Don’t Panic: A Movie Review of The Great Global Warming Swindle

The Great Global Warming Swindle is a new documentary from British television producer Martin Durkin, which casts aside environmental taboos and challenges the notion of “Global Warming” as a man-produced phenomenon.

Before I begin addressing the film’s arguments, I would like to discuss why such a film is so important. Whether or not one accepts that carbon dioxide emissions are changing the earth’s weather conditions, it is clear that the actual effects of these emissions, if any, are not properly understood. Any debate that becomes one-sided is doomed to sensationalism, and will inevitably be exploited for political and economic advantage. Already, climate change has become the Left’s sacred cow, as Al Gore prepares to grow rich off of the purchase and sale of emissions credits. If such exploitation is to be avoided, dialogue must continue.

If there is danger from climate change, appropriate action must be taken. However, the response to this danger must be balanced against the opportunity cost that restrictions on emissions necessarily entail. In one of its best moments, Swindle depicts a Kenyan health-care clinic. Because of the heavy lobbying against the use of fossil fuels by Western environmentalists in the area, the clinic uses only solar panels. However, these do not provide enough energy to run both the lights and the medical refrigerators at the same time. Patients suffer as a result, and for what purpose? As economist James Shikwati argues, “there’s somebody keen to kill the African dream. And the African dream is to develop. I don’t see how a solar panel is going to power a steel industry. . . . We are being told, ‘Don’t touch your resources. Don’t touch your oil. Don’t touch your coal. That is suicide.’”

Indeed, such action on the part of environmentalists appears all the more questionable in light of the film’s main argument: global warming is best understood as a natural phenomenon, and is not the work of man or the result of carbon emissions.

But wasn’t a panel of the “2,500 top scientists” recently cited by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, united in their view that man causes global warming? Indeed, they were – sort of. Many were not actually scientists at all, and many more do not agree with the report, having been cited without permission. In fact, the focus of much of Swindle is interviews with many of these UN-cited scientists, so that their true opinions may be heard.