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Extracts from Ofcom Complaint, by Category: Misrepresentation of People’s Views

1. Extracts From Complete Transcript and Rebuttal

1.3 Misrepresentation of Eigil Friis-Christensen’s Views

[Although Dr Friis-Christensen has stated publicly that his views were misrepresented in the film and that one of his graphs appears to have been falsified, the complainants did not ask him to authorise our complaint; and as a result, this section was considered by the Standards Division of Ofcom, and not by the Fairness Division.]

[Narrator]	What they found was an incredibly close correlation between what the sun was doing and changes in temperature on earth. Solar activity, they found, rose sharply to 1940, fell back for four decades until the 1970s, and then rose again after that.
[Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen, Director, Danish National Space Centre]	When we saw this correlation between temperature and solar activity or sunspot cyclings, then people said to us: “okay it can be just a coincidence.” So how can we prove that it’s not just a coincidence? Well one obvious thing is to have a longer time series, or a different time series. Then we went back in time.

[Comment 60: Cut to a graph comparing temperature and solar cycle length since 1540, which is (mostly) taken from Friis-Christensen and Lassen, J . Atmos. Terr. Phys. 57, 835 (1995). As with their 1991 paper, the documentary fails to mention that the paper’s results have been strongly disputed in the scientific literature (see Peter Laut, 2003, http://tinyurl.com/2ule4h, PDF, and Damon and Laut, 2004, http://tinyurl.com/2cwntm, PDF).

Continued …

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Section 1.3 / Comment 60: Sunspot activity since 1540]


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