Complaint to Ofcom Regarding “The Great Global Warming Swindle”

[Comment 68: Calder and the narrator are referring to discussion that took place in the 1970s about the possibility of future global cooling and a new ice age. This is often used by critics of global warming to imply that, since climate scientists were wrong before, they may be wrong now. However, this argument overstates the level that this was a mainstream opinion in the scientific community. William M. Connolley from the British Antarctic Survey (http://tinyurl.com/363urv) undertook a survey of the scientific publications in the 1970s, where the “experts” would have made their predictions. He found that there were two strands to the discussion of the global cooling: one which discussed it in terms of changes in the Earth’s orbit, and another that discussed the impacts that anthropogenic aerosols were having on the climate. Yet none suggested that a “catastrophic” cooling or new ice age was imminent and unease was expressed in the scientific literature about projecting any trend into the future. This idea of “catastrophic” cooling was only discussed in the popular media (such as in Nigel Calder’s Weather Machine programme, and in Newsweek, http://tinyurl.com/36779s); and not in the scientific literature).

There was never a scientific consensus on whether this cooling trend would continue (see the American Institute of Physics: http://tinyurl.com/2l874q, and Realclimate: http://tinyurl.com/mxlcr).

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