The Great Global Warming Swindle on Channel 4.
"We're heretics! I'm a heretic. The makers of this programme are heretics." Nigel Calder is explaining how the world sees scientists who deny global warming. Channel 4's The Great Global Warming Swindle made one interesting point - that scientists are not unanimous in their assessment of the connection between global warming and CO2. Most say the second causes the first; a few say the first causes the second. Interesting, huh? Academics in not-all-thinking-exactly-the-same-thing shock. The amazing thing about global warming is not that someone from Winnipeg University disagrees (if you've ever been to Winnipeg, you will know what it means to be forced by your academic qualifications to live there); it's how many people don't disagree.
Sorry, I am just rolling over and handing the refuseniks a piece of their most powerful weaponry - when everyone agrees, why, that's like when we thought the world was flat! Only a few brave voices stood up, and they were ridiculed! I actually had this argument on the Daily Politics with Peter Hitchens. "You can't seriously be contending," said I, "that just because all scientists say you're talking rubbish, that de facto turns you into the brave, lone voice of truth?" (I am buffing my prose a bit, I admit.) "That's the trouble with you Guardian journalists! You only talk to each other!" he retorted.
Calder, incidentally, is billed as the "ex-editor of the New Scientist"; to clarify for a second what they mean by "ex", he was the editor of a non-peer-reviewed journal that, under his relatively short tenure beginning 1962, was five years old. That's like accepting the ex-editor of a student fanzine as a leading authority on Mahler's experiments with harmonic dissonance. Here are the other core arguments against global warming: one, that the earth's temperature is always changing, and we had a mini-ice-age only a couple of hundred years ago; two, that the environmental lobby is just trying to scam the developing world out of developing, by forcing it to use solar power; three - this is a new one on me, I have to admit - that a new breed of "environmental journalists" has such a vested interest in there being an "environmental" case to answer that they effectively bully editors into printing stories that aren't true (they definitely have a point, here - a cancer journalist of my acquaintance recently ripped up the cure for cancer and flushed it down the toilet, because she worried that she might have to move into virus-reporting, and one's 30s simply isn't the time to retrain).
I know Channel 4 has a new remit of its own devising, to make trouble and stir up hornets' nests and all that, but what this amounts to is not mischievous subversion, it's just more of that age-old Fox News formula: take a surprising fact that might make people think, but won't make a programme on its own; gather together some bouncy commentators, stick a snooty voice over the top, create a sense of conflict without properly interrogating the positions taken within it, and aah, Bisto!, you have successfully brought to the world the smell of confusion.
What's a layman to make of all this? Oh me oh my, I'm too confused, I can't make anything of it! I'm just gonna take me a lovely holiday in the sun instead, and to heck with the environmental consequences which many leading people from Winnipeg have already told me aren't true. It's incredibly tacky, global warming aside, this cheap-shot attitude to what can be presented as truth. You can feel its insincerity, even before some frothy, patronising "scientist" bounces on to the screen to say: "If you had x-ray eyes, what appears as a nice yellow ball would appear as a raging tiger!" (That is Calder again. Talking about the sun.)
"You can't seriously be saying that the leftwing doesn't have its own propaganda," a young woman pertinently challenged Al Franken in BBC4's Storyville: Al Franken - God Spoke. I expected him to be annoying, but in fact he responded rather charmingly. She was pretty, I guess. Good God, though, it gave you a horrible insight into what it means to be a polemicist in America. Al Franken, if you remember, wrote Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them, whose subtitle - a Fair and Balanced look at the Right - gave the abovementioned Fox News cause to sue him. "Fair" and "balanced" are their words, apparently. Franken is not without his faults but the man has cojones. He takes on Ann Coulter. Nobody in their right mind would do that. Smarting, she emerged from the debate and a weeny sycophant ran over: "He is, like, totally obsessed by you! Did you hear what he said about your hair!" Coulter, fresh from defeat, stuck out her chin while her ego recharged.
It must be like playing Grand Theft Auto, keeping these people maintained. Storyville rocks. It should get all the licence-fee money.
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