Global-warming: myths exposed: in the documentary film The Great Global Warming 5windle, now on DVD, filmmaker Martin Durkin pokes holes in the idea that human activity causes global warming.

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Don't look now, but it's the end of the world. That's the message out of the UN climate meeting in Bali held the week of December 9. Bali makes the perfect backdrop for global-warming propaganda--being but six degrees below the equator, it is always warm. In contrast, it wouldn't have done any good for the climate fear mongers to have held their meeting in the Northern Hemisphere, gripped as it is in the middle of winter, especially were it emanating, say, from ice-storm ravaged Des Moines, Iowa.

In sunny Bali, however, the gloves were off with UN Secretary-General Ban Kimoon warning that we are now standing at the point of no return. "The situation is so desperately serious that any delay could push us past the tipping point, beyond which the ecological, financial and human costs would increase dramatically. We are at a crossroads: one path leads to a comprehensive climate change agreement, the other one to oblivion," the UN leader said on December 11. But don't take his word for it, he averred. No doubt thinking about the various reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), he claimed: "The world's scientists have spoken with one voice: the situation is grim and urgent action is needed."

Those who have seen the British documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle know for a fact that that last claim is completely untrue. There are, in fact, a large number of very serious and knowledgeable scientists who thoroughly disagree with the UN's notion that climate change is a global catastrophe in the making. Until recently, however, audiences in North America have not had access to the British documentary. It was shown, with great fanfare, on television in the UK and Australia, but with the exception of brief appearances of the film on the Internet, American audiences, whose daily lives are otherwise saturated with global-warming scare stories from the Weather Channel, the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, and others, have not been given the other side of the story.

Fortunately, writer and director Martin Durkin's masterpiece is now available on DVD for American audiences. It is a devastating response to the Al Gore-fueled thesis that mankind is destroying the world through carbon emissions. Though it was Gore who was infamously awarded a Nobel Prize for his movie An Inconvenient Truth, it is Durkin's The Great Global Warming Swindle that is far and away the best documentary film on the subject of global warming, and one which may prove to be the most important documentary film of the last several decades.

Alternative Opinions

The central idea behind the UN's climate alarmism is the idea that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are causing the Earth to trap and retain too much heat. If that's true, they say, then we must immediately begin to curtail carbon emissions. Environmentalist "journalists" in the UK have gone so far as to begin calling for a war effort against industrial emissions of carbon dioxide. On December 4, in the British newspaper The Guardian, George Monbiot said, for instance: "We must confront a challenge that is as great and as pressing as the rise of the Axis powers. Had we thrown up our hands then, as many people are tempted to do today, you would be reading this paper in German." The new climate-change war effort, he continued, will require putting government in charge of the economy and drastically curtailing modern lifestyles. "The US economy," he said, "was spun round on a dime in 1942 as civilian manufacturing was switched to military production. The state took on greater powers than it had exercised before. Impossible policies suddenly became achievable."

Taking full control of the economy is exactly what the UN would like to do in order to curb carbon emissions. This, indeed, is an "impossible policy," but one made more likely if one buys into the idea that carbon emissions really are driving up global temperatures. The one problem in all of this, as The Great Global Warming Swindle shows, is that carbon emissions are very clearly not causing temperature increases.

Interviewing several scientific experts on the subject. Durkin's film points out that most of the warming of the last century occurred before 1940 and that the world cooled for decades following World War II. Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu, director of the International Arctic Research Center, is one expert Durkin interviewed on the subject. In the film, the scientist notes: "C[O.sub.2] began to increase exponentially in about 1940. But, the temperature actually began to decrease in 1940 and continued until about 1975." This is clear and unmistakable evidence, he notes, that C[O.sub.2] is not causing climate change. "When the C[O.sub.2] is increasing rapidly, but yet the temperature decreasing," he pointed out in the film, "then we can not say that C[O.sub.2] and the temperature go together."

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Quite to the contrary, it seems that warming causes an increase in carbon dioxide; carbon dioxide does not cause an increase in warming. In fact, as the film notes, the ice-core record very clearly shows that C[O.sub.2] increases in the atmosphere follow centuries after temperature increases. In the film, paleoclimatologist Ian Clark of the University of Ottawa makes this point, looking at a graph of ice-core data. "We see temperature going up from early time to later time at a very key interval when we came out of a glaciation. We see the temperature going up and then we see the C[O.sub.2] coming up. C[O.sub.2] lags behind that increase--it's got an 800-year lag--so temperature is leading C[O.sub.2] by 800 years."

It Could Be Warmer

In fact, as Clark and others point out in the film, it is not now as warm as it has been in the past. Within the last 1,000 years, in fact, there was a period known as the Medieval Warm Period when the climate was warmer than it is today. The film doesn't make the connection, but it is interesting to ponder the fact, nonetheless, that the height of the Medieval Warm Period was, give or take a few years. 800 years ago. Given the time lag between temperature increases and atmospheric C[O.sub.2] increases, we shouldn't be surprised to see increases in C[O.sub.2] today.

Naturally, this kind of analysis does not sit well with radical environmentalists, and The Great Global Warming Swindle has its share of critics. Alleging that Durkin was guilty of misrepresenting certain facts in the film, in April, 37 scientists signed their names to an open letter to the filmmaker objecting "to plans ... to distribute DVD versions" of the film. Rather disingenuously, they claimed that they were not "seeking the censorship of differing viewpoints or the curtailment of free speech," though, in fact, that is exactly what they were seeking.

Durkin, for his part, has vigorously defended his work. In a response to critics published in the London Telegraph, he responded: "The remarkable thing is not that I was attacked. But that the attacks have been so feeble." Continuing, he noted: "Too many journalists and scientists have built their careers on the global-warming alarm. Certain newspapers have staked their reputation on it. The death of this theory will be painful and ugly. But it will die. Because it is wrong, wrong, wrong."

Finally, with the release of The Great Global Warming Swindle on DVD, American audiences get the chance to judge for themselves. It's a good bet that most will come away from the film convinced that Durkin is right about global warming.