The swindle was this documentary

The ABC, that bastion of informed intelligensia and reasoned, if somewhat boring, debate, has gone the way of mainstream current affairs. At least in terms of credibility.
The fallout is still dripping somewhat messily off the ceiling fan after last week's airing of their much hooted documentary "The great global warming swindle."

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/swindle/

It turns out the only swindle invovled the production of this documentary - and I use that term very loosely.

The very next day scientists were asking questions about a certain graph which was convieniently 'cropped' to stop at 1980, right when the effect it was demonstrating - a correlation between sunspots and climate, ceased to correspond. Temperatures went right up after 1980 - quite out of sync with sunspots.

Pressed by interviewer Tony Jones on why he did not avail himself of the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) graphs available since 1990 - which have shown astronomical rising temperatures and slowing sunspot activity, Mr Durkin said they were unreliable.

From SMH

Martin Durkin, the rather foul-mouthed conspiracy-loving director of the show, explains himself: "I'll tell you exactly why we didn't use one of those. They were superseded by graphs which eliminated the mediaeval warm period," he said.

Picking your old and superceded data to support your theories, and ignoring new and better data because it doesn't fit your story. Bad science, in the very least, and grossly irresponsible in this context.

The show followed on ABC by a rather sloppyly derived 'panel' of sorts who then debated whether they believed in man-made global warming. The 'panel' - and I am reminded of the Working Dog show featuring comedians talking about subjects they understand superficially if at all, and discussing said subjects at a similar level - the panel consisted mostly of media types and some industry ring-ins, and two scientists, one whom I think carries a bit of weight, the other who has a funny picture on his webpage, is a paleontologist (read: not a climatologist per se), and has only just starting publishing on climate change and who has no peer-reviewed papers on climate change in scientific journals. World economics is not science. He is of course a very well-published science author within his field, paleontology, sedimentology and stratigraphy, but this does not make one a climate change authority.

The show was followed by a farcical 'audience questions' which had its usual assort of completely irrelevant, offbeat, off-topic I'm-in-the-limelight-for15-seconds remarks which added absolutely nothing to the debate and made everyone 15 IQ points dumber for listening to it.

Leigh Dayton at The Australian has a science blog on the "Mean and Tricky" tactics employed by Durkin, who gives directors everywhere a bad name. Unfortunately the blog was opened for comments which read very much like the ABC's Q&A on a broad and somewhat simian scale.

Some of the comments at least warrant a retort, so I get to these in point form below. What's more entertaining is the response of real scientists to this (From Leigh's blog):

In a letter to Durkin, 37 scientists, including Australian-born Robert May, Lord May of Oxford, outlined “major misrepresentations of facts and views” in the documentary.

“In fact, so serious and fundamental are the misrepresentations that the distribution of the program without their removal amounts to nothing more than an exercise in misleading the public.”

Indeed.

Martin Durkin's many skills as a director come over well in this article from the times: C4's debate on global warming boils over.

Among his many charming euphemisms to scientists who wrote in to question the documentary are the memorable retorts "You’re a big daft cock" and “Never mind an irresponsible bit of film-making. Go and f*** yourself.”

This guy would probably feel right at home in a scientific conference.

Even senator Bob Brown has added to the debate. Among some of his acute observations are:

Monbiot nailed Swindle producer Martin Durkin as a charlatan for a previous production: "In October 1998 ... Durkin took a proposal to the BBC's science series, Horizon. Silicone breast implants, he claimed, far from harming women, were in fact beneficial, reducing the risk of breast cancer. Horizon commissioned a researcher to find out whether his assertion was true. After a thorough review, the researcher reported that Durkin had ignored a powerful body of evidence contradicting his claims. Durkin withdrew his proposal. Instead of dropping it, however, he took it to Channel 4 and, astonishingly, sold it to their science series, Equinox."

Durkin's Swindle carries on this tradition, ignoring the best evidence and, instead, clinging on to outdated data, outdated quotations and theories ranging from solar flares to anti-capitalist conspiracies to explain away concerns about climate change. What Swindle's sceptics have not done well is publish their findings in peer-reviewed academic journals, or provide compelling evidence to convince other researchers to change their mind.

Wow, maybe I should voting green if this is how they think. And here I was thinking they were watermelons.

Durkin has a riposte to all the criticism his documentary has received from scientists here.

"I can understand now why so few scientists are prepared to really stick their neck out and take this issue on because you're lambasted if you dare to. To suggest that this theory isn't true is an absolute taboo."

This shows his gross misunderstanding of the scientific community. To label something 'taboo' is to invite about 2000 reviewed papers on it the very next year. Its like having a big red button which says "Don't push" and putting an ADD kid in the room, you have to find out what it does.

One of the more insidious suggestions is that scientists create hype to obtain funding.

“No one dares speak against it for risk of being unpopular, losing funds and jeopardising careers,” slams Durkin.

This is also pretty weak. We have enough trouble getting legitimate proposals for grant money past the peer review system. Imagine if we were hyping up a weak, unsubstantiated theory! Your proposal would be shredded. Look at what has been said about Durkin's documentary by mainstream scientists. This is nothing compared to peer review. Getting funding is one of the hardest things for scientists, and the hint that your research is not above the plate is a sure way of getting it sunk before it starts. Global warming research gets funded because the evidence is very, very good.

Conspiracy's don't last long in science because on of the conspirators will write a paper on it.

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Ok, now a rebuttal of the content. Firstly, from the Times (no point reinventing the wheel):

Where Channel 4 got it wrong over climate change

Claim: Ice core data shows that carbon dioxide levels rise after temperatures go up, not before

Fact: This is correct, but climate scientists have a good explanation. There is a substantial feedback effect – initial small rises in temperature lead to substantial release of carbon dioxide from natural reservoirs in the oceans, which then produce much steeper warming later on

Claim: Temperatures in the troposphere, the lower part of the atmosphere, have not risen as predicted by the models

Fact: This was once the case, but it has been resolved now that initial measurement errors have been corrected

Claim: Temperatures rose for the first part of the century, then cooled for three decades before warming again. There is no link to carbon dioxide

Fact: Temperatures did follow this pattern, but again there is a good explanation. The mid-century effect fall came about chiefly because of sulphate aerosols – particles that have a cooling effect on the atmosphere. These are no longer produced so heavily by industry because of environmental regulations to combat other problems, such as acid rain.

Now, is solar activity causing climate change? No, according to this report in Nature. To quote:

A study has confirmed that there are no grounds to blame the Sun for recent global warming. The analysis shows that global warming since 1985 has been caused neither by an increase in solar radiation nor by a decrease in the flux of galactic cosmic rays.

"This paper is the final nail in the coffin for people who would like to make the Sun responsible for present global warming," says Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

Claims that the Sun, rather than raised levels of greenhouse gases, has been responsible for recent warming have persisted in a small number of scientists and in parts of the media. Mike Lockwood, a physicist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Chilton, UK, says he was "galvanized" to carry out the comprehensive study by misleading media reports. He cites 'The Great Global Warming Swindle', a television programme shown in March by Britain's Channel 4, as a prime example.

It seems at the very least this show pissed off scientists enough to go and prove it wrong.

Ok the following are real comments from The Australian blog:

Remember the time of the dinosaurs, lots of CO2, lush tropical growth everywhere, high temperatures....good stuff. No mankind around to cause that! Then we had the cold period, Europe under yards of solid ice.....it has all happened. The whole myth of mankinds effect on climate is a lefty plot to take away our standard of living and make us a slave to the guilt trip.

Good stuff for dinosaurs, not such good stuff for current residents of Bangladesh or the Maldives whose homes are going under water. You'll take away your own standard living when 20 million climate refugees turn up at your doorstep to camp on your frontyard and prolonged drought drains your water supply leaving you no choice but to drink your own urine. You really think you can keep up this standard of living?
This comment touches upon another point. Yes, climate change has happened in the past. Much more extreme than we have experienced over human history. The changes have been driven by a number of factors, atmospheric composition among them. We are now affecting atmospheric composition and there is no question we are thus also affecting the climate it regulates. Most organisms can adapt to slow climate variations. But you get a lot of extinctions if you have massive climate fluctuations. The rate we are changing the climate is fast. We don't understand the effects properly, and before we wipe out a lot of species, and costs ourselves a lot of money, it might be prudent to rein in our own changes and try to learn a little more.

Millions of species die (and are replaced) without the aid of self-destructive ecology-changing behaviour.
Even if the climate change is not the result of human emissions (a big IF), it doesn’t mean the consequence is any different.

What, you want to be responsible for the extinction of millions of species? Yes, it will be different, because we have the ability to do something about it. We have a responsibility.

According to NASA, the temperature on Mars is higher than usual, and the Martian southern polar ice cap is melting. Now, I put it to you that this is either because Martians are driving too many cars and have too many factories, or the sun is radiating more heat at the moment causing the ice caps to melt on both Earth and Mars.
You decide which one you believe.

That Mars' is warming up is true and the news release is here. That it is related to the sun (or Martian SUVs for that matter) is crap, and a cursory read of the NASA press release will show why. The heat coming into a planet from the sun is largely a factor of the planet's albedo (its brightness). A planet with a high albedo - like one made of ice, reflects most light, and this doesn't absorb much heat from the sun. A black planet would absorb a lot of heat. Mars' temperature changes have been shown to be due to its albedo changing - nothing to do with the sun itself, but to do with how much heat it is absorbing. This is changing due to different amounts of dustiness etc of the surface.

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In other news, Brazil is putting up pirahna nets on a popular beach after a spate of pirahna attacks, and the Cassins orbiter has found Saturn's moon Hyperion looks like a giant sponge.