A controversial British documentary which claims global warming is a lie will be shown by the ABC. The Great Global Warming Swindle, to be aired by the national broadcaster in July, is the ideological opposite to Al Gore’s acclaimed movie An Inconvenient Truth. The documentary rebuts mounting scientific evidence that global warming is caused predominantly by human activity, and says it’s the result of changes in radiation from the sun.

The film’s credibility, some of its contributors and its maker, Martin Durkin, came under heavy questioning by scientists and the media after it aired on Britain’s Channel 4 in March.  Channel 4 defended the film, as has ABC director of television Kim Dalton, on the basis that all sides of the hotly contested global warming debate deserved to be represented.  “Currently the issue of global warming is being debated around the world,” Mr Dalton said. “This documentary presents a controversial side to that debate.” See full story here. You may also see Great Global Warming Swindle from WAG-TV4 here

UPDATE: See uproar the decision has had in this Herald Sun story.

Global warming is an issue of great importance. Let there be no doubt, the evidence is overwhelming: Earth is warming. The questions that remain are;
1) What is the cause of the global warming?  Is it man made atmospheric carbon dioxide? Or is the cause of global warming natural variability?
2) How will politicians spend money while waiting for the answer to question #1?

I will demonstrate that the Earth’s warming climate is a result of natural variance and that man made changes in the warming climate in the last 40 years are negligible at best. I will insert pieces of the puzzle from new scientific studies that were not available or were ignored in previous global warming studies.

I add a possible piece of the puzzle, nuclear weapons testing in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, that may have made a small contribution to cooling at that time. After reviewing numerous scientific studies and observing data, it is clear that the theory that “man made increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide are causing global warming” is not likely.

I will demonstrate that a negative trend in the El Nino Southern Oscillation (more and stronger La Ninas) from 1945 to 1975 and a postive trend in the ENSO from 1975 to present (more and stronger El Ninos) correlates better with global temperature changes than greenhouse theory.  Thus, ENSO is probably the largest contributor to global warming in the past 30 years.

The economic and political climate surrounding this issue has made it nearly impossible for scientists and researchers to objectively view the mountain of recent data.  While I will use much of the available and updated scientific data, I will also interject common sense, something that is seriously lacking in the debate on this issue.  See Kristen Byrnes Paunder the Maunder Report/Website

UPDATE: Kristen correctly called for the end of 6 year drought as El Nino fades. See Drought Busting Forecast

Forecast Earth, the latest bad decision by The Weather Channel, is yet another example of how a good idea can go bad. The Weather Channel was started 25years ago with the idea of providing reliable and accurate weather information when you need it. That meant 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

It has taken a turn in recent years to being more and more part time weather and part-time “Discovery Channel”. Now with ‘Forecast Earth’, advocacy and hype have replaced down to earth real-time weather coverage and forecasting. You don’t get weather when you need it anymore, just when they choose to give it to you. A few years back, they were embarrassed when an outbreak of tornadoes had people tuning to The Weather Channel and finding a special about growing flower bulbs in Holland.

Now Heidi Cullen is telling us what could happen if the most souped up climate models are right and the earth warms significantly. I guess they ran out of storm stories recounting real weather disasters. They are now inventing possible future ones with disaster stories reminiscent of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ or ‘Day after Tomorrow’. 

And ironically not only are they buying without question the faulty climate models for the future, they even get the actual changes that have occurred wrong. “Alaska Meltdown” a recent featured story still on the website is the latest example. See where they went wrong here

Many people who saw “An Inconvenient Truth,” a global warming documentary featuring Al Gore, immediately became very concerned about global climate change and impending weather disasters. Don’t count state climatologist Dr. Charles Wax of Mississippi State University as one of them.

“First off, there isn’t a consensus among scientists,” Wax told the Columbus Rotary Club Tuesday. “Don’t let anybody tell you there is.” Wax spent much of his presentation telling the audience how the global climate is cyclical. It’s always gone through periods of warming and cooling. As for cries of impending doom, Wax says there’s tons of data on both sides - and man’s ever-changing weather monitoring capability further clouds the picture. The climate is changing, Wax admits - but it’s always changing and always has. See full story here

Skeptics are continuously accused of being shills for big oil. Despite what some alarmists and media perceive and/or want you to believe, big oil is not anti global warming, not at least anymore. In this featured story by Michael Economides, Professor, Cullen College of Engineering, University of Houston, he tells us why.

Al Gore is a darling of the oil companies. They also really love peak-oil Cassandras and are enamored with energy alternatives like biofuels, wind, and solar. The myths du jour, preposterous and transparently idiotic as they may be, are not opposed by the presumed bogeymen in the oil industry, the supposed culprits of the situation. In fact, it is in the oil companies’ interest to promote the myths and even prolong them.

Reality: Man-made global warming is a sinister hoax. After a desperate literature search over four years, involving as many as 30 engineering and science graduate students, we have yet to come up with one professional paper that shows a quantitive causality between increased carbon dioxide and enhanced global temperature. This means there is not one paper in the literature of heat transfer or thermodynamics that shows the physics of global warming in a quantified way, using well-known laws or principles. There are, however, many arm-waving and postulating writings, often in the popular press, all referencing the other “hundreds of papers.”Read full story here

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is to push climate change propaganda through it’s programming and media output in an effort to cause people to change their behavior and become more green. At an event held this morning in midtown Manhattan and webcast to all News Corp. employees, Murdoch vowed to “weave climate messaging into the content and programming of News Corp.’s many holdings.”

“The challenge is to revolutionize the [climate change] message,” Murdoch told the crowd. He emphasized the need to “make it dramatic, make it vivid, even sometimes make it fun. We want to inspire people to change their behavior.”

Murdoch’s media empire encompasses Fox News, 20th Century Fox, HarperCollins, MySpace.com, and dozens of newspapers in Australia, the U.K., the U.S., and beyond. Read full story here

Feeling crowded? Paul Watson is. The founder and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society writes that human overpopulation is “a virus . . . killing our host the planet Earth,” and so the number of people living in the world should be slashed by 85 percent.

“No human community should be larger than 20,000 people,” Watson insists in a new essay. “We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.” He describes mankind as “the AIDS of the Earth,” and calls for an end to cars, planes, and all ships save those powered by sail.

The views of a fanatic? Yes, but Watson is also a co founder of Greenpeace and a former member of the Sierra Club board of directors, not to mention one of Time magazine’s 20th-century environmental “heroes.” It is unlikely that his support for eliminating 5.5 billion human beings and most modern conveniences will hurt his standing among the green elite.

But that’s not what the evidence shows.  Just before the turn of the 19th century, when the Earth was home to some 980 million human beings. The global population today is about 6.5 billion, a sevenfold increase. If the alarmists are right, our lives should be far more impoverished, degraded, and pitiful than those of our ancestors. But they aren’t. By and large, human beings today are healthier, wealthier, safer, cleaner, better fed, and more productive than those who lived in 1800.

Anyone tempted to dismiss such a claim as naive should spend some time with Indur Goklany’s “The Improving State of the World,” a new compendium of data making the case that as nations grow wealthier, the quality of human life rises. Take food. Since 1950, the world’s population has soared by more than 150 percent. Yet food has become so abundant that global food prices (in real terms) have plunged 75 percent. Life expectancy? From 31 years in 1900, it was up to 66.8 worldwide in 2003.

Humanity, though more populous and still imperfect, has never been in better condition,” he writes. Our lives are better than our ancestors’. Our descendants’ can be better than ours. See Jacoby’s full story

By the Vatican seminar’s (Climate Change and Development") end, the 80 participants had heard dire warnings from some experts, but they heard much more, too—that global warming is natural, the cause of warming being primarily solar and that it can be beneficial. No one left the seminar thinking that the science of global warming is settled. To the dismay of those hoping that the high-level group would inspire a Church-led climatechange crusade, Cardinal Martino , in closing the seminar, urged caution in taking any position on global warming.

The man most responsible for quelling any potential call to action is one of the Vatican’s own, Antonino Zichichi, a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Dr. Zichichi, who made the seminar’s most powerful presentation, set its tone. It amounted to a damning indictment of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body responsible for most of the dire warnings that the press reports daily. “On the basis of actual scientific fact ‘it is not possible to exclude the idea that climate changes can be due to natural causes,’ and that it is plausible that ‘man is not to blame."Dr. Zichichi has concluded that solar activities are responsible for most of the global warming that earth has experienced—he estimates that man-made causes of global warming account for less than 10%—and his conclusions have gravitas: This man is the president of the World Federation of Scientists, past president of the European Physical Society, past president of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear and Subnuclear Physics, and past president of the NATO Science Committee for Disarmament Technology. See full story here