Review of The Great Global Warming Swindle

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The Great Global Warming Swindle has been the most widely watched documentary critical of the scientific consensus that climate change is due to anthropogenic activities. Aired in 2007 in the United Kingdom, the documentary claimed to debunk the “myth” of manmade global climate change, exposing it as a vast conspiracy designed to gain funding for research and push an environmental agenda that is especially harmful to the developing world. Directed by British producer Martin Durkin, the documentary includes discussion with a number of scientists who are skeptical of anthropogenic global warming and claim that there viewpoints are being deliberately censored in favor of the politically correct consensus. While critical of global warming alarmism, this documentary does not doubt that the earth is warming. Instead, they claim that scientific evidence demonstrates that such warming is but a natural variation in earth’s climatic history, similar to the Medieval Warm Period of the Little Ice Age. The documentary uses several lines of evidence to back up this claim, including ice core data that they claim when rightly interpreted shows carbon dioxide as having a lag time when earth’s climate has warmed in the recent and distant past, making it doubtful that it could be responsible for the increase in temperature that has been observed recently. The timing of the recent warming, which was most pronounced in the late Nineteenth Century through World War II, stopped and reversed to a cooling trend in the mid-Twentieth Century, and then rapidly warmed again in the past three decades, is dissected. Since this warming began before the advent of major human sources of greenhouse gas emissions and the period of most dramatic industrial... ... middle of paper ... ...global warming? Well, it’s warmer. Bloomberg Businessweek. http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-11-06/looking-for-the-good-side-of-global-warming-well-its-warmer Samenow, Jason (2013). 97 percent of scientific studies agree on manmade global warming, so what now? The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/05/17/97-percent-of-scientific-studies-agree-on-manmade-global-warming-so-what-now/ The Great Global Warming Swindle (2007). IMDb. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020027/ “Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide” 2013. Earth System Research Laboratory, Global Monitoring Division. http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/weekly.html Tripati, Aradhna. (2009). Coupling of CO2 and Ice Sheet Stability Over Major Climate Transitions of the Last 20 Million Years. Science. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/326/5958/1394.abstract

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