[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Distortions, Falsehoods, Fabrications

[Bill Totten]

The Great Global Warming Swindle is just one example of Channel 4's war
against the greens

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (July 22 2008)


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 statement.

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 eighteen 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 twenty 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 seventeen 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 ninety-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 Ch   annel 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 ninety 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 seventeen 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 ten 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 carbon  dioxide each year than all sources of man-made
carbon dioxide put together. In truth they produce less than one per
cent. It maintained that "the biggest source of carbon dioxide 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 forty per cent 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 carbon dioxide 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
three 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 twenty 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 five and a half
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 ninety per cent certainty that the causes of
global warming are man-made, it follows that there is a ten per cent
uncertainty. Yet this ten per cent uncertainty receives a
disproportionately small amount of airtime."

I find this argument extraordinary. A ninety per cent level of
confidence doesn't mean that ten per cent 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 GBP 10.99.

www.monbiot.com

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-mykura/


Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/07/21/distortions-falsehoods-fabrications/

_____

Swindled Again

A response to Channel 4's head of documentaries, Hamish Mykura

by George Monbiot

Monbiot.com (July 24 2008)


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 ten 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}.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/22/channel4.ofcom?gusrc=rss&feed=environment

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.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/07/24/swindled-again/


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