Don’t Panic

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.

That global warming is at least partly a natural phenomenon is well accepted within the scientific community: Earth’s 4.5 billion year history has been one long story of climate change. And there has been visible climate change in the past century. This climatic variability undercuts those that believe carbon dioxide emissions to be climate change’s driving force. From 1900 to 1940, average temperatures rose gradually. Following the Second World War, there was a massive economic boom, during which carbon emissions soared. The result? Over the next several decades, global temperatures fell, to the point that scientists in the 1970s predicted “Global Cooling” and the coming of a new Ice Age.

So what is going on? To answer this question, the documentary shows a clip from Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, during which a graph is drawn that correlates carbon dioxide and world temperature almost perfectly, as evidenced by ice-core samples. What Gore does not reveal, however, is that this correlation carries with it an 800-year time lag: carbon, very slowly, follows temperature. As Swindle argues, this is easily explained by the presence of the Earth’s massive oceans, which absorb more carbon as they get colder and release it as they get warmer. Because of their size, the oceans take centuries to adjust to changing atmospheric conditions such as warmer or cooler weather. In a somewhat amusing twist, it can thus be said that global warming causes carbon emissions, and not the reverse.

What, then, causes global warming? Swindle contends that solar emissions are far more influential than any sort of carbon emissions could possibly be. Following the work of scientists such as Eigil Friss-Christensen, correlations between solar activity and average earth temperature have proven to be extremely strong. Heightened solar activity, such as has been occurring over the past two decades, has led to the warmer conditions that we see today; in the same manner, reduced solar activity led to the unexpected “mini ice-age” in the 17th century, during which winter ice-carnivals were frequently held on the frozen rivers of southern England – even the Thames. Compared to the massive power of the sun, the small percentage of carbon in the Earth’s atmosphere is trivial.

The Great Global Warming Swindle has certainly not been without its critics and problems. Many of its arguments have been disputed, including the effects of cosmic rays, and the actual amount of carbon emitted each year by people as a percentage of the total emissions (the film claims lower than 1%, while some scientists argue many times this). And Frist-Christensen’s 1991 paper, correlating solar activity and terrestrial temperature, has been challenged by the work of Peter Laut, though it should be noted that this challenge has not been conclusively resolved either way.

Such controversy, however, should not be surprising. Again, I return to my argument at the beginning of this article: quite simply, climate change is not properly understood. By anyone. The fact that arguments such as those in Swindle are contestable is a function of this, as too is the fact that arguments in favor of global warming are unproven. We cannot “err on the safe side” by cutting all emissions; doing so necessarily results in wealth reduction, which, as we have seen, causes tangible harm in the Third World. Is hypothetically preventing a small portion of the temperature increase over the next several decades worth the suffering of millions who are hindered from development?

At present, far more vested interests lie in fabricating claims about global warming than denying them. Dozens of large corporations are lobbying Congress to create a carbon emissions-trading market because they see a great potential for profit under the auspices of social responsibility. Thousands of jobs have been created in a “climate change” industry, and funding for these jobs dwarfs the money spent by oil companies on climate-change research – oil companies, of course, which many global warming activists claim are solely responsible for the other side of the debate.

As Swindle proves, one need not be an oil company to argue against the illogic of environmental extremism. Like with any debate, the true answers will come with the free exchange of ideas. If critics paint Swindle as tantamount to Holocaust denial, there is a good reason: such critics are making a lot of money milking their sacred cow.