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justinbarnstable
Reviews
The Great Global Warming Swindle (2007)
A Travesty
If you like conspiracy theories like the fake moon landings, 9/11 inside jobs, Elvis's death, then this is the documentary(?) for you. Almost every climate disinformation found on the web is 'copy and pasted' into this hour-long programme. And for bonus points, the programme takes the extra step of doctoring graphs and skipping relevant information to bolster its case. Take the case of the 'cosmic ray theory'... hmmm... stop the graph in 1980s... why... showing the rest would put a hole the size of the Grand Canyon in that claim; then there's the blatantly false 'volcanoes produce more CO2 than humans'claim, which was quickly removed after the first edition; or the CO2 lagging crock peddled on the denial websites... The rest I'm not even going to bother because I don't think there are enough gigabytes on the IMDb servers.
This travesty is narrated by Martin Durkin, a producer with a history of releasing refutable documentaries, featuring an entire host of questionable characters like Tim Ball, credential fudging professor of the Climatology Department at the University of Winnipeg. Only problem is, Ball was a professor of geography and there was never a climatology department at the University of Winnipeg; Piers Corbyn, who ran a weather predicting service that was so successful it went bankrupt; Fred Singer,a physicist who will say anything for a small fee. About the only characters worth their salt were Carl Wunsch and Eigil Friis- Christensen, both of whom lodged a complaint about this programme.
But for extra laughs, the programme claims climate science is cooked up by scientists for funding purposes and it is a greenie scam to hamper African development, except that wouldn't be so funny because the people who are going to suffer most from a changing climate are those in the Third World.
If this was a documentary and if it was serious about doing an expose, Durkin could have done an investigation into the millions of dollars spent by the Koch brothers and Exxon just on climate disinformation.
I'd give this programme negative rating if IMDb would allow it but as it is, I gave it one star for its comedy value. Watch it but bear in mind, there is no scientific value in this, just a mish mesh of incoherent conspiracies and factual inaccuracies.