of mobile phones); because many of them are judged by peer review funding committees to be either insufficiently credible or insufficiently serious.

In addition, the cumulative effect of this collation of statements and images is to implant in the viewer’s mind the idea that almost all of the world’s climatologists have reached the scientific conclusions that they have reached, in many thousands of peer reviewed research papers, in support of environmentalist agendas. This comment fails to reflect the fact that the institutions and individuals engaged in the IPCC process are all well established in their fields of research. They have not been needy of funding. It gives an entirely false impression of the nature of academic research funding, and damages public understanding of the IPCC process: a process that was purposefully designed to be transparent, accountable and working to the highest standards of academic rigour. The editorial point driving the editing of this sequence lacks all credibility and no evidence was provided to support this idea.

Finally, the programme’s wording denies the scientific consensus on climate change that has existed since the mid-1990s by not acknowledging this and instead presenting its supposed movement from an ‘eccentric theory’ into a ‘political campaign’. This is inaccurate and misleading. Spencer R. Weart, 2003, The discovery of Global Warming (http://tinyurl.com/368wk) tracks the long history of scientists’ attempts to explain global warming and the institutional underfunding of global warming scientists throughout the 20th century.]

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