(Hmmm…light the blue touch paper and retire to a safe distance)
A recent Channel 4 documentary shown in the UK has been referred to the media regulator Ofcom after being accused of falsifying data in order to better support the view that there was a firm correlation between solar cycles and recorded temperatures on Earth. 37 senior scientists have complained that the programme had breached broadcasting rules on the misrepresentation of views and facts.
One of the participants in the programme who is an avowed climate change sceptic has accused the programme makers of peddling falsehoods.
Eigil Friis-Christensen, director of the Danish National Space Centre, has issued a statement accusing the film-makers of fabricating data based on his work looking at the links between solar activity and global temperatures. He says that a chart that he produced sometime ago to show solar sun spots and global mean temperatures had been doctored within the programme in order to say that these were directly related to recorded temperature changes rather than as any result of man made emissions on Earth.
Dr Friis-Christensen,who is a physicist, believes that solar cycles play an important role in climate change but says that not enough effort has gone into addressing the theory.
C4 is also accused of selectively using out of date data regarding solar activity.Whilst the good Doctor remains a climate skeptic he has joined the 36 other scientists in lodging a formal complaint against the programme and pressuring the film makers to correct the fabricated data before any release on DVD though that is not within Ofcom’s remit and so the programme is likely to be released as broadcast.
Obviously the whole global warming and its possible causation often results in intense and passionate argument. For me life shows me that very little is simply black and white and I remain open to whatever facts (not faction) emerge from future debate and research. I am personally involved in actions of recycling ,reuse and energy conservation which I believe are smart and prudent (sounding very Gordon Brown there) actions regardless of any proven or disproved linkage regarding possible climate change and its linkage to human activity .
The original documentary can be viewed here
Right I’m back off to be me eco-bunker.
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TV prog acused of falsifying data over climate change « Stuffem-Up the hill backwards
It is outrageous and unacceptable if programme makers deliberately falsify data in order to support a partisan view and I hope that if C4 is found guilty, a fitting penalty will be applied. In that event, the DVD should not be issued because that would be profiting from the deception.
As for global warming itself, the evidence cited in support of either view is so vast and requires such extensive scientific expertise to make sense of it that only a tiny minority of people actually know what they are talking about. The rest are shouting the odds about a subject they have no hope of understanding.
This is no less true of other topics such as GM products: most of those expressing the strongest opinions for or against it are totally incapable of marshalling valid scientific arguments is support of their claims. Not that the British public, egged on by the tabloid press, ever let reality get in the way of a strongly held opinion.
We have to accept that we are in the hands of the scientists on this and many other issues. Global warming is a matter on which, however, we cannot go wrong: the measures we are urged to take are sensible ones even in the event of global warming turning out to be a false alarm.
I don’t think for one moment that it is a false alarm. The evidence I have seen explained is far too compelling. For it to be false we would have to postulate a conspiracy of massive proportions among scientists worldwide. The probability of that is vanishingly small.
Hello again SilverTiger. I tend to feel that this item is as much about inherent distortions and re packaging of facts in the media than anything else and this applies to almost any given point of view. Television especially involves many falsifications and even the news has its own filters and emphasis so it’s hard for us mere mortals to really know what’s an authoritative source and in the end we can often find it easier to make educated or usually (certainly in my case) uneducated guesses which may even be swayed by just gut instinct which may or may not be a very useful thing to have to fall back on.
My least favourite source of neutral information is the newspapers which sometimes seem to be an unhealthy symbiosis of a readership looking for news via a certain point of view, usually their own and the newspaper writers and proprietors gladly viewing (distorting?) the world as filtered through the same mutually shared tinted piece of glass.
I’m sure the debate re climate change will go on and as long it’s a reasoned debate the I’m willing to listen whatever the point of view.