Channel 4 | ukwatch.net

The Lunar Conspiracy

Tim Holmes — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:33:00 +0000

A Proposal to Hamish Mykura, Head of Documentaries, Channel 4.

Dear Hamish,

until I read your response to my article yesterday(1) I had decided not to make any more programmes for Channel 4: I did not want to work for people whose editorial standards were so lax that they were prepared to broadcast 90 minutes of total bollocks. But now that you have exonerated yourself of all charges of inaccuracy, I have changed my mind. I have a proposal that’s just up your street.

The Lunar Conspiracy
1 × 90 minutes
Presenter: George Monbiot
Producer/Director: Martin Durkin

They told you it was made of rock.
They faked a voyage to prove it.
They “lost” the samples they took
And buried the real data
They covered up the truth they don’t want YOU to hear.
The whole thing stinks. Why? Because it is made of blue cheese.

Lunar rockism is no longer just a theory about the moon; it has become a belief system so rigid that it can no longer be challenged. Scientists say the time for debate is over, that any criticism of rockism, however rigorous, is illegitimate, even dangerous. But this film will show that the evidence does not support the theory that the moon is made of rock. The rock theory is dressed up as science. But it’s not science. It’s propaganda. You are being told lies, and I can redraw the graphs to prove it.

I can bring together a group of the world’s leading astronomers who, through creative editing, will confirm that the moon is made of blue cheese, probably stilton or possibly gorgonzola. I have also lined up Piers Corbyn, Philip Stott, Nigel Calder and others who, though they know nothing about this subject, are prepared to talk about it. They will say that lunar rockism is the result of scientific fraud cooked up by terrestrial cheese monopolists. Big Cheese has such a tight grip on science funding that astronomers who question the theory are terrified of stepping out of line, in case they have their stipends cut off.

Worst of all, the rockists are deliberately keeping people hungry. All we need to do to solve the global food crisis is to set up a number of lunar cheese mines, but Big Cheese and the astronomers it funds have been lobbying against it, and spreading lies and disinformation to create the impression that the mines would produce only rock.

I know that Channel 4 will love this idea, as it is edgy, noisy and provocative, and it will get right up the noses of the scientists trying to kill debate on a matter of vital public interest. I am sure that, like Martin and me, you have devoted a good deal of time to scrutinising Ofcom’s guidelines, and have worked out that it cannot and will not rule against films like this, because it has no provision for assessing the accuracy of factual programmes. This, as you have pointed out, means that everything we say is correct, even though we have just made it up.

I look forward to hearing from you and hope that this can be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

With my best wishes, George

References:

1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/22/channel4.ofcom

Despite Ruling, "Swindle" Is Still Dangerous

Tim Holmes — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:28:32 +0000

Don’t believe anything you see in a TV documentary made in the UK.

Documentary makers here have no obligation to be accurate, though factual programmes should present a wide range of views.

That is the implication of a series of rulings by Ofcom, the regulatory body for responsible for upholding broadcast standards in the UK, on complaints made about a British TV documentary called The Great Global Warming Swindle.

Channel 4, the television company that commissioned and broadcast the documentary, first shown on 8 March last year, subsequently sold the show to 21 countries and released it on DVD. Numerous clips have been viewed on video-sharing site YouTube.

According to the Ofcom ruling, while all programmes dealing with important issues should be impartial, only news programmes have to be presented with “due accuracy”. It doesn’t matter if other programmes are misleading as long as they don’t cause “harm or offence”, and the regulator’s interpretation of harm is so narrow that it effectively gives broadcasters a green light to mislead the public.

The “documentary” in question attacked the idea that global warming is caused by human activity.

To achieve this, writer and director Martin Durkin didn’t look at the many genuine questions and uncertainties relating to climate change. Instead, he assembled a one-sided package of misrepresentations and fabrications based mainly on inaccurate newspaper reports, opinion pieces and old propaganda disseminated by the oil lobby and its stooges.

Blatant errors

For instance, parts of some of the graphs were actually made up, as the programme makers effectively admitted when they corrected the most blatant errors for later broadcasts.

For me and my colleagues, this shameful piece of television was the final straw that persuaded us to do a special setting out the science behind the many climate myths and misconceptions.

We were not the only ones outraged. Durkin’s documentary also prompted many complaints to Ofcom. Dave Rado, a concerned layman, worked with scientists to produce one detailed complaint claiming 137 breaches of the UK’s broadcasting regulations. Those involved stress that they are not trying to stifle free speech, but rather to prevent the media from practicing “systematic deception”.

Now, more than a year after the broadcast, Ofcom has finally gotten around to ruling on these complaints (pdf). It has upheld some of the claimed breaches.

Upheld complaints

The programme misrepresented the views of David King, then the chief scientific advisor to the UK government, and gave him no opportunity to respond, Ofcom has decided. The programme criticised King for comments he did not make.

Ofcom also partly upheld similar complaints by oceanographer Carl Wunsch and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Channel 4 will have to broadcast summaries of Ofcom’s ruling in each of the three cases.

So much for fairness. What about the general issue of factual accuracy? According to Ofcom’s broadcasting code: “Factual programmes or items or portrayals of factual matters must not materially mislead the public”.

The code goes on to say that “due impartiality must be preserved on … major matters relating to current public policy” and “in dealing with matters, an appropriately wide range of significant views must be included and given due weight”.

Ofcom has ruled that the final part of the programme was in breach of the code relating to impartiality and presenting a wide range of views.

The decision is fairly meaningless, however, as it has not imposed any sanction. Channel 4 will not have to broadcast anything relating to this ruling.

Factual failings

What seems extraordinary, though, is that Ofcom has decided Durkin’s programme was not in breach of the code when it comes to factual accuracy. So apparently:

• It’s OK to fabricate graphics.

• It’s OK to state that volcanoes emit more carbon dioxide than humans when in fact humans emit far more.

• It’s OK to present scientists as experts in fields they in fact know little about.

• It’s OK to present disputed claims as if they were well-established and accepted scientific facts.

• It’s OK to claim: “There is no evidence at all from Earth’s long climate history that carbon dioxide has ever determined global temperatures”, when there is overwhelming evidence going back many decades that CO2 does play a role.

• It’s OK to deliberately confuse long-term changes in sea ice cover with the seasonal coming and going of ice.

• It’s OK to state that Margaret Thatcher made a speech to scientists at the Royal Society saying: “There’s money on the table for you to prove this stuff” (meaning global warming) when she did not say any such thing. The extraordinary idea being that climate change was an issue cooked up by climate scientists in order to get funding.

• It’s OK to state that, “The common belief that carbon dioxide is driving climate change is at odds with much of the available scientific data: data from weather balloons and satellites, from ice core surveys, and from the historical temperature records” when this is clearly untrue.

• It’s OK to claim that an individual called Piers Corbyn produces more accurate weather forecasts than the UK’s Met Office when there is no evidence of this at all.

The list could go on and on, but you get the picture. I can’t think of any supposedly factual programme on British TV that was less accurate than Durkin’s polemic. For Ofcom to rule that it was not factually misleading is extraordinary and sets a disastrous precedent for programmes relating to controversial scientific issues.

‘Harm and offence’

The reasoning behind this decision, according to the judgement, is that for non-news programmes the rule on factual accuracy applies only to “content which materially misleads the audience so as to cause harm and offence”. It goes on to say that only “actual harm” rather than “potential harm” matters.

In other words, discouraging action to avoid future catastrophes does not count as harm.

On this basis, Ofcom decided that all the falsehoods in the programme relating to the causes of climate change could simply be ignored. The programme will not cause harm by affecting people’s behaviour, the judgement claims, because most viewers know the views expressed are not the scientific consensus.

Well, yes, most viewers might know what the consensus is, but an awful lot of them do not accept it. What’s more, most viewers would not have been aware how many of the statements in the programme were false.

Poor record

By Ofcom’s logic, a programme that presented the long-discredited myths about AIDS not being caused by HIV as being true would not count as causing harm either. Indeed, astonishingly, the ruling makes exactly this comparison.

As for the factual inaccuracies not causing offence, well, I get hopping mad when I see a pack of lies presented as the truth. Does that kind of offence not count? Clearly not.

The other thing I find extraordinary about this case is that Channel 4 is a publicly owned company. Despite its public remit, it has a record of broadcasting similar nonsense.

What’s more, with its advertising revenues falling, it is currently campaigning to get its hands on part of the BBC’s licence fees. What a horrifying prospect.

In my opinion, if Channel 4 carries on producing programmes like The Great Global Warming Swindle, the sooner it goes bust the better off Britain and the world will be

Swindled Again

Tim Holmes — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:35:52 +0000

Hamish Mykura has done something quite impressive: he has managed to pack almost as many distortions and misrepresentations into his response(1) to my article about Channel 4 as Martin Durkin crammed into The Great Global Warming Swindle.

The broadcasting regulator Ofcom has not “agreed” that “none of the scientific data” in the film “was materially misleading”. What it said was that the audience was not “misled in a manner that would have led to actual or potential harm.”(2) Ofcom made it clear that it has no mandate to determine whether or not the data were accurate. As the ruling showed, it would be impossible for the Swindle to have broken Ofcom’s accuracy guidelines, because, while news programmes must be accurate, “there is no such requirement for other types of programming, including factual programmes of this type.” The regulator would have reached the same conclusion had the programme announced that the moon was made of blue cheese.

Mykura contends that the allegation that 10 of the film’s protagonists have been paid by fossil fuel companies or lobby groups funded by such companies “is a gross exaggeration that can be traced to blog gossip.” In fact in all ten cases the evidence comes from primary sources, such as ExxonMobil’s annual accounts and a leaked document from the Intermountain Rural Electric Association, which shows that one of the programme’s contributors has been paid $100,000 by that organisation alone to produce arguments beneficial to coal-fired power generators(3). Channel 4’s unwillingness to research its contributors’ hidden financial interests suggests that it is happy to be duped by the fossil fuel industries.

But Mykura’s worst misrepresentation is his charge that the people who complained about this programme want to shut down debate. This is a grotesque self-justification. Critics like me recognise that Channel 4 is entitled to its own opinions. But it is not entitled to its own facts. As a public service broadcaster it does not have the right to manipulate graphs, invent histories, alter scientific evidence or produce a film which, in the words of one of its contributors, was “as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two”(4).

References:

1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/22/channel4.ofcom?gusrc…

2. Ofcom, 21st July 2008. Broadcast Bulletin, Issue 114. http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/obb/prog_cb/obb114/issue114.pdf

3. IREA, 17th July 2006. Letter from Stanley R Lewandowski Jr, General Manager. http://www.desmogblog.com/files/IREA-memo.pdf

4. Carl Wunsch, quoted by Ben Goldacre and David Adam, 11th March 2007. Climate scientist ‘duped to deny global warming’. The Observer.

Distortions, Falsehoods, Fabrications

Tim Holmes — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:33:58 +0000

So here we go again. For the second time, Channel 4 has been fiercely criticised by the broadcasting regulator for a programme attacking environmental science. For the second time the director was Martin Durkin. Ten years ago, his series Against Nature was found to have misled his interviewees about “the content and purpose of the programmes” and distorted their views “through selective editing”(1). Now Ofcom has ruled that the programme he made last year – The Great Global Warming Swindle – treated two scientists and an organisation (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) unfairly(2). For the second time, Channel 4 will have to make an embarrassing primetime apology.

But while the new ruling exposes some of the channel’s practices, it also exposes the limitations of the regulator. The programme was peppered with distortions and misleading claims. But despite being presented with a vast dossier of evidence by climate scientists, Ofcom decided that it could not rule on the matter of accuracy. While news programmes are expected to be accurate, other factual programmes are not, and Ofcom “only regulates misleading material where that material is likely to cause harm or offence.” It decided that The Great Global Warming Swindle hadn’t caused actual harm to members of the public and would not rule on whether or not the programme had misled them. In fact, it is precisely because “the discussion about the causes of global warming was to a very great extent settled by the date of broadcast”, meaning that climate change was no longer a matter of political controversy, that a programme claiming it is all a pack of lies could slip past the partiality rules. The greater a programme’s defiance of scientific fact, the less likely Ofcom is to rule against it. This paradoxical judgement allows Channel 4 to keep getting away with it.

The Great Global Warming Swindle is part of a long-standing pattern. Channel 4 upsets all sorts of people, and it has every right to do so. On all other issues it appears to do so in a random fashion, sometimes attacking people on one side of the debate, sometimes on the other. But one polemical position has kept recurring over the past 18 years: a fierce antagonism towards environmentalism. Some of these programmes have used misrepresentation, distortion or fabrication to sustain claims that environmental concerns are the fantasies of self-serving scientists. It is arguable that no organisation in the United Kingdom has done more to damage the effort to protect the environment.

For the first eight years of the channel’s life, its coverage of environmental issues was broad, diverse and often stimulating. It broadcast 20 programmes a year in its Fragile Earth slot. But two years after Michael Grade became chief executive, its programming began to change. The trend continued after he left.

In 1990 Channel 4 screened a documentary called The Greenhouse Conspiracy, directed by Hilary Lawson at the company TVF. It maintained that “there is no evidence at all” for dangerous climate change. There is a conspiracy among scientists, it said, to talk up the dangers in order to win funding(3). No reasonable person would dispute that Channel 4 should show countervailing views, or would claim that it has an obligation to take an environmentalist line. But there were three problems with this programme, which appear to characterise several of the channel’s films about the environment.

The first is that it was billed as a science documentary, rather than a one-sided polemic. It had an anonymous and authoritative voiceover, rather than the onscreen presenter you would expect to see in a polemical film. It presented as hard fact statements that were extremely contentious and often plain wrong. The second is that contributors’ commercial interests were not mentioned. The third problem is that though the majority of scientific opinion was at odds with the line the programme took, the opposing point of view was scarcely represented. The contribution of a very eminent climate scientist was edited to make him seem like an inconsistent crank, while maverick outsiders were presented as the voices of scientific orthodoxy.

But this film became a template for the channel’s environmental coverage over much of the following 17 years. Its most prominent films about the environment screened in this period took the same line as The Greenhouse Conspiracy, which created the impression that environmental problems do not exist and that environmental scientists are mendacious fanatics.

In 1997 Channel 4 broadcast a series across three hours of prime time on Sunday evenings, called Against Nature. Made by Martin Durkin, then working for the production company RDF, it claimed that the greens are modern-day Nazis who have been “needlessly consigning millions of people in the Third World to poverty and early death”. The programme’s publicity stated that it “highlights the absence of scientific rigour behind notions like the greenhouse effect and global warming”, yet the series made the most elementary scientific blunders, describing sulphur dioxide as a greenhouse gas and the oceans as the major net source of carbon dioxide.

Like The Greenhouse Conspiracy, Against Nature was billed as a science programme, rather than a polemic. It had no onscreen presenter. It amplified the credentials of some of its contributors and failed to reveal that some were funded by fossil fuel industries. The programme makers duped and misrepresented the environmentalists they featured. This series was subject to one of the most damning verdicts that Ofcom’s predecessor, the Independent Television Commission, has ever handed down.

None of this, or subsequent distortions, stopped the channel from continuing to pay Martin Durkin to pursue what looks like a personal crusade against science. In 1998, he hired a research biochemist and TV researcher called Najma Kazi to help him with a film for Equinox called Storm in a D-Cup claiming that breast implants are completely safe. After two weeks she walked out. “It’s not a joke to walk away from four or five month’s work,” she told me, “but my research was being ignored. The published research had been construed to give an impression that’s not the case. I don’t know how that programme got passed.”(4) In 2000, he made another film – a 90-minute special – for Equinox about genetic engineering. He interviewed the environmentalist Dr Mae-Wan Ho. “I feel completely betrayed and misled”, she said. “They did not tell me it was going to be an attack on my position.”(5) Neither of these programmes, however, was criticised by the regulators.

During this period, Channel 4 broadcast several environmental programmes which were vicious and grossly unbalanced denunciations of environmental science. But, as independent film makers I have spoken to testify, proposals for programmes which expressed concern about the environment were rejected out of hand. When I went to speak to the man who was then the director of programmes, Tim Gardam, to ask why the channel seemed so hostile to the environment, he told me something that shocked me more than any defensive statement. “I don’t know what’s important any more”.

The list of environmental programmes Channel 4 has sent me shows a sharp reduction in output during the years 1992 to 2006(6). But in mid-2006 I was told by an executive that the channel had realised it had been misled by people who were sponsored by the fossil fuel industry. It seemed as if the dam had broken. Channel 4’s new commissions suggested that it was at last beginning to wake up to the fact that environmental issues were not just the crazy fantasy of a group of green fascists. That was until March 2007, when The Great Global Warming Swindle was broadcast, backed by a massive promotional campaign. The director, yet again, was Martin Durkin, and once more he was given 90 minutes of prime time.

The first thing I noticed about the Great Global Warming Swindle is how similar it is to The Greenhouse Conspiracy, broadcast 17 years before. The two programmes made the same claims, using some of the same contributors. They were now a little greyer and fatter, but they repeated their line almost verbatim. A vast accumulation of evidence in the intervening years, contradicting the programme’s thesis, was ignored – it appeared that very little had changed since 1990. Indeed much of the distortion in the programme involved the freezing of timelines at points convenient to his argument, producing a misleading impression of current evidence.

Some of the graphs Martin Durkin used in the programme, for example, seem to have been altered, changing the historical record. A graph of 20th Century temperatures was attributed in the programme to NASA. In reality it was first published by an Exxon-funded lobby group and creates the false impression that most of the rise in temperature occurred before 1940, after which there was a sharp fall(7). The data it used ended in the mid-1980s. On Durkin’s version however, the timeline was extended to 2005 – the change of dates on the graph appeared to support his argument. Following complaints, the dates were corrected when the programme was rebroadcast.

He used a graph of temperatures over the past millennium to make the claim that they were higher during the 12th Century than they are today. But again the timescale was altered. An arrow marked “Now” points to data which in fact end at 1975. A third graph had been mislabelled in the same way: the arrow marked “Now” points to the global temperature 108 years ago, in 1900. On a fourth graph, the film-makers altered part of a curve, thereby creating the impression that temperature has precisely tracked changes in sunspot cycles. The author of the original graph complained that the film had presented “fabricated data … as genuine” to make its case(8). In response Durkin said it was a mistake.

It would require a book to catalogue all the distortions and fabrications The Great Global Warming Swindle is alleged to have included. A complaint by a team of senior scientists – the first peer-reviewed submission ever made to Ofcom – runs to 188 pages(9). Not only did the film inflate credentials of some of the contributors; some of them appear to have been made up altogether. The climate sceptic Tim Ball, for example, was said to be a professor at the Department of Climatology in the University of Winnipeg. There is no such department and he has not held a professorship since he retired in 1996. Philip Stott, the programme claimed, is a professor at the Department of Biogeography, University of London. While he was once a Professor of Biogeography, there was no such department, and Stott retired some time ago, becoming professor emeritus. Piers Corbyn was given a doctorate he does not possess and described as a “climate forecaster”. He is in fact a weather forecaster – a very different matter – and has published no peer-reviewed papers on either topic since 1986(10). Fred Singer is said to have been the director of the US National Weather Service. In reality he was Director of the US National Weather Satellite Center.

Far from revealing its contributors’ financial interests, the film created the impression that they have taken no money from the coal or oil industry. In truth 10 of its protagonists have either been funded directly by fossil fuel companies, or have received paid employment from lobby groups funded by these companies, which campaign against taking action on climate change(11). Tim Ball claimed in the programme that “I’ve never received a nickel from the oil and gas companies.” But he has received fees from two groups which lobby against taking action on climate change – Friends of Science and the Natural Resources Stewardship Project – both of which receive major funding from energy companies(12). The Great Global Warming Swindle looks like free, undisclosed propaganda for coal and oil firms. Channel 4 forcefully denied this. Ofcom decided that it is “unable to assess or adjudicate on the relative merits of these strongly disputed allegations.”

The film invoked an extraordinary conspiracy theory to explain why governments have tried to tackle climate change. It began, the Swindle claimed, with the British coal miners’ strike. “The miners had brought down Ted Heath’s conservative government. Mrs Thatcher was determined the same would not happen to her. She set out to break their power … At the request of Mrs Thatcher, the UK Met Office set up a Climate Modelling Unit, which provided the basis for a new international committee called The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.” In reality, Mrs Thatcher did not make a public statement on climate change until 1988, three years after the miners’ strike ended in their defeat. The IPCC was established in the same year – not by the UK Met Office but by the World Meteorological Organisation and the UN(13) – and the Climate Modelling Unit (the Hadley Centre) did not open until two years afterwards, in 1990(14).

Here too were inaccuracies of the same stamp as those which appeared in Against Nature. The Great Global Warming Swindle claimed that volcanoes produce more CO2 each year than all sources of man-made carbon dioxide put together. In truth they produce less than 1%. It maintained that “the biggest source of CO2 by far is the oceans” (they remain a net carbon sink). Sea level changes have “nothing to do with melting ice” (melting ice is in fact responsible for about 40% of the rise) and so on and so forth. One of the contributors to the Great Global Warming Swindle, Carl Wunsch, says that he was duped into appearing in the documentary and his words were “grossly distorted by context”(15). Ofcom found that Professor Wunsch had been treated unfairly in the way in which his edited interview had been presented but that his comments about CO2 in the ocean were not unfairly edited.

Perhaps the cruellest distortion perpetrated in Durkin’s programme was the claim, also carried in Against Nature, that environmentalists are condemning the poor to live without electricity and to cook their meals on smoky fires, causing millions of premature deaths from respiratory disease. The film interviewed a Kenyan official at a rural clinic, whose solar panels did not produce enough power to run both the fridge and the lights. This was apparently the fault of Western environmentalists, who had somehow obliged the clinic to use solar power, which is “at least 3 times more expensive than conventional forms of electrical generation.”

In reality, it is much cheaper to install solar panels in parts of rural Africa which do not have transmission lines than to build a new grid connection, which is probably why the clinic was using them. If they are providing insufficient power, the cheapest solution is to install more panels and batteries. The solar fridge, developed by the British environmentalist and engineer Guy Watson, has saved countless lives, as it permits vaccines and blood which would otherwise be degraded by heat to survive in even the remotest locations. Environmentalists have been amongst the most outspoken campaigners against cooking on smoky fires, partly because of the health effects, partly because they use huge amounts of wood and partly because the black carbon they produce is a cause of global warming. This was the only partiality issue on which Ofcom was prepared to rule, because it regards the treatment of the poor, by contrast to climate change, to be a “matter of major political controversy”. It decided that in this respect the programme breached its rules.

This film was presented as a dispassionate science documentary. We were not told whose opinions the anonymous narrator represented. Outrageous claims were stated as bald fact. Ofcom has decided that there is “no …requirement” to disclose the personal views of the presenter “in relation to factual programmes”. The Great Global Warming Swindle, like Against Nature, had a huge impact, persuading many people that manmade climate change is not taking place. I attended a presentation by a pollster from Ipsos Mori who showed that there had been a decline last year in the number of people who believed that global warming was a real phenomenon – primarily, she said, as a result of Durkin’s film(16). This is hardly surprising. No one unfamiliar with the channel’s record on this issue could have imagined that a public service broadcaster would have transmitted a programme containing so many distortions.

This became a personal issue when the man who commissioned The Great Global Warming Swindle, Hamish Mykura, appeared on the Today programme to defend the film. It was, he said, part of “a season of opinionated polemical films about global warming”, and was balanced by a film I had made, broadcast in the same week, for Dispatches(17). I was flabbergasted. Neither I, nor the audience, nor anyone on the production team had been told that my programme was part of “a season of opinionated polemical films about global warming”, or that it would be linked to The Great Global Warming Swindle. Had I known this, I would have pulled out. When I asked Mykura for evidence – some memos or publicity material about this “season”, for example – he was unable to provide any(18).

My film was subjected to such a rigorous process of fact-checking that it was, in effect, edited by Channel 4’s lawyers. While this made it rather dull, it also meant that it was robust and unchallengeable: any claim which would not stand up to rigorous academic scrutiny was excluded. Despite this, it was billed as a controversial polemic and my own personal view (I was the onscreen presenter). Durkin’s film, by contrast, appears to have been exempted from such rigorous fact-checking and was not presented as his opinion. Why did such radically different standards apply? And in what sense did my film “balance” Durkin’s? Mine was about policies seeking to address climate change: I was not asked to demonstrate that manmade global warming was taking place. Even if that had been my aim, Channel 4 misunderstands its public service obligations if it believes it has to strike a balance between truth and falsehood. I was glad to see that Ofcom found that the other programmes in the channel’s schedule “were not sufficiently timely or linked” to the Swindle to balance it.

The channel appears until now to have shrugged off criticism of these programmes: even, in fact, to have enjoyed it. They create “noise”, which is considered by some executives to be the thing that counts. Hamish Mykura, the man who commissioned The Great Global Warming Swindle, has since been promoted. Channel 4’s spokesman tells me “It would be wrong to suggest that Channel 4 has an agenda regarding environmental programmes. The vast majority of Channel 4’s programmes on environmental issues over the last 20 years have reflected the opinion of the majority of scientists on man-made global warming. … to the best of our knowledge, since 1990 there has been 5 ½ hours of programming giving voice to the minority of scientists who question man’s role in global warming.” This, it says, “is against the background of the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] stating that there is a 90% certainty that the causes of global warming are man-made, it follows that there is a 10% uncertainty. Yet this 10% uncertainty receives a disproportionately small amount of airtime.”

I find this argument extraordinary. A 90% level of confidence doesn’t mean that 10% of the evidence suggests that an effect is not occurring – in fact there is no reliable evidence showing that manmade global warming is not taking place. It is expressed in this way because there is no absolute certainty in science. The “very high confidence” the IPCC expresses in the global warming thesis is the strongest statement any reputable scientist would make about his area of study. It is legitimate and right to stress that there can be no absolute certainty about global warming. But this is not what Channel 4 has done. The five and half hours of programmes which attack the thesis (and there have been many more which savage other aspects of environmentalism) express absolute certainty that manmade global warming isn’t happening.

So why does Channel 4 seem to be waging a war against the greens? I am not sure, but it seems to me that much of its programming – whether it concerns property, celebrities or contestants seeking fame and money – is aspirational. Environmentalism is counter-aspirational. It suggests that the carefree world Channel 4 has created, the celebration of the self, cannot be sustained.

It is against my interests to publish this article. I would like to continue making programmes for Channel 4. I recognise that what I have written may jeopardise this work. But these matters are far more consequential than my own employment. By broadcasting programmes that appear to manipulate and even fabricate evidence, it has impeded efforts to forestall the 21st Century’s greatest threat. For how much longer will this be allowed to continue? And for how much longer will Ofcom forbid itself to state that a programme is misleading?

George Monbiot’s book Bring on the Apocalypse: Six Arguments for Global Justice is published by Guardian Books, at £10.99.

References:

1. Independent Television Commission, 1st April 1998. Channel Four to Apologise to Four Interviewees in “Against Nature” Series. Press Release.

2. Ofcom, 21st July 2008. Broadcast Bulletin, Issue 114. http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/obb/prog_cb/obb114/issue114.pdf

3. You can read the transcript here: http://www.angelfire.com/dc/gaudcert/globwarm3.htm

4. Najma Kazi, pers comm.

5. Mae-Wan Ho, pers comm.

6. Channel 4, by email.

7. You can read the account of where this graph came from and much more at http://www.ofcomswindlecomplaint.net/

8. Nathan Rive and Eigil Friis-Christensen, 27th April 2007. Regarding: “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, broadcast in the UK on Channel 4 on March 8, 2007. http://folk.uio.no/nathan/web/statement.html

9. See http://www.ofcomswindlecomplaint.net/

10. Piers Corbyn has sent me the list of his publications.

11. See http://www.ofcomswindlecomplaint.net/

12. Tim Ball, pers comm.

13. http://www.ipcc.ch/about/index.htm

14. http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/history/

15. http://ocean.mit.edu/~cwunsch/papersonline/channel4response

16. Dr Lucy Arnot, 18th October 2007. Communicate 07 conference, Bristol.

17. Hamish Mykura, 16th March 2007. The Today programme.

18. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/04/01/correspondence-with-hamish-my…

The Self-Justifying Myth

Tim Holmes — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:29:15 +0000

There is just one party which doesn’t seem to care about the controversy created by The Great Global Warming Swindle. That is the company which broadcast it: Channel 4. In fact it seems rather proud of the fuss, and I suspect that Ofcom’s damning verdict won’t cause its executives a moment’s lost sleep. The channel boasts that the programme generated a huge response, and that favourable comments outweighed hostile remarks by six to one(1).

Though the programme was 90 minutes of nonsense(2), I find this quite easy to believe. Faced with the overwhelming realities of climate change, people clutch at any reassurance. We want someone to tell us that everything will be alright, that we can carry on enjoying this marvellous feast of fossil fuels without adverse effects.

On almost every other weighty issue, the professional classes appear to be better informed than the rest of the population. On global warming the reverse seems to be true. The only people I have met over the past few years who haven’t the faintest idea what manmade climate change is or how it is caused are university graduates. Not long ago, for example, I had to explain to the press officer at the government’s Department for Transport what carbon dioxide is. A few weeks ago the writer Mark Lynas found a counter-intuitive revelation buried in the small print of an ICM survey. The number of people in social classes D and E who thought the government should prioritise the environment over the economy was higher (56%) than the proportion in classes A and B (47%)(3). It is counter-intuitive only because a vast and well-funded denial industry has spent years persuading us that environmentalism is a middle-class caprice. Classes A and B are Channel 4’s core audience.

From this distribution I deduce that the problem is not that people aren’t hearing about climate change, but that they don’t want to know. The professional classes have the most freedom to lose and the least to gain from an attempt to restrain it. Those who are most responsible for carbon pollution are – being insulated by their money – the least likely to suffer its effects. We talk airily in the United Kingdom about the adaptation technologies which will shield us from catastrophe. But in the Sahel, as I saw during a major climate-related drought, an effective adaptation technology is already being deployed. It’s called the AK47.

Last night I watched a preview screening of Franny Armstrong’s fascinating film The Age of Stupid, which follows the lives of six people – from the boss of an Indian airline to a fisherwoman in the Niger delta – caught up in climate change. The message, never stated but constantly emerging, is that we all have our self-justifying myths. We tell ourselves a story of our lives in which we almost always appear as the heroes. These myths prevent us from engaging with climate change.

The most powerful story of all, endlessly narrated by the hired hands of the fossil fuel industry, just as it was once told by the sugar slavers, is that we are both all-important and utterly insignificant. We are too important to be denied any of the delights we crave, but too insignificant to exert any impact on planetary processes. We fill the whole frame of the story when it suits us and shrink to a dot when that scale is more convenient. We are capable of occupying both niches simultaneously.

It is not just because The Great Global Warming Swindle is at odds with the entire body of scientific knowledge on this subject that I have bothered to contest it. It is also because it is consonant with the entire body of human self-deception. We want to be misled, we crave it; and we will bend our minds into whatever shape they need to take in order not to face our brutal truths.

References:

1. Owen Gibson, 19th July 2008. Channel 4 to be censured over controversial climate film. The Guardian.

2. See the article accompanying this one, at http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/07/21/distortions-falsehoods-fabric…

3. Mark Lynas, 2nd July 2008. Climate change is no longer just a middle-class issue. The Guardian.

Channel 4 ‘did not mislead’ on global warming

Ellie Keen — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 22:31:39 +0000

Ofcom will rule next week that Channel 4 did not mislead the public over the science of climate change with its programme the Great Global Warming Swindle, according to Owen Gibson in the Guardian this morning.

There is some criticism of Channel 4 and the GGWS programme, produced by Michael Durkin:

Ofcom is expected to censure the network over its treatment of some scientists in the programme… Complaints about privacy and fairness from the government’s former chief scientist, Sir David King, and the Nobel peace prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be upheld on almost all counts…

But the bigger story is around what Channel 4 won’t be censured for:

But it is understood that Channel 4 will still claim victory because the ultimate verdict on a separate complaint about accuracy, which contained 131 specific points and ran to 270 pages, will find that it did not breach the regulator’s broadcasting code and did not materially mislead viewers.

Have a look at an example complaint made to Ofcom from Josie Wexler (via Flet) which suggests the programme broke the “Broadcasting code clauses: 5.5, 5.7, 5.8, 5.9, 5.10, 5.11, 5.12, 7.1, 7.6, 7.9, 7.10, 7.11 and 7.13.”

As Josie points out in her letter:

The director Martin Durkin is well known for his unscrupulous approach as shown by the fact that he has a previous ruling against him for his programme “Against Nature.” And yet despite having had to apologise for broadcasting this Channel 4 have now broadcast another of his programmes on the same subject without warning the public. [my emphasis]

So, Channel 4 had already had to apologise for a previous misleading programme of Martin Durkin’s?

What is even more worrying is that, again, the ’six-to-one’ evidence (six times more people supported the programme when phoning in or leaving messages on the message board) was used as a justiification of airing this programme:

Channel 4 justified the broadcast by saying it was a useful contribution to a timely debate… The producers claimed that after it was broadcast, Channel 4 received a record number of phone calls that were six to one in favour of the arguments made. The film was subsequently sold to 21 other countries.

Why this justification is wrong

This justification suggests that a particular percentage of a particular number of members of the pubic with a phone and a gripe is enough to warrant a progamme that flies in the face of over 2,000 of the world’s leading scientists publishing the 4th Assessment Report for the IPCC. So, a couple of questions for Ofcom and Channel 4.

1. How many people phoned in exactly, and what percentage of the audience figures is this?

2. What is the average repsonse to a political/provocative programme such as this?

3. What kind of people would self-select to watch a programme called the Great Global Warming Swindle?

4. What kind of people would want to phone in to support or criticize such a programme?

5. The Royal Society, scientists, academics, press, columnists, at least 1/7th of people who watched the programme, and media monitors have all come out against the programme. Do around, for example–and I’m guessing here–600 people who phoned in to watch the programme, 6/7ths of all those that phoned in, mean that Channel 4 can extrapolate out so that “6/7ths more people in the country” are behind them on this?

6. Or, in reality, do ONLY, say, 600 people who watch Channel 4 support them on this? In total. And if Channel 4 get this many viewers for one programme, does it justify its airing?

(That last one is probably unfair. Different polls at different times show different levels of support and understanding for, or disbelief and scepticism in, global warming.)

But I think Ofcom has made a mistake here. I’d like to see the numbers, so will come back to this when the report is out. I’m also going to do some digging around the code, and the definition of ‘material’ misleading.

But it may be the case that they a) either do not have the scientific experience to weigh up whether or not the programme misled the public, or b) they’ve been cowardly.

Want more? Some reviews from the time:

Robin McKie in the Guardian condemns Channel 4

Martin Durkin defends his programme

The Royal Society’s Rebuttal

the Independent attempts a he-said-they-said balancing act