Last night Channel 4 screened The Great Global Warming Swindle, Martin Durkin's rebuttal to the hugely successful documentary by Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth.

In brief, the film spoke to several figures sceptical of the commonly held and often expressed view that climate change is being accelerated by the industrialised world's carbon emisssions. Among them were a co-founder of Greenpeace, a former editor of New Scientist, an IPCC-credited virologist and various meteorologists, astronomers and economists from leading universities around the world.

Their refutation of carbon theory goes like this: yes, climate change is happening, and the mean temperature of the earth is rising. However this is a natural phenomenon. The world's climate is changed by the amount of cloud cover, whch in itself is determined by the amount of cosmic rays that reach our atmosphere, which are in turn deflected by solar winds. More sun spots mean greater magnetic activity, which mean less cosmic rays reach us, less cloud cover is formed and higher temperatures are the result. As in Gore's film, we where shown several graphs that appeared to back up this relationship.

Moreover, Durkin accused Gore of distorting his figures. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as shown in ice core samples, does correlate with peaks in troughs in mean global temperature. But Durkin and co. say the relationship is the inverse of that presented in An Inconvenient Truth. Temperatures rise first, the film states, then carbon dioxide levels, usually some 800 years later. This is because as the oceans warm they release more CO2 than they absorb. No-one on screen denies that carbon dioxide acts as a greenhouse gas. But they say that it is neither the most significant greenhouse gas (that'd be water vapour) nor is man-made carbon dioxide anywhere near as great in volume in the atmosphere as that which occurs naturally (released from the sea, from geological sources, from decomposing plant matter and the respiration of animals).

The prevalence of the carbon theory today is caused, argues Durkin, by two factors. Firstly, the climate research sector of science has now become an industry. Too many jobs depend on the belief that the reduction of carbon emissions is an essential activity. Secondly, oppossing political idelogies inadvertantly conspiring to endorse the idea that fossil fuel-burning economies are a bad idea: a pro-nuclear right distrustful of the highly unionised mining industry and unwilling to depend on sources in the politically unstable Middle East; and an increasingly radicalised green movment, hijacked by neo-Marxist anti-capitalists left rudderless by the collapse of the Communist bloc.

Durkin concludes that the pursuit of an anti-carbon agenda on a global scale (just as world leaders are doing at the moment in Germany) will actually damage people's lives rather than save the environment, as any legislation that results will hit the developing world hardest and, effectively, stop them from ever developing.

I'm not a scientist, but I am a democrat. I think it's important that both sides of any argument are at least heard. If, as some experts in this film claim, people who express unorthodox views on climate change are being actively supressed, misquoted and excluded, even receiving death threats, then that's totally unacceptable. Though I can't help but notice that the all-pervading anti-carbon conspiracy alleged in the film isn't quite powerful enough to present that self-same ninety minute documentary being broadcast by a mainstream television channel in a G8 country.

I'll overlook Martin Durkin's suspect journalistic history, but I do have a few problems with his argument and those of his contributors...
1) The suggestion that the USA, Republican-led USA no less, doesn't really care for oil I find laughable, yet the film straight-facedly stated that Ronald Reagan and George Bush Snr's government was in cahoots with Margaret Thatcher's to cook up scientific proof of man-made global warming. If to unravel a conspiracy one must simply ask "who benefits?", then who the hell in booming, post-Three Mile Island 1980s America benfeits from the idea that we have to stop hauling oil, coal and gas out of the ground and start building nuclear reactors (at that time, the only viable alternative)?
2) I found a rather unpalatable anti-conservation refrain running through the entire program. The contributors seemed to be suggesting that not only is carbon emission not a problem, but that climate change (warmer or cooler) is not a problem. "Mere human activity has never and will never interupt the natural cycles of our benign planet, there's more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, everything'll work out in the end, if we can grow vinyards in Orkney or ski in Yorkshire then where's the harm in that?"
Two thoughts present themselves. Firstly, even if we're not having an immediate, short-term impact on our climate, we certainly and demonstrably can affect other parts of our environment with our cultivation, industry, population growth and waste. All the aforementioned will, in the next few decades, reach unprecedented levels. We're conducting a massive experimemt with the only planet we'll ever have, during the only period of time we'll ever live on it. Isn't it better, even on a simple economic level, to strive for a more efficient, less wasteful lifestyle for all? It's the same point I made about the "World Trade Center wouldn't fall down like that" nutters a couple of weeks ago... Any comparison made between today's society's environmental impact and yesterday's is an utterly false one because the effects are both accumulative and growing exponentially.
Secondly, anyone who actually knows anything about this planet's long history can see that it is extraordinarily hostile to life. How many mass-extinctions, Julia? Therefore whether we've made it happen or not, but especially if we have, any kind of sustained change in our environmental conditions must not be shrugged off as merely "nature's way". Nature wants us dead. We need to apply our minds to the problem of how we'll survive in a world unlike our own.
3) Durkin's conclusion that it is "morally repugnant" for developed nations to pressure developing nations with carbon emission legislation that will deprive their people of life-improving/saving electricity would be fair enough if it weren't also quite patronising to suggest that in order to join us at the big table, the Third World has to repeat the same mistakes we made. If Africa can be fully developed without a messy, polluting industrial revolution in the style of our own, isn't that worth pursuing? Of course I have no patience for those who refuse to place the value and dignity of human life in a position of paramount importance. Too many environmentalists make the mistake of romanticising the "simpler existence" of those who actaully live brutally short lives amid filth, disease and utter deprivation. However the real tragedy of global economic inequality is that, in an attempt to catch up, some developing nations have made truly catastrophic decisions... Witness the hyrdorelectric dams of India or the extraordinary levels of pollution now found in China's water. Surely (after debt cancellation) the best thing the devloped world can do for the developing is advise them well, and tearing Africa up for a short-term fix of coal isn't great advice from any perspective.