Complaint to Ofcom Regarding “The Great Global Warming Swindle”

[Comment 95: The narrator, again, is misrepresenting how climate scenarios are developed. See Comment 92, page 77. Moreover, despite the claims that models’ results provide “wild speculations about the climate”, the programme provided no examples, nor any evidence that this has ever occurred.]

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

[Comment 96: Numerous studies have shown that the application of “the most elementary principles of journalism” in fact resulted in a wholly distorted summary of climate research through the 1990s and into the first half of this decade. The dramatic and editorial conventions that favour conflict, with the presentation of ‘pro’ and ‘con’ voices within a debate format, ensured that for 15 years much coverage of the issue gave a distorted and unbalanced sense of where the centre of gravity on the issue of climate change really lay. In striving for “balance” the news media failed to represent to the public the fact that since the mid 1990s, the vast majority of climate scientists have been convinced of the anthropogenic contribution to climate change.

In the UK these distortions have been identified in research by Smith 2000 (http://tinyurl.com/2jt529); Smith 2005 (http://tinyurl.com/2cm7qt); and Carvalho and Burgess 2005 (http://tinyurl.com/2woyhg); while in the US, research by Boykoff and Boykoff 2004 (http://tinyurl.com/3yu9pu, PDF) and McCright and Dunlap 2003 (http://tinyurl.com/3cpcnh, PDF) has reached similar conclusions.

This situation has changed gradually, as the number of ‘climate change sceptics’ with a published academic record in relevant subjects has dwindled to a vocal handful (almost all appearing in this film) (see Andreadis and Smith 2007, http://tinyurl.com/yv2wt3); compared with the thousands of researchers supporting the IPCC process and its conclusions.

Calder’s statement also fails to acknowledge that there are several news publications which have, through the last ten years, given consistent, often prominent, coverage to the contrarian point of view expressed in the Channel 4 programme, including highly influential UK papers such as The Economist (see http://tinyurl.com/gatww), The Mail (http://tinyurl.com/yudacw) and The Telegraph (http://tinyurl.com/yc4jtf).]

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