The channel 4 programme - The Great Global Warming Swindle - turned out to be a swindle itself. Unfortunatly, it led many people to believe that they do not need to worry about greenhouse gas emissions and has therefore been most unhelpful in the crucial fight against climate change and in turn, Peak Food.
Steve Conner in The Independent reports on a study published by the Royal Society:.
“The theory that past changes in solar activity may have explained some changes in the climate before the industrial revolution is not in dispute. In previous centuries, for instance, notably between about 1420 and 1570, when the Vikings had to abandon their Greenland settlements, solar minima corresponded with unusually cool weather, such as the “little ice age” of the 17th century.
“But climate sceptics have exploited this to dispute the idea that man-made emissions are responsible for global warming. In the recent Channel 4 programme The Great Global Warming Swindle, the rise in solar activity over the latter half of the 20th century was erroneously presented as perfectly matching the rise in global average temperatures.
“Dr Lockwood said he was outraged when he saw the documentary, because of the way the programme-makers used graphs of temperature rises and sunspot cycles that were cut off in the 1980s, when the two trends went in the opposite direction.
“‘The trouble is that the theory of solar activity and climate was being misappropriated to apply to modern-day warming. The sceptics were taking perfectly good science and bringing it into disrespect,” Dr Lockwood said.
“The Royal Society said yesterday: ‘There is a small minority which is seeking to confuse the public on the causes of climate change. They are often misrepresenting the science, when the reality is that the evidence is getting stronger every day.’”
