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Complaint to Ofcom Regarding “The Great Global Warming Swindle”

2. Complete Transcript and Rebuttal

The impacts of climate change will not be evenly distributed among the peoples of the world. There is high confidence that developing countries will be more vulnerable to climate change than developed countries, and there is medium confidence that climate change would exacerbate income inequalities between and within countries. There also is medium confidence that a small temperature increase would have net negative impacts on market sectors in many developing countries and net positive impacts on market sectors in many developed countries. However, there is high confidence that with medium to high increases in temperature, net positive impacts would start to decline and eventually would turn negative, and negative impacts would be exacerbated. [Emphasis added].

Also see the World Health Organisation’s 2005 report Priority environment and health risks, at http://tinyurl.com/2us2eg, which states that at that time climate change was already “estimated to cause over 150,000 deaths annually”, and that most of these deaths were in the developing world.

So it is the world’s poorest people who stand to benefit by far the most from any measures the developed world takes to reduce its emissions – the opposite of what the film maker was trying to manipulate the public into believing.

It is hard to believe that this is a case of the narrator and the other contributors expressing ill-informed opinions, as the facts are very easy to obtain; and the film was, after all, billed as a “documentary” containing “experts”. This is therefore a clear case of very serious misrepresentation and even deceit. For the film-maker to mislead the public to such a great degree on a matter relating to current public policy is a clear and very serious breach of Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code.]

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

[Comment 124: Paul Driessen’s links to fossil-fuel industry-funded lobby groups that campaign against greenhouse gas emissions reductions should have been mentioned and were not. For full details, see Appendix C.4, page 131.]

(In breach of the 2003 Communications Act Section 265, Ofcom 5.7, 5.8)

[Narrator]	Global warming campaigners, say: ‘it does no harm to be on the safe side. Even if the theory of man-made climate change is wrong, we should impose draconian measures to cut carbon emissions, just in case’. They call this “the precautionary principle”.
[Paul Driessen]	The precautionary principle is a very interesting beast. It’s basically used to promote a particular agenda and ideology; it’s always used in one direction only; it talks about the risks of using a particular technology – fossil fuels for example – but never about the risks of not using it. It never talks about the benefits of having that technology.

[Comment 125: The above statements regarding the “precautionary principle” are a serious misrepresentation of the facts. The precautionary principle says that, if there is a possible, but uncertain, major threat to mankind, it is sensible for society to address this before there is absolute proof that the problem exists.

Continued …

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Comment 124: Driessen’s links to lobby groups / Comment 125: Misrepresentation of ’precautionary principle’]


Page 106 of 176	Final Revision	Last updated: 11 Jun 2007