Complaint to Ofcom Regarding “The Great Global Warming Swindle”

For example, in December in the Northern Hemisphere, we may not know for sure what the temperature will be tomorrow (weather). But we do know that the temperature will almost certainly be higher in July than it is in December (climate); and that it will almost certainly be higher in Kenya than in Alaska (climate).

See a further discussion on why the climate can be predicted at Realclimate: http://tinyurl.com/oet3t.

It is inconceivable that the narrator was unaware of the difference between weather and climate; so by exploiting the fact that this difference is not well known amongst the general public, the narrator was clearly setting out to mislead the programme’s viewers about the ability to predict climate.]

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

[Comment 89: This statement is apparently intentionally highly misleading; partly because it confuses weather with climate (see Comment 88); and partly because it is referring to 1974. Sophisticated climate models were only developed in the late 1980s, so they did not exist in 1974. Moreover, they have improved dramatically in both sophistication and accuracy since then, through both improved fundamental understanding and increased computing power, as an outcome of the increased investment in climate research that is subsequently criticised by the Channel 4 programme (see section 2.13, page 97).]

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

[Comment 90: In fact, models do not “assume” this. The main factors influencing the climate are inputs in the models, and the predictions for different combinations of the factors are compared to observations. This is the basis of “attribution and detection studies” (http://tinyurl.com/34a883 [NOAA]) which has been subject to much research in recent years. The models show (http://tinyurl.com/2v4x2t [IPCC]) that the global warming over the past few decades cannot be explained by natural factors alone, although they also show that natural factors are important (http://tinyurl.com/2f8vam [Global Warming Art]).

Continued …