Much-loved actor and director Robert Redford launched the Sundance Channel fourteen years ago to broadcast independent and progressive films from around the world.
It is therefore surprising that the network chose to broadcast the notoriously inaccurate “Great Global Warming Swindle” this week.
When this pseudo-scientific “documentary” was first broadcast on British television to an audience of 2.5 million in 2007, real scientists were appalled. The British Antarctic Survey released a statement that “any scientist found to have falsified data in the manner of the [film] would be guilty of serious professional misconduct.”
The film was so loopy that several of the individual scientists featured in the “documentary” released their own statements to show how their interviews were used out of context to support the flat-Earth view that climate change was not real.
Dr. Carl Wunsch, a professor of Oceanography at MIT released a statement that read in part:
“I believe that climate change is real, a major threat, and almost surely has a major human-induced component… Many of us [in the scientific community] feel an obligation to talk to the media—it’s part of our role as scientists, citizens, and educators… Channel 4 now says they were making a film in a series of “polemics”. There is nothing in the communication we had …that suggested they were making a film that was one-sided, anti-educational, and misleading. I took them at face value—clearly a great error.”
Apparently unfazed by this bracing dose of truth, the production company behind the GGWS responded by threatening to sue Wunsch unless he recanted his statements.
He did not. He instead successfully complained to the British media watchdog (along with 264 other people), which agreed on several points that the filmmakers mistreated him, several other scientists and breached the British broadcasting code for impartiality.
Another scientist featured in the film was Dr. Eigil Friis-Christensen of Danish National Space center. He and his colleague Nathan Rive released a statement after the film was broadcast which read in part:
“We have concerns regarding the use of a graph featured in the documentary titled ‘Temp & Solar Activity 400 Years’. Firstly, we have reason to believe that parts of the graph were made up of fabricated data that were presented as genuine. The inclusion of the artificial data is both misleading and pointless. Secondly, although the narrator commentary during the presentation of the graph is consistent with the conclusions of the paper from which the figure originates, it incorrectly rules out a contribution by anthropogenic greenhouse gases to 20th century global warming.”
Thirty-six scientists also co-signed a open letter of protest of the film. Another group of researchers submitted a 176-page complaint to the broadcasting watchdog.
The list goes on. In spite of the tsunami evidence that the Great Global Warming Swindle is both laughably wrong and criminally irresponsible, this polemic aired this week to a nation-wide audience on a network renown for its lefty credentials.
Robert Redford, what happened to you?
