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botanika

The great global warming swindle

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Hey, good flick. just finished watchign the first part, and kinda leads towards my theory on global warming. will watch the other parts

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Wow, just watched it all and now i dont know what to believe lol, damn this world sucks

Hardly anyone, even in the scientific community, can accurately tell you everything that's really happening, but the huge value in this film is it offers timely alternative viewpoints to Gore's film plus the warming media phenomena...I came away from the swindle film with a greater sense of perspective and to keep asking questions even when answers are thrown at you in concrete, not so much because its a better or worse film, simply because its another alternative viewpoint.

The swindle film also has its share of controversy: http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/...icle2355956.ece

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/...icle2347526.ece

Its just good to keep an open mind...to me thats what makes the world an interesting place.

'wisdom is understanding what we dont know' Einstein

Edited by botanika

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Its just good to keep an open mind...to me thats what makes the world an interesting place.

"Your mind is like a parachute, it doesn't work unless it's open"

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a hyperbolic production like that is accomplishing one thing only, the undermining of a global movement of passionate intelligent people trying to stop the ongoing massive and accelerating destruction of the biosphere.

open minded is good, having your head stuffed with empty talk isnt. life and habitat on earth is being slaughtered to extinction, even if you prefer to believe the useless sceptics on this particular issue. the global warming movement is a spearhead for ecological revolution, anyone with an ounce of love and intelligence should be supporting it, not bitching from the sidelines.

end rant. :BANGHEAD2:

Edited by komodo

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a hyperbolic production like that is accomplishing one thing only, the undermining of a global movement of passionate intelligent people trying to stop the ongoing massive and accelerating destruction of the biosphere.

open minded is good, having your head stuffed with empty talk isnt. life and habitat on earth is being slaughtered to extinction, even if you prefer to believe the useless sceptics on this particular issue. the global warming movement is a spearhead for ecological revolution, anyone with an ounce of love and intelligence should be supporting it, not bitching from the sidelines.

end rant. :BANGHEAD2:

agreed.

even if the current (ha!) interest in warming is exaggerated at all it would be an exception that doesn't matter cos it leads us in the right direction in terms of evolution.

no more oil, alternate energy, decentralisation of trade and living.

i changed my ways about 2 years ago in this direction more because of reliance on dirty, deadly gotten oil, over consumming of such crap no one even needs and to perhaps enable my ability to be an actual human animal.

not to be reliant on things i cannot do for myself.

but now i cringe whenever i see somone driving a car, smoking a cig, eating fastfood, buying fucking air coolers/ipods/plastic wrapped anything... it isn't any easier really, to deal with at least.

shit and don't any of you guys feel totally inept and detached from actuality when you engage with yr plants of choice?

i would have thought so.

this video u posted botanika and the inconveinent truth and the whole 'global warming' interest/fanaticism are not the things that should be scrutinised and supported, they just get in the way.

living with a proper relation to the natural world like every other living thing does is important.

isn't that what ethnobotany is all about. joining with plants and organisms to help each other to evolve and to survive??

and then there is still animal farming and media control and a whole lot of other things that are not in our best interest and are not going to be changed by every single so and so changing a light bulb, ditching their car and growing/buying local produce.

so why even entertain the idea of not doing anything to change the world?

*this is my opinion*

-edit-

x peace or somthn?

Edited by husk

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Hardly anyone, even in the scientific community, can accurately tell you everything that's really happening, but the huge value in this film is it offers timely alternative viewpoints to Gore's film plus the warming media phenomena...I came away from the swindle film with a greater sense of perspective and to keep asking questions even when answers are thrown at you in concrete, not so much because its a better or worse film, simply because its another alternative viewpoint.

The swindle film also has its share of controversy: http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/...icle2355956.ece

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/...icle2347526.ece

Its just good to keep an open mind...to me thats what makes the world an interesting place.

'wisdom is understanding what we dont know' Einstein

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The real global warming swindle - http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/...icle2355956.ece

just some of the points;

1. Other graphs used out-of-date information or data that was shown some years ago to be wrong.

Yet the programme makers claimed the graphs demonstrated that orthodox climate science was a conspiratorial "lie" foisted on the public.

2. Martin Durkin, who wrote and directed the film, admitted yesterday that one of the graphs contained serious errors but he said they were corrected in time for the second transmission of the programme following inquiries by The Independent.

3. Mr Durkin has already been criticised by one scientist who took part in the programme over alleged misrepresentation of his views on the climate.

4. The programme-makers labelled the source of the world temperature data as "Nasa" but when we inquired about where we could find this information, we received an email through Wag TV's PR consultant saying that the graph was drawn from a 1998 diagram published in an obscure journal called Medical Sentinel. The authors of the paper are well-known climate sceptics who were funded by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the George C Marshall Institute, a right-wing Washington think-tank.

5. However, there are no diagrams in the paper that accurately compare with the C4 graph. The nearest comparison is a diagram of "terrestrial northern hemisphere" temperatures - which refers only to data gathered by weather stations in the top one third of the globe.

6. However, crucially, the axis along the bottom of the graph has been distorted in the C4 version of the graph, which made it look like the information was up-to-date when in fact the data ended in the early 1980s.

7. Mr Durkin admitted that his graphics team had extended the time axis along the bottom of the graph to the year 2000. "There was a fluff there," he said.

8. If Mr Durkin had gone directly to the Nasa website he could have got the most up-to-date data. This would have demonstrated that the amount of global warming since 1975, as monitored by terrestrial weather stations around the world, has been greater than that between 1900 and 1940 - although that would have undermined his argument.

9. "The original Nasa data was very wiggly-lined and we wanted the simplest line we could find," Mr Durkin said.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

i hardly call this 'open minded' programming. the film makers are clearly out and out liars. They just want money/fame.

Edited by husk

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I dont know if these films 'get in the way'. As i mentioned before, both films have merit and issues. Its clear there are problems with the environment and irrelevent of cause its warming. Its also clear many people are changing habits in regard to it - i myself have chosen a profession involving environmental stewardship (thats not empty talk). But i think its fair to want a better understanding of why our planets warming and how we are proving that.

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I dont know if these films 'get in the way'. As i mentioned before, both films have merit and issues. Its clear there are problems with the environment and irrelevent of cause its warming. Its also clear many people are changing habits in regard to it - i myself have chosen a profession involving environmental stewardship (thats not empty talk). But i think its fair to want a better understanding of why our planets warming and how we are proving that.

yeah, that's fair enough.

i apologise if i suggested u don't care about the planet.

there are lies and scams everywhere, it's not a good or acceptable thing but could u not just appreciate the fact that this new craze is prolly better for us and the earth even if it is slightly/greatly over exaggerated?

i mean 'democratic elections' are a crock but we still try to make the best of them, no?

x peace

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Environmentalism is a religion. Faith can get in the way of facts.

But what are the facts? There is sooo much data on both sides of the argument. None of it is proof, as IMO, every study is performed under pseudoreplication, ie. we only have one earth to work with and nothing to compare.

I dislike fear-based environmental campaigns as much as I dislike fear-based anti-terrorism campaigns. Are we that selfish that we need to be scared into action? I feel it is akin to one giving money to charity to feel okay with their hedonism. Do people really care about the environment or simply about maintaining a lifestyle?

Global warming science is a massive, billion dollar industry. If there were no studies 'proving' anthropogenic global warming the funding would dry up. It is in the interests of many to say there is global warming. It is in the interests of many to say there isn't. Even that competition is fueling research funding.

With all that being said, the push toward renewable energy as a result of all this is a good thing. Pity it's taken threat of apocalypse.

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what he said :lol:

Edited by husk

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lol, I sat on that post for ages looking for a Crikey article that listed people/companies that would gain from GW initiatives. Never found it though. Just affirmed my dislike at their lack of search parameters.

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be easy to find articles on how global warming deniers are supported by big dirty industry though...

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if CO2 does have anything to do with GW then the Industrial companies would be at least 70% in fault for the co2 emmistions,hardly little co2 compared ild think. i agree with Kenny, its like a religion (science in general),where peoples beliefs and understanding is veried and in constently being "rewritten", so to speak. By the time people actually find out whats happening ittle be over n something new n world threatening would have come up.

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if CO2 does have anything to do with GW then the Industrial companies would be at least 70% in fault for the co2 emmistions,hardly little co2 compared ild think. i agree with Kenny, its like a religion (science in general),where peoples beliefs and understanding is veried and in constently being "rewritten", so to speak. By the time people actually find out whats happening ittle be over n something new n world threatening would have come up.

what? :unsure:

no this is 'world threatening'. the main reason ppl wouldn't believe it cos it effects them too much.

'industry' has NEVER done anything precautionary ever.

always; 1) idea , 2) lower the costs, 3) do/make, 4) fuck up some vital part of existence, 5) defend accusations at all costs.

only reason ppl would not support is cos they fear a 'shit economy' where they cannot give their children or themselves everything they want in life. prolly never change cos A LOT of pppl in this country are some of the most selfish ppl in the world.

x peace

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For some reason i just remembered a quote from The Young Ones, something like... 'Pollution. All around. Sometimes up, sometimes down. But always around. Were on different buses y'know pollution...but we're both using petrol'

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be easy to find articles on how global warming deniers are supported by big dirty industry though...

Definitely. There are ulterior motives on both sides.

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Definitely. There are ulterior motives on both sides.

true, but what makes it a cut and dried issue for me is that arguments for continued carbon pollution are almost all ulterior, while the arguments for renewable energy are almost all honest.

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Just getting both these films now (3am on a Sunday night... sad, I know).

I tend to agree that most of the people who are skeptical of the generally held opinion that carbon emissions are contributing to global warming seem to mostly have a vested interest in being skeptical, whether it is ideological, political or practical. Often, when I discuss global warming or indeed any environmental issues with people they get very defensive, and when you get to the root of it, it usually boils down to something like "I'll have as many bloody kids as I want and I'm not going to be made to feel guilty everytime I eat a steak" or "those fucking green whackos aren't the boss of me".

Having said this, I also agree that the green movement can often be ugly and fanatical. The dirty, dreadlocked hippy on a bike made entirely of hemp can be driven by the same basic power and greed issues as the corporate bigwig wearing Versace and a rolling around in the latest V12 Lexus. I think so far that both of the films sounds somewhat like crocks of shit to varying degrees, but I'm going to watch both because I agree with Botanika (see, someone does read your stuff Botan) that opposing information and dissenting voices are always valuable, no matter what they are saying and I don't want to exchange one subtle totalitarian system for another.

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to call gore's film a crock of shit is groundless slander, especially if you havent seen it. the research it quotes is authentic, and the point of view it sets out is reasonable, whether you choose to share the conclusions or not.

as i value life, evolution and complex living systems, drastic change to global human culture to counter the wide-spectrum threats to the ecology of our planet is indeed a 'total' prerogative. if you don't value these things, fence-sitting (which results in business as usual) is a consistent position.

Edited by komodo

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You are imagining evil motives again...

I didn't call it a crock of shit, and I didn't need to have seen it in order to have made that purposefully awkwardly constructed sentence: "both of the films sound like crocks of shit to one degree or another". Again, from what I've heard Gore's film is the much more respectable and scientifically sound of the two, doesn't mean that bullshit is not involved to a certain degree, and I won't make up my mind until I've seen them... this is not fence sitting and has nothing to do with whether or not I value life, but thanks for making the insinuation.

Did you have any response to the overall point of my post, or are you happy playing with your straw doll?

*EDIT*

I just realized you were indirectly addressing my post in your second paragraph.

I guess I just don't like totalitarian systems of any kind, mainly because they are always destructive, and also because I value my personal freedom... I don't want a Bolshevik telling me what to do the same way I don't want a Prince telling me what to do. There's a lot more than just 'disinterested' scientists and concerned 'honest' activists capitalizing on the whole global warming issue in case you hadn't noticed. Nevertheless from what I know without having seen the film, global warming is obviously real, and I'm personally much more persuaded by the generally held scientific reasons as to what is causing it than I am by conspiracy theories.

Edited by IllegalBrain

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I can't believe people here are buying into this sensationalist bollocks. These theories have been well and truly debunked. It's not 'open minded' to buy into this shit, open minded would be examining the scientific consensus achieved by over 2,500 scientists from over eighty countries on the Inter-governmental Panel for Climate Change that found a ninety per cent certainty that global warming is caused by humans.

Looking for sensation and ignoring facts

George Monbiot

May 25, 2007

The climate documentary to be shown by the ABC is bad science.

WERE it not for dissent, science, like politics, would have stayed in the dark ages. All the great heroes of the discipline — Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein — took tremendous risks in confronting mainstream opinion. Today's crank has often proved to be tomorrow's visionary.

But the syllogism does not apply. Being a crank does not automatically make you a visionary. But the point is often confused. Professor David Bellamy, for example, while making the incorrect claim that wind farms do not have "any measurable effect" on total emissions of carbon dioxide, has compared himself with Galileo.

The problem with The Great Global Warming Swindle, which caused a sensation when it was broadcast in Britain earlier this year and which the ABC plans to screen, is that to make its case it relies not on future visionaries, but on people whose findings have already been proved wrong. The implications could not be graver. Thousands have been misled into believing there is no problem to address.

The film's main contention is that the increase in global temperatures is caused not by rising greenhouse gases, but by changes in the activity of the sun. It is built around the discovery in 1991 by the Danish atmospheric physicist Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen that recent temperature variations on Earth are in "strikingly good agreement" with the length of the cycle of sunspots.

Unfortunately, he found nothing of the kind. A paper published in the journal Eos in 2004 reveals that the "agreement" was the result of "incorrect handling of the physical data". The real data for recent years show the opposite: that the length of the sunspot cycle has declined, while temperatures have risen. When this error was exposed, Friis-Christensen and his co-author published a new paper, purporting to produce similar results. But this too turned out to be an artefact of mistakes.

So Friis-Christensen and another author developed yet another means of demonstrating that the sun is responsible, claiming to have discovered a remarkable agreement between cosmic radiation influenced by the sun and global cloud cover. This is the mechanism the film proposes for global warming. But, yet again, the method was exposed as faulty. They had been using satellite data that did not in fact measure global cloud cover. A paper in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics shows that, when the right data are used, a correlation is not found.

Friis-Christensen's co-author, Henrik Svensmark, published a paper last year purporting to show that cosmic rays could form tiny particles in the atmosphere. Accompanying the paper was a press release that went way beyond the findings reported in the paper, claiming it showed that both past and present climate events are

the result of cosmic rays.

As Dr Gavin Schmidt of NASA has shown on www.realclimate.org, five missing steps would have to be taken to justify the wild claims in the press release. "We've often criticised press releases that we felt gave misleading impressions of the underlying work," Schmidt says, "but this example is by far the most blatant extrapolation beyond reasonableness that we have seen." None of this seems to have troubled the program-makers, who report the cosmic ray theory as if it trounces all competing explanations.

The film also maintains that manmade global warming is disproved by conflicting temperature data. Professor John Christy speaks about the discrepancy he discovered between temperatures at the Earth's surface and temperatures in the troposphere (or lower atmosphere). But the program fails to mention that in 2005 his data were proved wrong, by three papers in Science magazine.

Christy himself admitted last year that he was mistaken. He was one of the authors of a paper that states the opposite of what he says in the film.

Until recently, when found to be wrong, scientists went back to their labs to start again. Now, emboldened by the denial industry, some of them shriek "censorship". This is an example of manufactured victimhood. If you demonstrate someone is wrong, you are now deemed to be silencing him.

But there is one scientist in the film whose work has not been debunked: the oceanographer Carl Wunsch. He appears to support the idea that increasing carbon dioxide is not responsible for rising global temperatures. Wunsch says he was "completely misrepresented" by the program, and "totally misled" by the people who made it.

This is a familiar story to those who have followed the career of the director Martin Durkin. In 1998, the British Independent Television Commission found that, when making a similar series, he had "misled" his interviewees about "the content and purpose of the programs". Their views had been "distorted through selective editing". Channel Four had to apologise.

Cherry-pick your results, choose work already discredited, and anything and everything becomes true. The twin towers were brought down by controlled explosions; homeopathy works; black people are less intelligent than white people; species came about through intelligent design. You can find lines of evidence that appear to support all these contentions, and, in most cases, professors who will speak up in their favour. But this does not mean that any of them are correct. You can sustain a belief in these propositions only by ignoring the overwhelming body of contradictory data. To form a balanced, scientific view, you have to consider all the evidence, on both sides.

But for the film's commissioners, all that counts is the sensation.

GUARDIAN

http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/look...ge#contentSwap1

If anyone is truly open minded thay will examine the science contained in the IPCC report

http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html

Edited by FungalFractoids

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brain - i dont think i was mistaken in my construction of your position as fence sitting, with regards to what i see as an immediate imperative. to continue to dissemble on this issue and not take action is unacceptable (assuming you share the values i mentioned in the last post). the views have been exchanged for decades and there is consensus. we don't need to take into serious consideration every latest piece of slack scientific fraud to be balanced, reasonable and informed.

Edited by komodo

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I'm sorry you've chosen this route komodo... yet again you are accusing me of being disingenuous... I'm beginning to think its just a basic character flaw you have, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt once more and explain things to you. You are assuming I have the knowledge that you apparently have about global warming, when in fact I know relatively little about it... certainly science is not my forte, and never has been. I get very bogged down in scientific studies and have a very impressionable mind, so I have to fight against an innate tendency to accept whatever appeals to me as fact. Not many people will rush out and start engaging in activism over something they have only a basic knowledge of, and yet I do think the caring for the environment is of utmost importance and I have been adjusting my lifestyle to reflect this. All I've said was I'm not going to make a decision about either film until I've seen it... is that so unreasonable? Exactly how is this fence sitting? Where and how am I dissembling (lying)? Would you care to explain your accusations, or are you just happy making them?

You say you don't think you were mistaken in your assessment of my position, not surprising, considering you don't ever seem to think you are mistaken about me and my beliefs and praxis... quite a feat considering the brief and limited interaction we have had. I get the feeling from the number of times you have accused me of being dishonest recently that perhaps you are very quick to judge people (me at least), but are not such an astute listener. Great at criticizing a 'position', not so good at understanding people. What worries me is how do you expect to convince people of the seriousness of global warming and other environmental issues with such an attitude... it certainly doesn't appear to have anything to do with explanation or reasonable discussion, and going by your earlier defense of totalitarianism with regards to environmentalism, I'm curious to know exactly how you think such a regime should be enacted? Who will be in charge of this ecological autocracy? The Green Party? Scientists? Maybe Science itself?

Your answer is predictable... "all this is far too dramatic, you have only gone by what I have written, and you certainly don't judge me and you don't think you are wrong" Well it is, you haven't, you have and you are.

BTW, I noticed you constructed your sentence to say "I'll try and imagine you don't have evil motives" instead of "I'll try not to imagine you have evil motives".. you're doing pretty badly at either so far. It's also interesting that you've accused me specifically of 'dissembling', when I said in an earlier post "if you're accusing me of dissembling you can go and fuck yourself"... don't tell me that at heart you're just a little shit-stirrer posing as a great mind.

Edited by IllegalBrain

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