Complaint to Ofcom Regarding “The Great Global Warming Swindle”

Former Vice President Al Gore’s emotional film “An Inconvenient Truth” is regarded by many as the definitive popular presentation of the theory of man-made global warming. His argument rests on one all-important piece of evidence taken from ice core surveys in which scientists drilled deep into the ice to look back into earth’s climate history hundreds of thousands of years. The first ice core survey took place in Vostok in the Antarctic. What it found, as Al Gore correctly points out was a clear correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature.

We’re going back in time now 650,000 years. Here’s what the temperature has been on our earth. Now one thing that kinda jumps out at you is: “Do ever fit together?” Most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.

The relationship is actually very complicated, but there is one relationship that is far more powerful than all the others, and it’s this: when there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer.

Al Gore says that the relationship between temperature and CO₂ is complicated; but he doesn’t say what those complications are. In fact there was something very important in the ice core data that he failed to mention. Professor Ian Clark is a leading Arctic palaeoclimatologist, who looks back into the earth’s temperature record tens of millions of years.

When we look at climate on long scales we’re looking at geological material that actually records climate. If we were to take an ice sample for example, we use isotopes to reconstruct temperature; but the atmosphere that’s imprisoned in that ice, we liberate it and then we look at the CO₂ content.

Professor Clark and others have indeed discovered, as Al Gore said a link between carbon dioxide and temperature. But what Al Gore doesn’t say is that the link is the wrong way round.

So here we’re looking at the ice core record from Vostok, and in the red we see temperature going up from early time to later time. At a very key interval when we came out of a glaciation; and we see the temperature going up, and then we see the CO₂ coming up. The CO₂ lags behind that increase – it’s got an 800 lag. So temperature is leading CO₂ by 800 years.