The Great Global Warming Swindle

I walked into this movie knowing i probably wasn't going to like it.  Mostly because i've heard a lot of the climate denial points of interest before and i've heard them soundly being refuted.  But since i like to think of myself as an open minded type wanting to hear both sides of the issues, i put aside all my skepticism and decided to give Martin Durkin a chance to make the case for the other side.  Hey, it's the least he'd do for climatologists, right?  Right?

Alas, far from being an honest and frank portrayal of the climate denial ('scuse me, climate SKEPTIC) side of the debate, The Great Global Warming Swindle starts off with an ironically alarmist message warning about the dangers of (you guessed it) alarmist messages.

But ok, so it's a little alarmist in its message.  I'm sure Al Gore's movie, which i haven't seen (and have no interest in seeing) isn't any different.  And it's not like Durkin did the whole "compare my opponents to dangerous ideologues" dealy.

Oh wait - that's exactly what they did!

According to The Great Global Warming Swindle the environmental movement is little more than a plot by neo-marxists, who trace their roots right to the USSR, to subvert capitalism and promote communism through the UN.

That's right, the same UN that seems utterly impotent when it comes to to stopping things like: the Iraq War, the Rwandan genocide, the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran, conflicts in the middle east and countless other wars and territory squabbles is behind the single greatest attempt at total world domination in the history of the world!  Even the mighty US, that gladly shrugged off UN resolutions to go into Iraq, is powerless to stop the IPCC and the Climatolomarxistnazis!

Only in Climate Denier land.

The thing with this movie is that while it spends a good deal of time deriding the "evil IPCC" for being biased and full of greedy, money-hungry communists (don't ask), it willingly embraces its own biases, flatly declaring uncontested, unsupported lies as if they were reality.

One of the most glaring examples is their statement that volcanoes produce more CO2 than all the factories, cars, planes, etc put together.  This is, of course, just demonstrably wrong.  And i don't even mean like "kinda wrong" - it's wrong on orders of magnitude, as volcanoes only emit 1/150th of the CO2 as all human sources.

To put this into perspective, that's wrongness on the scale of claiming the US is roughly 30km across from east coast to west (an actual distance of more than 4500km).  In other words, really, really wrong.

But, how does one make such a gross miscalculation and then include it into a documentary (that's aimed at criticizing scientists for inaccuracies, remember)?  Obviously, they just didn't care.

I should note that Climate Deniers like to think of themselves as skeptics.  But i'm sorry: if you fail to fact-check dubious claims simply because the opinion it supports agrees with your political view, you are not a skeptic.

Now, some climate deniers might point out that this is an unfair criticism, as this point was corrected in the theatrical release provided later.  But that's completely missing the point!  The very fact that this misinformation was ever in your documentary demonstrates how little skepticism you show opinions that already align with your particularly slanted view of the world.

Mind, this isn't even the only piece of bad science in the movie.  Oh, there's much more where that came from!  But i don't want to bore you with the science... and evidently neither does Martin Durkin; he's much more adept at boring you with lies and spin.

Now, going against the vast amounts of scientific consensus and mountains of scientific journals is a tough job.  An honest documentary has to sort out the most important arguments from both sides and weigh the facts and evidence supporting each claim and then demonstrate how the ideas you front are the better options.  The Great Global Warming Swindle, however, resorts to your typical strawman fallacy.

"All [climate change] models assume that man made CO2 is the main cause, rather than the sun or the clouds."

All?  Really?  Every single one?

I'm no climatologist; in fact, i have limited understanding of the field (though evidently, considerably more than the intended audience of this movie), but that's just simply not true.  In fact, no climate model claims CO2 is the main influence on climate.

According to The Great Global Warming Swindle, climatologists willfully ignore the influence of the sun on climate.  Further, they claim that the sun can account for all the warming we've been noticing.  They even give a little graph to show how global temperatures compare to solar activity (sorry for the lousy quality - i just screen capped it).

See?  That orange line is solar activity (right side axis), that blue one is average temperatures (left axis not visible) and x-axis is time in years (not visible).

Well that proves it, doesn't it?  The lines match almost perfectly!  Case closed!  Climate change is a fraud!

But wait.  Notice how the orange line stops and the blue line continues on for a bit?  Seems like an odd omission.  I mean, our record keeping in the past 20 years has gotten better, so it's unlikely our data for average temperature outstrip our data on solar activity by 20+ years.

I wanted to know what the rest of this chart looks like, but since it was painfully clear the climate "skeptics" do not, i would have to do the research on my own.  That lead me here.  (Note: this guy's actually done quite a few videos explaining the science behind climate change, including at least one video on this very film!)

watch the video, here's the graph we're concerned about (with the more complete data record).

Blue line is average temperature, orange line is my faith in the movies claims over time solar activity.  The x-axis is again time.

Why, it almost seems like Durkin was deliberately leaving that info out.  There's no way he didn't have the corresponding solar activity data for the same 20 year time frame as temperature data.  But, if he did have it, why wouldn't he include it?

Isn't it obvious?  The neomarxists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had artificially cooled the sun and... no, wait!  They used tree rings to... no!  The science isn't decided, yet!  Except that it's decided that the sun causes global warming.

Well, whatever it is, i'm damn sure Durkin is the guy telling the truth on this one.  I mean, who do you trust?  A guy just makin' a documentary or the group of commi-scientists at the IPCC?  I know where my money is!

Anyway, by this point in the film, i had completely given up any hope for an honest presentation of the material.

But with Durkin's strawmen utterly humiliated and the accusations of bias in the IPCC cast, it was finally time for him to tackle all those unfair "myths" levied at the climate denier side.  You know, myths like Climate Deniers getting money from private financers with an agenda.  It's absurd.... claims Durkin.

Huh...

That's odd.  He can't be serious, right?  I'm sure Durkin's heard of groups like: The Cato Institute,The Committe for a Constructive Tomorrow, The Science and Environmental Policy Project and The Heartland Institute.  In fact, i know Durkin's heard of these organizations, because half of the damn people in his documentary are involved with them in one way or another.

Each of these organizations are all opposed to the idea of Anthropogenic Climate Change and all of them receive much of their funding from private donors, including those from the energy and car manufacturing sectors.  Many also receive money from the tobacco industry and, surprise surprise, they're opposed to the scientific consensus that secondhand smoke is harmful.  But that's just a coincidence, right?

But is it any wonder that these scientists who are associated with organizations that receive tons of money from companies like Exxon-Mobil have anti-climate change opinions?  Or that Durkin would deliberately hide the fact that these organizations exist and are associated with his selection of climate denying scientists?

Now, Durkin might like to say that the source of the money shouldn't matter (and in fact, he does at one point), but he obviously doesn't really believe that.  After all, he went out of his way to try and "dispel the myth" of private financing.  Not to mention all the effort he puts into making the vast scientific community who hold the consensus views look like they're only in it for the money.

Durkin knows money speaks and he knows the source of the money determines the outcome of the result.  He just didn't want you to know it.

Anyway, that's The Great Global Warming Swindle.  It's an insultingly anti-intellectual display of lies, half-truths and propaganda designed to make the watcher question the science.  I'll stop short of saying it's fronting an agenda, because for all i do know, maybe Durkin really is this ignorant and simply doesn't understand the facts himself.  I mean, i doubt that's the case, but it's possible.  Even most climate deniers themselves aren't evil, just misinformed... and it's banal shit like The Great Global Warming Swindle that makes sure they stay that way.

Now, it's not to say the movie is complete trash; it's just mostly trash. It does make some good points, particularly for the alarmist media presentation of Climate Change, which is more often wrongheaded, if not explicitly wrong.  But what little it gets right is done no service by the lies and blatant propaganda that makes up the remainder of the movie.  It's deliberately manipulative, slanderous and full of lies.

But if you don't believe me, just read what Carl Wunsch, a professor of Physical Oceanography at MIT (who was featured in the film) had to say about it.

"Grossly distorted"?  "... as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two"?

Well, that seems a little harsh!  But, what do you expect; he's just a money-hungry, neo-marxist-commie!

But wait, if this is like WWII propaganda and the climatologists are the commies, i wonder who the climate deniers are?

Don't see this movie.  It's not even a good representation of the more intelligent less stupid climate denial criticisms.

The Trap

Ok, so this is probably the first documentary i've reviewed and incidentally, the first movie i reviewed i really really liked. So, before i get into the details, here's an overview:

The Trap is a three part documentary made by Adam Curtis and produced by the BBC. Now, i'm not normally a fan of documentaries nor the BBC in general since i find documentaries are typically deeply flawed and the BBC tends to be quite a bit more biased than the idiotic "i love everything british" fan-boys think (yes, it's no CNN, but a three legged weasel is still a weasel). But The Trap is different.

The Trap, like many of adam curtis' works, looks at the rise and effects of neo-liberal policies and practices since the second world war (arguably the starting point for all this madness). The Trap specifically analyzes the rise and effects of laissez-faire capitalism, negative freedom and game theory and how they shaped our current economic mindset (specifically those of the us and uk).

The film talks about how governments and groups like the Rand Corporation worked to build an economic theory that they thought was logical and intelligent, simply because their theory was internally mathematically consistent. This theory was built on the mathematics of game theory and would later lead to the ever proliferating ideology of Libertarianism (a form of mental disorder that spreads like a virus and effects grossly ignorant people). According to their theory, all individuals acting, in what's called a "rational self interested way", will invariably benefit not only themselves, but those around them as well. Basically, the idea that the invisible hand of the market can and would correct for any mistakes through the power of economics where governments had failed in the past.

This theory isn't "new". It was first proposed by the likes of adam smith... and even HE didn't invent it (adam smith only observed the economic structure in operation at the end of the 19th century in britain... then wrote a book about it). However, new or old, this theory is strewn with many flaws and the need for the "invisible hand" should act as an indicator of such. The Trap discusses many of these flaws, using expert testimony from credible sources, including the father of economic game theory, dr john nash himself in a thorough and convincing fashion. Of course, i'd like to point out that while libertarians believe in the model of the "rational self interested" human, the very existence of libertarians themselves should at least be proof that the "rational" part is completely wrong.

Ironically, the best thing about The Trap is the part that i found most aggravating about it. For the entire first hour, hour and a half, The Trap comes off (to me) as almost completely unwatchable. So how is it that i'm able to still give it a glowing review? Well, it's because this is exactly what a documentary SHOULD do! While other documentaries, like Sicko and Bowling for Columbine (say) are well received from beginning to end, the only ones doing the receiving are michael moore's dedicated personal fan club. The Trap doesn't do this "preaching to the choir" as it were. It starts off with a detailed look at all the benefits of game theory and how it rose to popularity. So, while people like me (ie, intelligent people) will be put off by the paranoid rantings and ravings of a schizophrenic dr nash, the very people who SHOULD be watching the documentary (ie, libertarians) will be completely sucked in, only to find, later on, that dr nash is his own worst enemy. It's a completely new way of conducting a documentary, but it is, in my view, the right one. As aggravated as i was with the first hour, its purpose is to fully explore how such nonsensical theories came to light and how the most foolish of us were misled to believe their own bullshit.

Now, i'd like to end on a bit of a different note. While i don't want to be repeating the points of the documentary, there's one point i'd like to drive home here, and that's the point of the "invisible hand". While libertarians and capitalists in general view the market as a totally infallible god-like entity (hence the "invisible"-ness) capable of manipulating society into the best point of equilibrium, this all stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of how capitalism works. Capitalisms proponents state that the system works because each and every individual will exchange something they don't want for something they want (whether that's goods for cash or vice versa). The object you acquired you clearly wanted more than what you gave up for it and in time, the system will adjust and correct to create an equilibrium that best serves the sum of its parts.

This theory works great... so long as the transactions are dealing with "non-required" goods/services. However, once the transaction is for a good or service that you require (like, say for example, healthcare) the theory fails as there's nothing a person isn't willing to give up for a necessity of life (no amount of cash) and so the self interested aspect catered to in a purely capitalistic society ends up delivering a veritable Hell onto the sum of its parts; a far cry from the utopia predicted by myopic libertarian philosophy. An important part of capitalistic theory, ignored by many of its proponents, is that the theory ONLY WORKS if the option to opt out of a transaction entirely exists as part of your consumer choices. No amount of "competition" can replace this option and once it's removed the theory breaks down and you end up with the "utopian paradise" of the third world.

In other words, as adam curtis so elegantly put it, "the invisible hand of the market is invisible because it isn't actually there."