The disbenefit of the doubt
July 22nd, 2008 | 
Poor old Ofcom. It knew full well what mire it would enter when it took on the task of adjudicating the wide array of complaints leveled at The Great Global Warming Swindle, the programme shown on Channel 4 in March 2007 that gleefully attacked the scientific “conspiracy” that human activity is the principal cause of climate change.
It’s no surprise, therefore, that it took 16 months to publish its findings. Even though most of the complainants’ targets of criticism were easy enough to spot on the night the programme first aired, Ofcom had to show due diligence in its adjudication and it should be congratulated for completing what was always going to be a near-impossible task.
After all, whatever its final ruling, no one in this polarised debate was ever going to be content, barring a complete humiliation for one side or the other. And Ofcom, like most industry regulators, rarely does complete humiliation. (Remember, it was only charged with the task of assessing the programme’s fairness, not the specific accuracy of its scientific hypothesis.)
I haven’t got 16 further months to pour over each complaint, but the key ruling is correct, of course, namely that the programme manipulated and misrepresented the views of some of its main interviewees. This is about as bad as it gets for a programme coming out of a channel’s science department.
It couldn’t really be any other way given these interviewees had long ago complained about having their words and views twisted by Martin Durkin, the programme maker, in order to fit his central thesis.
Channel 4 was fully entitled to air a programme asking critical questions about anthropocentric climate change – that’s good commissioning given how widely discussed these issues still are among the public, despite what the vast majority of scientists are saying – but that it turned to a filmmaker with form for such wilful deception (that had already landed Channel 4 in hot water before) and one with a well-known ideological hatred of the environmental movement was clearly never going to result in a dispassionate, objective walk-through the skeptics’ key arguments.
That the channel did choose this route proves that it was far more interested in whipping up a controversy than actually competently addressing the subject at hand. One thing now seems certain: Channel 4 will not, after twice being burned by Durkin, be in a hurry to commission anything else from him again.
Or perhaps the channel just couldn’t find anyone competent enough to handle such a task? Perhaps none of the more established science documentary makers would dare touch this subject? This is where we start slipping into the world of the climate “truthers”. Bearing uncanny similarities to the pitch and reasoning of the 9/11 truthers – I refer you, with reservation, to the comments that followed last week’s Cif postings by Charlie Brooker and Dan Hind – there is, somewhat predictably, a significant minority of people who now believe that climate change is a giant conspiracy, as the Durkin’s film repeatedly implies. For example, for Tower 7 read the Hockey Stick Graph and for the “No Plane Theory” read cosmic rays.
I regularly get emails accusing me of being part of a wider plan to use talk of climate change to help introduce a new global government. “Eco-fascists” such as myself, along with the 10,000-odd Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientists and various “compliant” heads of state, are using this “lie” as a mechanism to evoke fear in order to suppress the masses and ensure world domination.
Or something like that – I usually favour activating the delete key once I see tell-tale subject headers (the use of capital letters is a bit of a clue). But to quickly summarise the broad gist of their collective argument, I am a patsy for anyone ranging from the Bilderberg Group to the UN, all of whom are hell bent on introducing a range of life-sucking taxes that will starve and nullify the world’s poor and enrich a small, controlling elite.
Or am I a stooge for a right-wing elite with a vested interest in shifting their portfolio of dwindling oil assets into one dominated by nuclear power? Sorry, I forget which one it is now.
As with any “official” investigation, the Ofcom ruling is only likely to fuel the fires of the various climate change conspiracies. The Great Global Warming Swindle, despite its multitude of obvious flaws, will be held up by the “truthers” as the Loose Change of this debate. After all, it DARED to ask the questions THEY don’t want to be asked. It would be funny, if it wasn’t so toxic.
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