The Great Global Warming Swindle

On the 8th March, 2007, 2.69 million people tuned into Channel 4 to watch a documentary called "The Great Global Warming Swindle". Being only 13 at the time, I was not one of them. However having heard of it's controversial standing I decided to follow suit and watch it - and that's where this blog starts!

Hi, I'm Ellie! Admittedly I'm not a geographer but for the sake of this blog I'm going to try my hardest to be. I'm a Natural Sciences student in my third year at UCL, as part of my degree I look at the social and communicative aspect of science which is the aspect of global warming I would like to examine in this blog, and this is where the documentary comes into play!

If you have a spare 76 minutes, I would recommend a watch of "The Great Global Warming Swindle" (featured below) however, if you don't, I'll briefly summarise it for you.

 

The British documentary undermines the key focus of the global warming argument - that increased CO2 is driving global warming. It tells the tale of how "many" scientists don't believe that humans are the cause of global warming and that the scientific basis for climate change is crumbling. The documentary then goes on to argue that the whole global warming debacle is a political activist movement and it acts to "kill the African dream to develop" aka the whole idea of global warming prevention is a method to stop the development of developing countries. It assures the audience with direct quotes from climate scientists of their vested interest to create a state of panic to drive money into their departments. The change in climate is explained away with the science that climate change always occurs periodically and we just happen to be going through a period of increase and this is simply a natural change.

This all seems absurd but the documentary is so cleverly edited and convincing it even had me doubting my beliefs!! (It didn't, but I can very much appreciate how a non-scientist would be convinced by the programme.)

This documentary is where the idea for my blog started - with the idea that some people don't believe in global warming at all or don't feel it's an issue that needs to be dealt with. I want to focus on one country in particular - The United States of America. This is one of the top world contributors to CO2 output (coming only second to China). I want to explore the initial idea of denial of climate change within America (the science vs the media aspect), explore the current government approaches to reducing their CO2 output and the general stance of America as a major player in the CO2 emission game. I will do this though the use of academic papers and hopefully some more fun mediums! I'm not sure where this blog is going to take me, but feel free to come along for the ride as we explore global warming across the pond!